Yes to all of this. My antidotes to internet poisoning are prayer and Mass. Attending Mass every week, sometimes twice, is the most cultural thing I do. The music, incense, art, prayer, and community are profound balm for any anxiety. I also pray every morning. Lastly, I read old books and realize we're all grappling with the same stuff age after age. Another book you might check out on memory is St. Augustine's Confessions. Lots to say about memory in books teen and eleven and lots to say about truth and understanding differences of memory and truth in book twelve.
For me. the first inkling me that computers might be causing our mental faculties to atrophy came with the introduction of the GPS. Until then, we we all largely obliged, with the aid of printed maps, to form a mental chart before settling out on a journey, which we did with varying degree of success, only occasionally having to stop and ask a local for directions (with the concomitant wound to masculine pride, but I digress). I wonder who does that now, and wonder even more if anyone who grew up with GPS would be able to get around without it...
As for AI and memory. I feel this less acutely, than the effect of GPS and our sense of direction. This might be simply due to it's relatively novelty, but as yet I don't feel abilty to lay down memories and retrieve them has been seriously impacted. Without a doubt though, internet scrolling does have as adverse effect on one's attention span and patience with more long form media. The only remedy I've found so far is to "go dry" on social for a period of weeks and months - it does help restore some sort of balance. I suppose ideally we should cut ourselves off altogether, but very few are prepared to go truly off grid, with all that entails.
I do think we might be forced to one day through. As I'm sure a lot of people are aware, Frank Herbert's "Dune" saga is premised on a future civilization where AI, or "thinking machines" are outlawed following the "Butlerian Jihad", and where complex mental tasks are performed by rigorously schooled humans. It seemed outlandish, even back in the 80s when I first came across it. It seems far less so now.
Yesterday I went to a new place in the city I've lived in for 27 years. Before I left the house I pulled up the Google map, picked out a route, jotted down my directions on a post-it, and stuck that on the dashboard. I drive a 2013 Corolla with a screen that informs me that "Bluetooth connection failed" and I always think that's an interesting choice of words because I wasn't even trying.
Oh I use GPS all the time (but without the voice feature). I'm a keen off-road cyclist and whereas I do like to plan my routes using a conventional map, I always make sure I have my phone handy. There are many occasions when I would have been literally lost without it.
One group of people who are likely to regain the memory function are sailors. They need to be able to plot their position and course using the instruments which have been around for centuries as it is foolish to rely purely on GPS.
I've done a few trips out west (from Alabama to New Mexico, Arizona, etc) and every time have brought a 'trip book' containing printed out maps for every leg of the journey, printed out airline and hotel confirmations, etc. Not only does studying these maps give me a real sense of where in the state I am, but when I was in remote AZ my gps went out and it was only that real sense that allowed me to find my way back to the interstate.
I've lived in the American West for the last forty years and thus, hands down for me, the most powerful antidote to internet poisoning is hiking into the mountains or out into the desert or walking along rough stretches of the Pacific coast - basically any place I can get to where I am surrounded by what David Abram calls 'the more than human', i.e. any place where it is obvious that there are far greater powers in play than those of homo sapiens.....not so sapiente (??) at this point alas.
I don't have GPS, still use maps but, of course, there was a time when if you asked for directions you might get something like "well, the road you're on right now, just keep going for a piece and sooner or later you'll come to a big ole maple on the right...you'll know because it
has a big lightning scar...thought we were gonna lose the tree, it's more'n hundred years old but somehow it managed to survive that strike...that was some storm, lemme tell ya...it's the southermost edge of Maddy Ingalls place if ya know her, anyway you're gonna go right...and then you go for another piece until ya come to Ingalls Creek which you shouldn't have any trouble crossing this time of year...now if you'd come a couple months ago you'd a never been able to get across it the water was running so high from the spring rains...but you'll be fine now...so ya keep going for another piece and you'll come to some rises...now not after the first rise but after the second one, you'll see........" Admittedly a long time ago but asking for directions was an opportunity for conversation and connection and the reference points were living beings in a living landscape.
I finally switched from saying Liturgy of the Hours with an app on my phone to using the book. There is something special about interacting with something physical and my ability to convert words on a page (as opposed to from a screen) into memory, as I slowly commit the repeated verses and Psalms to memory. The myth of neutral technology is dead, we must bury it and encase it in concrete.
Prayer is it. You might enjoy my Carruthers’ inspired book on how to pray the Marian office: “Mary and the Art of Prayer” (Columbia University Press, 2017).
Your work here sounds a lot like that of the Canadian media theorist, Harold A. Innis, and his distinction between time biased and space biased media, and his concern for the loss of time biased media in the contemporary world.
For an entertaining pop expression of ars memoriae, check out the Hughes brothers movie "The Book of Eli" from 2010. Stars Denzel Washington and the great Gary Oldman. Be sure to watch until the very end...
I have devotional time each morning and make an effort to memorize Scripture. After watching the 1966 version Fahrenheit 451, I wanted to memorize the whole Bible. But I will settle for several Psalms at this point.
I realised how much better the medievals were at this than us when I read about one of the early English saints updating his memorised edition of the Psalms to the latest version used in Rome
Ie he wasn’t just able to memorise them all, he could also do accurate minor textual updates to his memorisation without getting confused
What I appreciate most here is the way you refuse the false comfort of abstraction. By returning to Plato’s wax tablet—not as a quaint metaphor but as a felt description of how thought actually takes shape—you point to something we all recognize but rarely name: that thinking is tactile, embodied, and spatial long before it is efficient. The contrast you draw between cultivated memory and the passivity of doomscrolling is especially sharp. One forms an inner landscape; the other lets an algorithm do the landscaping. Framing prayer not as content but as a counter-practice—a reorientation of the wax itself rather than a new imprint—feels exactly right, and quietly explains why so many people sense relief there without being able to articulate why.
Your notion of “The Great Forgetting” also resonates deeply with me, especially as it connects memory to class, formation, and survival rather than nostalgia. What’s at stake isn’t whether AI exists, but whether we still form selves capable of holding, revisiting, and dwelling with ideas over time. Without that inner wax—worked slowly, deliberately—we lose not just recall but judgment, continuity, even prayer itself. I’ve been circling similar questions around memory, mediation, and what it means to see clearly in an age of outsourced cognition, and your essay gave language to something I’ve been feeling but hadn’t yet named.
I will be excited to read your thoughts about memory! I read the Socrates/Phraedus dialogue and stated pondering memory a bit. My amateur dip into it made me realise how much the ancients linked remembering a thing to identity, it wasn't "yours" until you knew it by heart and also to virtue. Remembering seems to be such a human thing to do and yet outsourcing it is encouraged at every turn. Remembering requires slowing down and sometimes being together with others, two things that are harder to do unless we are intentional about it. https://www.crosssentinel.com/p/the-resistance-of-memory
I am glad you mentioned prayer at the end of your essay. It is the only answer to the poison of the screen. Indeed, the only answer to any mental surfeit, depletion or blockage. Prayer is, as Teresa of Avila tells us, a "loving conversation with a friend." Indeed, The friend: Christ.
A few years ago I read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book) which makes a powerful argument - even 14 years ago - that how we think had been eroded by the internet which encouraged a shallow surface approach rather than a deeper comprehensive reading style.
As others have suggested memorising scripture is a good antidote to some of the challenges but there is also a need to use the memorised fragments to construct arguments and bigger ideas.
So, GPT eventually puts you in a molten, fluid state as a person. What has already happened to many with the social media algorythms at identity level, this tech appears to burrow even deeper into a person.
I wonder if the act of memorizing music (and in some cases lyrics) helps explain the increase in happiness and longevity amongst retirees who play an instrument.
This brings to my mind the epiphany in the Guermantes' library in Time Regained, Volume 7 of "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust. "I began to discover the cause by comparing those varying happy impressions which had the common quality of being felt simultaneously at the actual moment and at a distance in time, because of which common quality the noise of the spoon upon the plate, the unevenness of the paving-stones, the taste of the madeleine, imposed the past upon the present and made me hesitate as to which time I was existing in."
Yes to all of this. My antidotes to internet poisoning are prayer and Mass. Attending Mass every week, sometimes twice, is the most cultural thing I do. The music, incense, art, prayer, and community are profound balm for any anxiety. I also pray every morning. Lastly, I read old books and realize we're all grappling with the same stuff age after age. Another book you might check out on memory is St. Augustine's Confessions. Lots to say about memory in books teen and eleven and lots to say about truth and understanding differences of memory and truth in book twelve.
For me. the first inkling me that computers might be causing our mental faculties to atrophy came with the introduction of the GPS. Until then, we we all largely obliged, with the aid of printed maps, to form a mental chart before settling out on a journey, which we did with varying degree of success, only occasionally having to stop and ask a local for directions (with the concomitant wound to masculine pride, but I digress). I wonder who does that now, and wonder even more if anyone who grew up with GPS would be able to get around without it...
As for AI and memory. I feel this less acutely, than the effect of GPS and our sense of direction. This might be simply due to it's relatively novelty, but as yet I don't feel abilty to lay down memories and retrieve them has been seriously impacted. Without a doubt though, internet scrolling does have as adverse effect on one's attention span and patience with more long form media. The only remedy I've found so far is to "go dry" on social for a period of weeks and months - it does help restore some sort of balance. I suppose ideally we should cut ourselves off altogether, but very few are prepared to go truly off grid, with all that entails.
I do think we might be forced to one day through. As I'm sure a lot of people are aware, Frank Herbert's "Dune" saga is premised on a future civilization where AI, or "thinking machines" are outlawed following the "Butlerian Jihad", and where complex mental tasks are performed by rigorously schooled humans. It seemed outlandish, even back in the 80s when I first came across it. It seems far less so now.
I still do that now! I have an atlas in my car.
I fully understand why people like using a GPS. But the thought of a non-human voice telling me what to do has always sounded creepy.
Yesterday I went to a new place in the city I've lived in for 27 years. Before I left the house I pulled up the Google map, picked out a route, jotted down my directions on a post-it, and stuck that on the dashboard. I drive a 2013 Corolla with a screen that informs me that "Bluetooth connection failed" and I always think that's an interesting choice of words because I wasn't even trying.
Oh I use GPS all the time (but without the voice feature). I'm a keen off-road cyclist and whereas I do like to plan my routes using a conventional map, I always make sure I have my phone handy. There are many occasions when I would have been literally lost without it.
One group of people who are likely to regain the memory function are sailors. They need to be able to plot their position and course using the instruments which have been around for centuries as it is foolish to rely purely on GPS.
I've done a few trips out west (from Alabama to New Mexico, Arizona, etc) and every time have brought a 'trip book' containing printed out maps for every leg of the journey, printed out airline and hotel confirmations, etc. Not only does studying these maps give me a real sense of where in the state I am, but when I was in remote AZ my gps went out and it was only that real sense that allowed me to find my way back to the interstate.
I've lived in the American West for the last forty years and thus, hands down for me, the most powerful antidote to internet poisoning is hiking into the mountains or out into the desert or walking along rough stretches of the Pacific coast - basically any place I can get to where I am surrounded by what David Abram calls 'the more than human', i.e. any place where it is obvious that there are far greater powers in play than those of homo sapiens.....not so sapiente (??) at this point alas.
I don't have GPS, still use maps but, of course, there was a time when if you asked for directions you might get something like "well, the road you're on right now, just keep going for a piece and sooner or later you'll come to a big ole maple on the right...you'll know because it
has a big lightning scar...thought we were gonna lose the tree, it's more'n hundred years old but somehow it managed to survive that strike...that was some storm, lemme tell ya...it's the southermost edge of Maddy Ingalls place if ya know her, anyway you're gonna go right...and then you go for another piece until ya come to Ingalls Creek which you shouldn't have any trouble crossing this time of year...now if you'd come a couple months ago you'd a never been able to get across it the water was running so high from the spring rains...but you'll be fine now...so ya keep going for another piece and you'll come to some rises...now not after the first rise but after the second one, you'll see........" Admittedly a long time ago but asking for directions was an opportunity for conversation and connection and the reference points were living beings in a living landscape.
I finally switched from saying Liturgy of the Hours with an app on my phone to using the book. There is something special about interacting with something physical and my ability to convert words on a page (as opposed to from a screen) into memory, as I slowly commit the repeated verses and Psalms to memory. The myth of neutral technology is dead, we must bury it and encase it in concrete.
Prayer is it. You might enjoy my Carruthers’ inspired book on how to pray the Marian office: “Mary and the Art of Prayer” (Columbia University Press, 2017).
If you’re interested, here is an introduction! https://www.hprweb.com/2019/04/on-mary-the-mother-of-god-queen-of-the-universe/
Just ordered
Your work here sounds a lot like that of the Canadian media theorist, Harold A. Innis, and his distinction between time biased and space biased media, and his concern for the loss of time biased media in the contemporary world.
For an entertaining pop expression of ars memoriae, check out the Hughes brothers movie "The Book of Eli" from 2010. Stars Denzel Washington and the great Gary Oldman. Be sure to watch until the very end...
I have devotional time each morning and make an effort to memorize Scripture. After watching the 1966 version Fahrenheit 451, I wanted to memorize the whole Bible. But I will settle for several Psalms at this point.
I realised how much better the medievals were at this than us when I read about one of the early English saints updating his memorised edition of the Psalms to the latest version used in Rome
Ie he wasn’t just able to memorise them all, he could also do accurate minor textual updates to his memorisation without getting confused
What I appreciate most here is the way you refuse the false comfort of abstraction. By returning to Plato’s wax tablet—not as a quaint metaphor but as a felt description of how thought actually takes shape—you point to something we all recognize but rarely name: that thinking is tactile, embodied, and spatial long before it is efficient. The contrast you draw between cultivated memory and the passivity of doomscrolling is especially sharp. One forms an inner landscape; the other lets an algorithm do the landscaping. Framing prayer not as content but as a counter-practice—a reorientation of the wax itself rather than a new imprint—feels exactly right, and quietly explains why so many people sense relief there without being able to articulate why.
Your notion of “The Great Forgetting” also resonates deeply with me, especially as it connects memory to class, formation, and survival rather than nostalgia. What’s at stake isn’t whether AI exists, but whether we still form selves capable of holding, revisiting, and dwelling with ideas over time. Without that inner wax—worked slowly, deliberately—we lose not just recall but judgment, continuity, even prayer itself. I’ve been circling similar questions around memory, mediation, and what it means to see clearly in an age of outsourced cognition, and your essay gave language to something I’ve been feeling but hadn’t yet named.
https://theeternalnowmm.substack.com/p/seeing-clearly-lenses-history-and?r=71z4jh
I will be excited to read your thoughts about memory! I read the Socrates/Phraedus dialogue and stated pondering memory a bit. My amateur dip into it made me realise how much the ancients linked remembering a thing to identity, it wasn't "yours" until you knew it by heart and also to virtue. Remembering seems to be such a human thing to do and yet outsourcing it is encouraged at every turn. Remembering requires slowing down and sometimes being together with others, two things that are harder to do unless we are intentional about it. https://www.crosssentinel.com/p/the-resistance-of-memory
I like the to think of it as 'palimpsetic memory' - something digital memory lacks is those traces of previously remembered things.
I am glad you mentioned prayer at the end of your essay. It is the only answer to the poison of the screen. Indeed, the only answer to any mental surfeit, depletion or blockage. Prayer is, as Teresa of Avila tells us, a "loving conversation with a friend." Indeed, The friend: Christ.
A few years ago I read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book) which makes a powerful argument - even 14 years ago - that how we think had been eroded by the internet which encouraged a shallow surface approach rather than a deeper comprehensive reading style.
As others have suggested memorising scripture is a good antidote to some of the challenges but there is also a need to use the memorised fragments to construct arguments and bigger ideas.
So, GPT eventually puts you in a molten, fluid state as a person. What has already happened to many with the social media algorythms at identity level, this tech appears to burrow even deeper into a person.
I wonder if the act of memorizing music (and in some cases lyrics) helps explain the increase in happiness and longevity amongst retirees who play an instrument.
This brings to my mind the epiphany in the Guermantes' library in Time Regained, Volume 7 of "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust. "I began to discover the cause by comparing those varying happy impressions which had the common quality of being felt simultaneously at the actual moment and at a distance in time, because of which common quality the noise of the spoon upon the plate, the unevenness of the paving-stones, the taste of the madeleine, imposed the past upon the present and made me hesitate as to which time I was existing in."