Leon Trotsky is one of a select number of people in history who was killed twice — both in Mexico City at the hands of an assassin, and in Soviet national memory. Once richly interwoven with Soviet Revolutionary history, Trotsky’s image was removed from photographs, his name deleted from textbooks, and his presence expunged from documents. What Stalinism managed to complete in this case was not just the literal murder of Trotsky, but also his symbolic erasure in wider societal memory. A dual death, enacted through forgetting — effacing a person so comprehensively that history (which is itself a collective memory) is woven around this now-empty space.
The modern condition is something of the inverse. Most of us are not at risk of disappearing from history; rather, our history is being embedded into us. In the age of social media, our “selves” are fixed in amber. Any reckless post or now-idiotic teenage opinion remains documented. Our worst moments are easily discovered, public, and retrievable. The phenomenon which befell Trotsky is termed damnatio memoriae: the condemnation of memory through erasure. Our modern condition is its inversion: damnatio memoria: the condemnation of being remembered too well.
An old joke often recounted by Žižek illustrates my point well:
A man insults Stalin and is sent to the gulag. But the first man arrested is not him, it is instead the bystander who protests, “Comrade, you cannot say such a thing about Stalin”.
This second man’s crime was not the insult itself, but rather the acknowledgement of an unspoken social pact. Everyone knew the truth, but the point was in acting as if they didn’t. Stalinist propaganda served not to control what individuals believed; it governed what individuals thought everyone else believed.
The digital age subverts this logic. Rather than being bound by the silence of forgetting, we are restricted by the presumption of remembering. We know that people change, that mistakes fade, but society now performs a new fiction; it acts as though the archive is permanent and accurate, rather than a selective patchwork torn from its temporal context and open to manipulation.
A society that is unable to forget is a society where no one is afforded the opportunity to become someone else, someone better.
To paraphrase Heraclitus, you never step into the same river twice, and you also never return to the same self. The past, insomuch as it is a static object, remaining forever intact, does not exist. Memory is not mere storage but a living narrative, constantly rewritten and reinterpreted. Digital archives comprise only stationary points, what Byung-Chul Han’s Psychopolitics (2017) refers to as “undead” presences — instances which lack the horizon where past, present, and future still exert influence over one another.
Even if technology retrieves a perfect record of a past decision, one now meets it as a stranger. Looking back, I often feel estranged from my former selves, which is precisely what growth demands. The individual who acted then is never quite the person who now recounts it. One cannot re-enter the mindset that produced such a decision. In Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (2009), Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues that no amount of “perfect contextualisation” can return us to the moment of decision itself. No archive, however “complete”, can represent us.
Nevertheless, our digital archive ensures that no-one may act as if forgetting were possible. We live under a different social ‘chilling effect’. Under Stalinism, the acknowledgement of prohibition was itself prohibited. In our digital culture, the acknowledgement of forgetting has been forgotten. The vast majority of social media users operate under permanent anticipation of recall, not because individuals remember, but because one must presume that others are capable of doing so. This is not merely a cognitive burden but a new architecture of personhood: the past fixes the horizon of the future. Human and social evolution are being stunted.
Criminologists have long observed a phenomenon called the “age–crime curve”: peak offending occurs in late adolescence and early adulthood, before declining sharply as people age. Most young offenders do not go on to become adult offenders, but instead “grow out” of it.
Labelling theory posits that being branded as a criminal often does more in producing continued offending than initial acts of delinquency. As H.S. Becker argues in Outsiders, “deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits… the deviant is one to whom that label has been successfully applied”. Research in the UK affirmed the point: young people spared formal prosecution were more likely to desist from crime than those involved in the criminal justice system. Later studies, such as McAra and McVie’s longitudinal research in Edinburgh, arrived at similar conclusions. The label serves to fix a fluid and temporary stage of life into a permanent identity; online, we risk turning instances of stupidity into lifelong sentences.
Social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance […] deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits… the deviant is one to whom that label has been successfully applied.
H. S. Becker, Outsiders
Society learned the merit of forgetting (and mercy), it helped people grow. The digital archive, cheap to store, easily retrievable, and much of it globally accessible, now reverses such a lesson on a political level: culture now insists on preserving what was once allowed to fade. Journalist J.D. Lasica noted even back in 1998, “our pasts are becoming etched like a tattoo into our digital skins”.
Digital space no longer creates solely a spatial panopticon — Jeremy Bentham’s design, later popularised by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1977), where the possibility of constant surveillance encourages self-discipline. It also establishes a temporal panopticon, where our past selves are eternally presented. This creates a serious burden on what Isiah Berlin called “positive liberty” in Two Concepts of Liberty (1958). Berlin phrased the concept in the following terms: “I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. […] I wish to be a subject, not an object”. To me, the danger is not merely due to surveillance, but also that our past selves lie fixed and visible in digital space, like monuments to our past mistakes we may never chip away at nor relabel. We are becoming objects, both beholden to and captioned by our own past.
The political ramifications are profound; democratic nations rely on progress and change. This issue is not solely about what people feel able to say, though the fear of speaking freely is genuine. The more corrosive effect lies in what we are allowed to become. Many of what we deem to have been social “gains” of the past century were possible only because people were able to revise their convictions, opponents came to reconciled consensus, and parties shifted.
If forgetting collapses, so too does progress. But there is a crucial conflict here. Some things ought not to, or cannot, be forgotten. The atrocities of past centuries demand remembrance, not for the purpose of holding individuals in eternal guilt, but for societies to use these events as touchstones for learning. There exists a distinction between memory-as-warning and memory-as-chains. To remember tyranny is to hinder its return. But to unearth a teenager’s old tweet is to deny them the chance to grow. The ever-difficult task lies in folding crucial remembrance into collective consciousness, whilst too allowing individuals the space to evolve beyond their past.
In losing sight of that dichotomy, we allow memory to have a petrifying effect. Positions harden, political divisions solidify into demarcations of grievances where no discussion is possible because no-one’s perspectives shift. To confess error or admit evolution is to invite moral condemnation of hypocrisy — we have forgotten how people might change. The effect is not progress but trench warfare: endless stasis, punctuated by partisan skirmishes where some leaders shrug off scandals while others are crucified for theirs. The result is not public accountability but asymmetry: memorial outrage as another battleground of political struggle.
For Mayer-Schönberger, the danger of total recall is that it collapses history, denying us the chance to change and learn. A decade later, Shoshana Zuboff refined this point in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), stating that surveillance capitalism strips us of the “Right to the Future Tense”. Individuals must reckon with the fact that what is expressed in the now may be evaluated and scrutinised in future contexts which one cannot reasonably predict nor prepare for, shifting control of the future tense from “I will” to “You will.”
Together, these arguments display our current predicament, which Zuboff refers to as “an infinite present of mere behavior, in which there can be no subjects and no projects: only objects.” This feels to me the bleakest outcome: not just surveillance, but a slow erosion of the ability to imagine ourselves differently in both a personal and political sense. Our past selves are cast, our future selves pre-empted. The words of T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” ring true: ‘If all time is eternally present, / All time is unredeemable.’
Where shame once dissolved with time, it now amasses. Where once archives were selective, they are now total. If nothing is ever forgotten, why might anyone push themselves to change? Digital memory inhibits creativity itself. If every word may be brought up later, then every word is written under pre-emptive scepticism. How does one imagine a new future under those conditions? The flattening of both time and context by digital memory robs both the present of its novelty and the future of its potential.
Trotsky’s imposed erasure shows us that forgetting can be a weapon of domination used to silence dissent. Our present danger is that remembering becomes its own weapon. Both forms have the potential to stunt human freedom — one by destroying what has been, the other by denying what could be.
I do not mean to suggest we abolish memory, but instead that we remember how to forget. Liberty lies in distinguishing between memory-as-warning and memory-as-chains, so that history can guide us without also imprisoning. Only then can we afford people the opportunity to change and grow, freeing politics from stagnation and reclaiming the right to the future tense. This is the path to forgiveness.
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