This article is a commentary on the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI), capitalism, and memory. The political policies of neoliberalism have reduced the capacity of individuals and groups to reflect on and change the social world, meanwhile applications of AI and algorithmic technologies, rooted in the profit-seeking objectives of global capitalism, deepen this deficit. In these conditions, memory in individuals and across society is at risk of becoming myopic. In this article, I develop the concept of myopic memory with two core claims. Firstly, I argue that AI is a technological development that cannot be divorced from the capitalist conditions from which it comes from and is implemented in service of. To this end, I reveal capitalism and colonialism's historical and contemporary use of surveillance as a way to control the populations it oppresses, imagining their pasts to determine their futures, disempowering them in the process. My second core claim emphasises that this process of disempowerment is undergoing an acute realisation four decades into the period of neoliberalism. Neoliberal policies have restructured society on the basis of being an individual consumer, leaving little time, space, and institutional capacity for citizens to reflect on their impact or challenge their dominance. As a result, with the growing role of AI and algorithmic technologies in shaping our engagement with society along similar lines of individualism, it is my conclusion that the scope of memory is being reduced and constrained within the prism of capitalism, reducing its potential, and rendering it myopic.

Oral traditions describing details of ancient volcanic eruptions and their effects survive throughout the inhabited world. Many such eruptions, especially those having catastrophic environmental and societal consequences, proved sufficiently memorable to form the basis of enduring oral traditions. Using global databases, we identified 2306 such eruptions from 477 inhabited locations that occurred before the start of the Common Era (CE) and are therefore likely to have been the subject of oral traditions. Of these, we selected 20 events (‘remembered’ Holocene eruptions) for which there are extant oral (-derived) traditions that demonstrate how such traditions can reveal details of past volcanism that often are undetectable by retrodictive geoscientific enquiry. We also selected 20 events (‘forgotten’ Holocene eruptions) about which no oral traditions are known and discuss the possible reasons for this. Such oral traditions, while often challenging for conventionally trained geoscientists to interpret, are valuable yet largely overlooked sources of information about the nature and effects of Holocene volcanism that can usefully complement geoscientific enquiry. In particular, we identified locations where memories of such volcanism appear ‘forgotten’ in the hope that scientists might focus their attention on revealing, identifying, and analyzing local traditions.

This article is about the seminar held at Luiss University in Rome on 17 June 2024. The seminar focused on ‘The End of Christian Democracy: A New Direction for Research’ and was the first milestone and official launch of the PRIN research project ‘The End of Christian Democracy: The Collapse of a Political Dream – Voices from the Margins’, led by a consortium of four universities: Luiss, Roma Tre, Bologna and Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples.

The engraved slate plaques were part of an extensive and variable class of ritual objects in Late Neolithic and Copper Age Iberia, with Classic plaques being the most numerous and standardized type. Classic plaques have a top and base separated by a horizontal line or bands, and base registers of repeating design elements (triangles, checkerboard, etc.). Associated with burials, they have been interpreted as genealogical records, with their base design referencing a clan or other social unit and their number of registers denoting the generational distance of the deceased from an important ancestor. The authors evaluate the genealogical hypothesis using a larger dataset than available when originally proposed, employing statistical analyses to examine the relationship between the number of registers and find locations, and between design elements and tomb size. Tomb size is viewed as a measure of collective labour, and hence a proxy of the status of the individuals in the tomb. These analyses show significant patterning between the number of registers and the plaques’ geographic distribution, and between specific design elements and tomb size, suggesting that the genealogical hypothesis remains a plausible explanation for the Classic plaques.

Acquired prosopagnosia is a rare disorder, but it serves as a model for impairments in expert-level visual processing. This review discusses five key observations made over the past 30 years. First, there are variants, an apperceptive type linked to damage to the inferior occipitotemporal cortex and an amnestic type associated with anterior temporal lesions, both either right or bilateral. Second, these variants are clustered in syndromes with other perceptual deficits, the apperceptive type with field defects, dyschromatopsia and topographagnosia, and the amnestic type with topographagnosia and the auditory disorders of phonagnosia and acquired amusia. Third, extensive testing often shows additional problems with recognizing exemplars of other objects, especially when degrees of expertise are taken into account. Fourth, the prosopagnosic impairment does not affect all facial information. For example, the perception of expression and lip-reading likely depends on other neural substrates than those for processing facial identity. Last, face perception in prosopagnosia is not immutable but can improve with extensive training, though as yet this does not represent a cure for the condition. Continuing work with neural networks and animal models will enhance our understanding of this intriguing condition and what it tells us about how our brains process vision.

This article investigates memory practices in connection with retrospective Facebook groups created for remembering specific aspects of the past. It focuses on how members of these groups experience and deal with how Facebook's interface and algorithms enable, shape, and interfere with memory practices. From this point of departure, the article discusses and nuances the idea that a ‘connective turn’ has brought with it an ontological shift in memory culture (Hoskins 2017a) and a ‘greying’ of memories (Hoskins and Halstead 2021). Theoretically, the article draws on Deborah Lupton's (2020) concept of ‘data selves’, which offers an account of how people interact with data and technology. This concept does not view data practices as immaterial but rather as material, corporeal, and affective, thus prompting an understanding of memory practices as hybrid processes where offline and online practices intersect (Gajjala 2019; Merrill forthcoming/2024). In this qualitative study, nine members of retrospective Facebook groups were chosen to participate in semi-structured interviews. The analysis explains the importance of viewing contemporary memory practices as hybrid, showing a greying effect within the affordances of Facebook that shapes both which memories are shared and how memories are shared. In addition, the analysis nuances the idea of an ontological shift in memory culture and the greying of memories by investigating how the interviewees’ deal and struggle with the affordances of the platform in their memory practices.