By: Sam Leith

The latest trend among the offspring of Generation Z - that is, those born between 1997 and 2012 - is posting "old videos" on TikTok.

It is like a snake eating its own tail.

After reaching the ripe old age of, say, 11, Gen Zers start digging through their archives to critique that ridiculous hairstyle they had in the not-too-distant past – say, 18 months ago.

Or, reminiscing with friends about "Snapchat filters we all use".

But this is as stupid as it is sad.

As we ponder world historical events in a 10, 20 or 50 year time frame – the long-term effects of Brexit, the restoration of the status quo in European security,

Today, an entire generation of the digital age has come of age, in a world in which the past is no longer the past in the sense that we once understood it.

Today nothing is forgotten.

Almost everything you've experienced, every action you've taken is an inevitable chronicle somewhere on the web.

Memory cannot make you edit your past with some rosy memories.

You cannot romanticize, reinvent or retell your story.

The most you can do is remix the raw material with a packaging from the present.

Human experience is now recorded on something that looks a bit like an unofficial version of the blockchain on which cryptocurrencies are based.

Among the ancillary effects of all this – incidental but perhaps not insignificant = is what seems to be influencing the future of politics.

This means that people entering public life today are likely to become increasingly strange.

"Youthful indifference" - that drug bust in your early 20s, the awkward choice of a too extravagant dress, the moment of a sexual gesture you might not mind = it's no longer something you can to be forgotten or left silent during an interview.

That's because the evidence will still be out there, somewhere, in some damn TikTok video, or in some Instagram archive all along.

You might think that we could adjust our public morals somewhat, to be more forgiving.

But that doesn't seem to be the direction the culture is moving.

On the contrary, we are more prone than ever to abuse our collective and personal history.

Therefore, it is very likely that the only people who will survive scrutiny as candidates will be those who, being determined to have no career in public life, have had a superhuman vigilance to make sure they never do anything they might later feel ashamed of.

We have all met some people with this mindset and they are not the people I would choose to govern us.

Overrepresented in this field are egomaniacs and madmen.

But my real concern is the psychological, cultural and social impact on the general population

Nostalgia depends to a large extent on the ability to remember things from the past in a wrong way.

The canonical form of nostalgia requires a past happiness that may be entirely invented.

On the other hand, total memory is a curse.

Or to put it bluntly, it is a new psychological and social fact unprecedented in human experience.

We can complain and say it's the fault of these stupid young people who parade their idiotic social media.

And, perhaps in one respect that is right.

But you don't disappear from the digital record by refusing to post selfies (nor is it reasonable to expect young people to completely shun the culture of their generation).

There are a million different ways, not all born of narcissism, in which our lives are put on a permanent record in real time, and in which our mistakes should not be learned from but added to the sheet. of the accusation.

Most of us, especially those who grew up before the advent of social media, built our sense of our history around a myriad of unreliable memories, meaningful objects, and partly fictional events.

Photographs can show us when we were young, old documents and school books, tarnished pieces of jewelry.

These objects are not always with us.

We don't have much interest in them in the short or even medium term.

They are sent to drawers and attics.

We store them like wine.

And then later, we find ourselves looking back at them with nostalgia.

Martin Amis has summed up this process brilliantly: “Your youth evaporates in your early forties when you look in the mirror.

And then you become obsessed with pretending you're not going to die.

But then you accept that one day you will die.

Then, in your 50s, resistance to the inevitable is much weaker.

And then suddenly you have this great new territory within you, which is the past that wasn't there before.

The past did not pile up around us.

She was in that attic, in that drawer, sitting comfortably."

But now the cycle between experience and contemplation of experience—between life and the examination of life—is closing, and it is very fast.

Douglas Coupland in his novel "Generation X" used the subtitle "Tales of an Accelerating Culture".

As is often the case with Couplan, he was a generation ahead of his time.

In fact, the culture has accelerated now.

And, I suspect that one of the most profound problems for a generation looking back on the memories it created just a few years ago, and the "old" media that created them, will be how to negotiate that kind of accelerated memory. with that kind of instant nostalgia, over a lifetime.

/Source: "The Spectator"/In Albanian from: Bota.al/