The internet stuff is spooky.
Kurt Vonnegut, November 5, 1995
If Murakami were so inclined or Cortázar alive, I’d want him to write a story about an internet that forgets, a living mind.
On this internet, blogs would shed entries as they aged alongside their author. Some text would grow small and indistinct, but certain passages in desert places would glow like embers in a dying fire. Language would be forgotten, sentences would decay, meanings would invert. Some passages would mesh and recur as dreams, while others would advance in time as déjà vu. Florid details of youth would be compressed into dry generalities. Searches would lead to inaccuracies and dead ends.
The internet now never forgets. It’s sometimes referred to as a hive mind, but other than its general unreliability for accuracy and penchant for trivia and frivolity, it’s like no mind I’ve ever known, expanding infinitely into distant inky reaches.