The latest trend among the scions of Generation Z – those born between 1997 and 2012 – is posting ‘throwback videos’ on TikTok. Talk about a snake eating its tail. Having reached the ripe old age of, say, 11, Generation Z is digging through their archives to offer a wan critique of that embarrassing haircut they sported in the dim and distant past of, say, 18 months ago, or reminiscing with friends about ‘Snapchat filters we all used to use’. That’s silly, but it’s also a little sad.
As we ponder world-historical events on a ten-, 20- or 50-year timeline – the long-term effects of Brexit; the resettling of the status quo in European security; even the climate crisis – it’s somehow easy to miss changes that are potentially even more lasting and fundamental. This apparently inconsequential story strikes me as an epiphenomenon of one of them. That is: gradually and without all that much fanfare, a whole generation of digital natives have come to adulthood in a world in which the past is no longer the past in the sense in which we are accustomed to understand it.
Nothing is forgotten. Almost everything you have experienced, every action you have taken, is ineradicably chronicled somewhere in the cloud. Memory can’t play you false or burnish your past with rosy recollection. You can’t romanticise or reinvent or re-narrate your own history. The most you can do in terms of taking possession of it, as these throw backers seem to acknowledge, is to remix the raw material into a mash-up or a sizzle reel – which mash-up or sizzle reel itself becomes a document of your present. Human experience is now recorded on something that looks a bit like an informal version of the blockchain – the distributed public ledger whose unforgiving mathematics underpins cryptocurrencies.
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