Forgiving What You Can 39;t Forget Digital Download

Nonetheless, I have found one personal rule that keeps my grudge-holding in check: Once I have forgotten the details of the original offence, I strictly forbid myself from maintaining my grudge. I may not be much good at forgive and forget, but once I forget, I require myself to forgive.

In a world in which we all leave a permanent record, we all need to learn the art of delivering a public apology that combines an expression of remorse or mortification with a narrative that keeps the victim at the centre of our apology. We can and should use that formula when we make a mistake online, like sending a hostile email or posting something insensitive on Facebook or Twitter. But we can and should also keep it in reserve for the inevitable and numerous situations in which we hurt or offend people offline in ways that Google may preclude forgetting.

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Over the last few years, Lysa TerKeurst has experienced seasons of total devastation that left her wondering, Will I ever recover from this? But in the face of hurt that felt impossible to move past, Lysa has found journaling to be a life-giving way to help let go of bitterness, process resentments, and live in the freedom of forgiving others. Now she is passionate about coming alongside readers on our own journeys of forgiveness, whether the deepest pain comes from years ago or is still happening today.

In the recent book, Delete, author Viktor Mayer-Schnberger cautions readers about the consequences of shifting from a human pattern of forgetting to a digital age of never forgetting. He recommends we reclaim the virtue of forgetting. He writes,

Many people have stories of posted information, emails sent, or messages exchanged that they now regret. Juan Enriquez, in a TedTalk asks us to consider our online life as a permanent tattoo. In general, we (young and old) should be more aware of digital permanence and strive to have our digital lives reflect the Christian values we support.

The message of the medium is this: blockchains never forget. By providing an extra-institutional base layer of irreversibly settling collective memories that cannot be erased, blockchains create a foundation for fundamentally different institutional and technological landscapes. Ones based, as I will argue, on a notion of artificial forgiveness.

The reversibility of computing is not just the main difference between atoms and bits, it is also arguably the primary selling point of the digital world, ahead of such selling points such as computational speed advantage over pen-and-paper. It is a selling point that has historically constituted the biggest competitive advantage of the digital world over the physical world. The biggest difference between a word processor and a typewriter is that the former has effectively unlimited undo/redo capability. The biggest difference between Grand Theft Auto and physical roads is that you can uncrash a car in the former. The biggest difference between an online poll and paper ballots (or electronic voting machines that print out a paper record at the time the vote is cast) is that you can uncast a vote in the former.

One can imagine a generalized wabi-sabi button as a replacement for the undo button in any engineered artifact based on blockchain technology. A button that, when pushed, causes healing, forgiving events that would make the Buddha smile.

In computational terms, forgiveness is a decision to construct a justification for actions that is at odds with the justification supplied by history, leading to increased freedom of action. To forgive is to not be a prisoner of of history, without having to destroy it through erasure or rewriting. A temporal non-zero-sum game. To forget, on the other hand, is to destroy the past to free the present, a much weaker mode based on a temporal zero-sum game.

There is perhaps no more powerful force in human affairs than the power to ignore the instinctive imperatives of history and choose forgiveness. To be able to engineer digital artifacts that can work with this force is to have power comparable to that of religious figures.

Biological memories derive their irreversibility from a different physical mechanism than blockchains, but the effect is similar. The idea that you cannot forget is so completely fundamental to everything else that it becomes a strong forcing function driving all design. The human brain, like the blockchain, is a spiritual descendent of the odometer, rather than the wheel. If the computer was a bicycle for a mind, the blockchain is an odometer for the hivemind.

One of the three is not like the other two: unlike making and breaking promises, which can be modeled in ordinary, logically reversible computing, forgiving only makes sense with respect to irreversible social computing. You can only forgive what you cannot forget. If you can truly forget things, the concept of forgiveness is moot. Forgiveness is a consequential behavior only when there are things you cannot un-remember.

If blockchains never forget, traditional institutions never forgive. Not because they are vengeful gods, but because they have, and are designed around, the ability to truly forget. This gives them the ability to arbitrarily rewrite history as required for justifying actions, instead of living on the forgiveness fork of a multiverse of possible histories.

That smaller-scale feature of humanity operates at the level of living individuals and small tribes that make-do with oral histories. In other words, the inability of humans to forget extends to Gemeinschaft, but not to Gesellschaft.

You could say that priests are the mechanical turks of artificial forgiving. Homunculi within machine-like, rule-bound, outside-of-time atemporal institutions that do the one thing no set of rules and procedures can: forgive another human being. And remember what that means: to accept a memory but forbear from action on the basis of that memory.

Institutions that are not built around priestly figures generally rely on the second mechanism: using the ability to officially forget and remember to produce a more accurate record of history, rather than an Appleby-like fabrication. Structured, procedural more-true rewrites modulating the impact of unstructured, natural remembering. The most familiar example of course is to be found in courtroom proceedings:

The small disadvantage is that both turking and official forgetting involve reposing a great deal of trust in fallible individual humans. Neither priests, nor judges and juries, are generally deserving of the power to fake forgiveness on behalf of others.

One does not simply forget that something has happened. Thanks to the nature of human memory, events are etched in the communal mind in the form of a collective, irreversible, historical consciousness. Memories are carved into this consciousness through experienced emotions, pain in particular being the important one. If proof-of-work and proof-of-stake supply the logic underlying the engineered irreversibility of the the blockchain, proof-of-pain supplies the logic underlying the natural irreversibility of social memory.

Here is a mnemonic to help you remember this principle: the most perfect money is blood money. It is informationally complete with respect to the agonies and ecstasies of history that it represents. To the extent that all institutions represent some form of social currency, whether or not that currency is made legible in the form of banknotes or tokens, they are imperfect to the extent they forget.

Institutions that can officially forget are institutions that function as reversible computers, always under the threat of pwnage by superusers like Sir Humphrey Appleby with the power to monopolize history. They are institutions meant for idealized, timeless worlds, where remembering history is a nice-to-have feature rather than a critical one, and where the incentives are stacked against remembering the unpleasant parts.

The historical record is an incredibly powerful source of agency and legitimacy. In even the worst wars, humans have sought to justify their actions with respect to the historical record, and the official record can often justify actions that collective memory would not, and prohibit actions that collective memory would permit. Transitions from peace to war, and war to peace, rest on acts of ritual and institutional promising-making, promise-breaking and promise-break-forgiving.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this point. The lack of irreversibility is the root of utopianism in all institutional design. When you can rewrite or entirely forget your history, you can self-mythologize. You can make mistake after costly mistake, and keep wiping the slate clean. You can pretend uncomfortable things never happened. You can convert entire peoples to new religions and force them to adopt new names.

Fortunately for our sanity, it so happens that a convenient truth for you can be an inconvenient for me. So in a distributed system with the right kinds of digital wabi-sabi buttons and no undo buttons there is a possibility that something resembling the truth can emerge. And be irreversibly recorded outside of proof-of-pain human memories, despite every party to it having an incentive to distort it later with the benefit of hindsight.

To get beyond those limits, we need consensus (and dissent) technologies and institutions based on true forgiveness at scale, grounded in extra-institutional technologies that never forget. The truth, as the saying goes, will set us free. Especially if it is crypotgraphically secured and independent of the history production processes of any truth monopolists. 006ab0faaa