A bug flew into my mouth the other day when I was cycling, and I remembered, as I usually do when I swallow a bug, that someone told me when I was young that we all inadvertently swallow about seven spiders a year.
But was it really seven? Was it a year or a month? Who told me this, or did I read it somewhere? Further details of this memory are irretrievable to me. But I could at least fire up Google or ChatGPT, and find out how much we really know about spider-swallowing. A moment’s reflection tells me that it’s unlikely this matter has been studied, and also unlikely that it even could be studied very effectively. Presumably we all do swallow the occasional spider in our sleep, and presumably the numbers vary, depending on the density of spiders in our environment. But I struggle to see how one could determine even approximate average numbers. Still, I could certainly find out with astonishing rapidity how much is known about this matter, and also—if what I was told is indeed mere folklore—what the usual forms of that folklore are, and where and when it tends to circulate.
Details of the memory are irretrievable to me. But I could fire up Google or ChatGPT, and find out how much we really know.
Moreover, if I were a bit younger, I might well have received this spider-diet tidbit not in oral conversation, but when messaging with a friend. If so, I could search my chats and work out exactly who told me what, and when.
In short, I could supplement my hazy, and doubtless erroneous, knowledge and memory with the vast resources of electronic information distribution and storage. Henceforth, when I gulped down a bug, I could filter that experience through the best and widest-ranging scientific, cultural and personal knowledge about voluntary and involuntary bug ingestion.
But what would be the point? My current, blurry memory does everything I need it to. It provides a pleasant reminiscence of the idle, goofy conversations of younger years. It impresses on me that there is no hermetic seal between me and the more unsettling entities of creation. And it allows me to cope with one unpleasant place where I perceive that seal being broken. If I’ve retained this supposed fact about spider-swallowing, it’s precisely because it’s useful in telling me that nothing terrible will happen to me when the occasional bug flies down my throat. After all, I’ve already swallowed all those spiders, and I am none the worse for it.
My current, blurry memory does everything I need it to.
Not all knowledge needs to be a mastery of the best available evidence. Not every memory needs to be precise and reliable. Accuracy and detail have their place, but there is something monstrous about the scale on which they are currently on offer. I would rather not have to even consider whether I should update my information on spider-swallowing: the very possibility is oppressive.
Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) centers around an imaginary future technology that records memories directly from the cerebral cortex, and allows those memories to be replayed. It’s a weak movie, but it’s central line is to the point: “Memories are meant to fade. They’re designed that way for a reason”. Of course, as Plato taught in the Phaedrus, it is simply writing, rather than imagined brain-downloads, that fundamentally altered out relations with memory’s inbuilt alteration and dimming over time. And it would be not just fruitless, but mad, to rail against writing as a whole: it has given us history and literature and Holy Scripture.
But now we can and do write nearly everything, and we have stored so much of it, and made so much of what we have stored searchable. We have declared a total war on memory’s natural erosion, and on the labile oral transmission of knowledge. No wonder we dream of achieving immortality through uploading our minds into the matrix—we are already doing that on an unthinkable scale to the symbols we have devised to represent our thoughts.
No immortality will come of that, just a joyless surfeit of data, and minds rendered increasingly blank by reliance on electronic storage and search—a prospect far more repulsive than any number of swallowed spiders.
