Substrate

I recently stumbled upon this tweet from Aaron Lewis: “what if old tweets were displayed with the profile pic you had at the time of posting. a way to differentiate between past and present selves.” ​ I’m going to set aside for now an obviously and integrally related matter: to what degree should our present self be held responsible for the utterances of an older iteration of the self that resurface through the operations of our new memory machines? ​ What I’m reading into Lewis’s proposal then is an impulse, not at all unwarranted, to reassert a measure of agency over the operations of digitally mediated memory. ​ Yes, that was me as I was, but that is no longer me as I now am, and this critical difference was implicit in the evolution of my physical appearance, which signaled as much to all who saw me. No such signals are available to the self as it exists online.

But as a result, I am remembering much of my life through the algorithmic frameworks of these third-party companies. ​ Consequently, we view photographs not merely as relatively rare artifacts capturing particularly significant moments but as prosthetic extensions of ourselves and our interior lives. ​ When algorithms intervene in how and when we interact with our photographs, they secure a deeply emotional inroad to our identity-forming practices. ​ These images and the way they are algorithmically organized don’t merely remind us of the past; they help shape how we think of ourselves in the present and how we might think to document our lives and articulate ourselves in the future. ​ — making us audiences of ourselves as the algorithms piece together our “best” stories for us. ​ But “Memories” features rewire relationships in such a way that makes commercial platforms indispensable mediators. ​ memories become susceptible to being evaluated according to performance metrics. ​ we must ask what memories are left on the outskirts. What experiences are illegible to or unvalued by a commercial system? What does it mean for our subjectivities at large that we are all building our memories around same scaffolding? Over four decades ago, Susan Sontag posited that photography enables “an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.” As a multiplier of photography’s influence, algorithmically fueled “Memories” features bring us deeper into a supercharged aesthetic consumerism that shapes our personal narratives along the lines of influencer culture.