On technologies of forgetting

While working on this project, many people asked if I have seen local film The Last Dance (directed by Anselm Chan, 2024). I felt that I have landed in Hong Kong at just the right cultural moment, as the film, which centres the local deathcare industry, generated renewed interest in the city’s Taoist funeral rites, coffin homes, and cemetries. In a memorable scene, Taoist priest Master Man chides newbie funeral planner Dominic for helping a grieving mother embalm her son using mummification, because it would obstruct the little boy’s possibilities of reincarnation. Without proper rites, the boy’s ghost would be doomed to wander between worlds. One minor detail in the film that stayed with me was the advice that the living should not allow their tears to fall onto the cadaver, because if they do so, the deceased would find it difficult to depart the earthly realms and it would impede their journey to reincarnation. In my research, I also came across similar cultural beliefs in Japan stemming from Buddhism. People believe that if the dead see family members suffering and hurting, they cannot let go of their earthly life and would hesitate to cross over to the other side.

Applying this logic to the creation of digital doubles through griefbots, I began to wonder – how do these technologies fit within a Buddhist or Taoist worldview? Can souls become trapped in this world, if we insist on talking to their digital ‘ghosts’? It seems culturally significant for both the living and the dead to move on and refrain from lingering. I turned my attention to the centrality of letting go and forgetting in Buddhist beliefs in the afterlife. In this worldview, when we die, we travel along the River of forgetting (忘川河) until we reach a bridge to the underworld (奈何橋). At this bridge, an old lady serves a bowl of soup which ensures amnesia. Those who drink this soup (孟婆湯) enter the cycles of reincarnation, unburdened by their previous lives. Those who refuse are banished to remain in the underworld for centuries, swimming in a river of pain, regret, and sorrow.

I meditated on the significance of this bowl of soup, a timeless Buddhist technology of forgetting, in the collective imagination of reincarnation. And I began to question: what if digital technologies are also created from this perspective? What if they are re-oriented around letting go and forgetting?

The truth is, data-driven technology is anything but forgetting. Machines want to record and remember everything possible about the world. Digital afterlife is a data stream where nothing ever gets forgotten, every selfie, every upload, every comment, every online purchase, every emoji ever sent. In digital capitalist belief, when people die, their data must remain profitable, and staying in this digital stream is important to sustain the data extraction model created. After all, grief technology can be sold as subscription-based services, where one would have to pay to continue chatting with a beloved digital ghost.

I started researching what machine forgetting could look like, and ended in the world of machine unlearning. In the emergence of the right to be forgotten, available to specific legal regimes like the EU, data scientists have to figure out how to remove someone’s data upon request. Put simply, AI engineers are not happy about having to delete data. It’s easy enough to remove someone off a database, but AI is trained through machine learning. Machine learning remembers general patterns based on millions of data points. Once learned, it is very difficult to make a machine forget a single user’s data. It is unclear what the impact of each individual’s data is. And if many, many people opt for data deletion, a model needs to be retrained, and the degradation can be exponential. When models collapse because of this, data scientists call it ‘catastrophic unlearning’.

How might we counter this technologically-mediated culture of memory retention that is so incredibly tied up with capitalistic data capture? Is there a future where we move towards unlearning and forgetting instead? I began imagining deletion and forgetting as forms of resistance. Dying with AI seems to suggest that even the very human experience of grief and death cannot escape capitalisation.