The curse of Funes

“I alone have more memories than all men have had since the world has been the world”
– Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious”

Forgetting no longer exists, and that is something politicians are going to have to start understanding.

What the UDI is doing (the UDI being a Chilean right-wing party) is pathetic, truly pathetic in this day and age.

Deleting content from their site because it could compromise them right now, when the pharmacy chains are the villains of the story.

I’ve said it before: you can’t take back what you left on the record, and it’s better to own it.

The net is like Funes the Memorious, the character in the famous Jorge Luis Borges story, who, in a curious coincidence, is remembered this week by Saramago:

[Funes] that man endowed with a memory that absorbed everything, that recorded everything, facts, images, readings, sensations, the light of a dawn, a ripple of water on the surface of a lake…

The net suffers from the curse of Funes. It doesn’t forget. But what is a curse for a man is an essential feature of the net, and sometimes that’s a good thing, especially for democracy.

So, if you’re a politician, be careful what you publish on the net, or you might get funado, which is what we call it in Chile when someone gets publicly called out.

:wink: