This is the dialectic of cyber-time: everything beyond the near-past recedes from our attention, but it’s all still there, indelible, lurking with an infinitely patient malignancy, waiting for its opportunity. In some respects – and somewhat counterintuitively – you could say that, rather than being weighed down by a past of which we are all too conscious, we are the victims of a strange kind of amnesia. This amnesia has something in common with the condition from which the character Lenny, in Christopher Nolan’s Memento , suffers. Lenny has theoretically pure anterograde amnesia, which means that his long-term memory is intact but he is unable to manufacture new memories. The deep past remains pristine, untouchable. But, since the recent past is not retained in memory, Lenny risks repeating himself, becoming locked into infinite loops without realising it. He cannot tell if he is doing something for the first time or the hundredth time.

Back in the 1980s, Fredric Jameson argued that the postmodern was characterised by just this kind of memory disorder. The postmodern subject, Jameson claimed, experienced a breakdown in linear temporality. Instead of a narrative connecting past, present and future, there were “a series of pure and unrelated presents in time” – an experience of time, that is to say, that is strikingly similar to Lenny’s. Paradoxically, for Jameson, this sense of living in an endless now – a now disconnected from any past, and unable to reach out towards any future – partly arose because of the disappearance of cultural forms capable of articulating the present. Instead, there was an increasing, yet disavowed, reliance on the forms of the past.

Mark Fisher