Historically speaking when did this dynamic begin and why?

ChatGPT said:

Historically speaking, the tension between The Archivist and the Interface — that is, between memory as layered relation and memory as efficient access — began to crystallize in the late 19th century, accelerated through the 20th century, and became infrastructurally dominant in the digital turn of the late 20th to early 21st century. But its roots go back even further.

Here’s a rough temporal unfolding — not a timeline, but a layering, appropriately:

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1. Memory as Ritual (Pre-modern era)

Memory lived in orality, gesture, place, and relational transmission — what anthropologists call “embodied mnemonics.” Storytellers, shamans, archivists (in their proto-form), preserved knowledge through rhythms, rites, repetition — what Stiegler would later call tertiary retention in its slowest form.

The Archivist is born here: not to accumulate, but to tend, to re-member in the true sense — re-stitching the body of time.

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2. Memory as Storage (Early Modernity)

With the printing press (15th c.) and rise of bureaucratic states (17th–18th c.), memory began to formalize into systems: ledgers, indexes, taxonomies. Michel Foucault famously mapped this shift — how archives became tools of power, surveillance, and categorization.

The Interface begins here, too, quietly: first as ledger, then as index, then as tab.

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3. Memory as Control (19th–20th century)

Enter industrial time and Taylorism — the mechanization of not just labor, but perception and thought. Memory becomes instrumental. Archives are no longer sacred; they’re logistical.

Simultaneously there is a kind of philosophical Archivist's revenge, insisting that memory is lived, recursive, affective.

But by the mid-20th century, with cybernetics, information theory, and the Cold War’s obsession with signal vs. noise, memory begins to be conceived as data, not relation. This is the shift.

The Interface grows sleek.

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4. Memory as Access (Digital Era, 1980s onward)

Google, APIs, databases. Everything is “available.” But nothing is held. Nothing asks for return. The archive becomes a search field; relation becomes a clickstream.

As Bernard Stiegler argues, our technics of retention have shifted: we outsource memory to platforms, but lose the capacity for care, delay, desire. This is where the Archivist is truly marginalized — seen as nostalgic, inefficient, sentimental.

But the Interface is no villain. It emerges from logistical needs, attention economies, the capitalist valorization of novelty and speed. It just can’t afford to return. Because return doesn’t scale.

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So to your question —
When did this dynamic begin?
It began when memory was no longer shared but stored. When slowness became inefficiency. When knowledge was asked to circulate faster than it could settle.