The Man Without Memory in the Hyperfast Society: Time, Trauma, and Digitalization through Critical Theory

Abstract

The essay explores the contemporary crisis of memory in the age of hypervelocity and digitalisation, questioning the fate of historical consciousness confronted with algorithmic temporality and the automation of remembrance. Drawing on the paradigms of Critical Theory from Adorno and Benjamin to Freud and Habermas, memory is conceived as an act of resistance and as the place where wounded time becomes a possibility for thought. The analysis extends to the mnemonic forms of digital society, from social acceleration (Rosa) and algorithmic memory (Esposito) to the connective transformations of memory described by Hoskins. The rise of generative artificial intelligence introduces a new threshold, that of “synthetic memories” which produce the past instead of preserving it. In this scenario, memory loses its ethical value and is reduced to a technical function. Yet, following the utopian legacy of Bloch and Freud’s critique of repetition, the essay identifies a potential reactivation: a memory that, even when immersed in simulation, can still safeguard the promise of time and oppose the dominance of simultaneity with a politics of remembering.