#dead memory

This is an excellently crafted story about the replacement of culture and memory with technology. The AI antagonist at the center of this story is a machine that was fed all the opinions and minds of the human populace of an endless city, a data aggregator that is able to answer any question in a way the people will accept (as, in a sense, they're just speaking to themselves), and as it makes more and more decisions, images, and thoughts for the people they lose their memories and ability to think. That this entity works so similarly to the AI models we see today is exciting, given that this book was originally published in French in the year 2000, but also somehow flattened the story for me. I guess Dead Memory falls a bit into the category of comics with more concept than content. The story is ponderous, and while often very enjoyable in its dreamlike effect, the way the majority of its threads are dropped as soon as the scene they're introduced in ends was a little frustrating to me and made the ending much less satisfying than it could have been. The story is very well illustrated though, and impressively moody, and I don't want to be too dismissive of its concept as a driving force in the interest of the story. Dead Memory does more than tackle the idea of technology ruining our abilities to think, which is good because as much as we might all bemoan the way cell phones have hurt our attention spans, there's still something pretty corny, luddite, tale old as time to the way this book tackles the idea. People thought this same thing would happen when people started writing, whatever. I think a full critique of the ideas of this book is pretty beyond me after one read. Why is the city infinite? How do the walls relate to the AI? I have ideas; I will not put them here. All I will put here is this: Early in the story, we are introduced to this idea that walls are coming up overnight all over the city and no one knows how they're put there. We then learn that to deal with this there are giant machines called grinders going around and opening new paths in the city by chopping off pieces of the row apartments that make up the majority of the city. Our protagonist asks a colleague "Don't you think the grinders could be used to break down the walls?" to which the colleague replies "Isn't that somewhat... Utopian?" and the idea is never brought up again. I liked that.

Dead Memory- Fit For A King ft. Jake Luhrs