The result of this historical amnesia is that the presentgeneration is easy prey to distortions of the past

"Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair," the theologian Walter Brueggeman wrote.

The tech industry's historical amnesia — the inability to learn about, to recognize, to remember what has come before — is deeply intertwined with the idea of "disruption" and its firm belief that new technologies are necessarily innovative and are always "progress." I like to cite, as an example, a New Yorker article from a few years ago, an interview with an Uber engineer who'd pleaded guilty to stealing Google's self-driving car technology. "The only thing that matters is the future," he told the magazine. "I don't even know why we study history. It's entertaining, I guess — the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn't really matter. You don't need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow." (I could tie this attitude to the Italian Futurists and to fascism, but that’s a presentation for another day.)

The narrative of Free America shaped the parameters of acceptable thinking for Smart America. Free trade, deregulation, economic concentration, and balanced budgets became the policy of the Democratic Party.

Under late capital, the non-profit has been asked to take over the space of providing for community needs or supporting community interests that had formerly been occupied by the state as the entity responsible for the public welfare.

amnesia

The third level of education is the discovery of Knowledge. Here you begin to remember your point of departure and anticipate your point of return-not because you are anxious to leave the world, but because the meaning of your being here is entirely defined by where you have come from and where you are going. It is as if you went to school one day and you stayed there for eighty years and never left the classroom. Well, after a while it would be very difficult to remember what life was like outside the classroom. But when you leave the classroom after eighty years, more or less, you go home to your "parents," who are your Spiritual Family. It was just a very long day in class, that's all-so long, in fact, that it allowed you to concentrate on the classroom entirely. If you penetrate the membrane that separates this world from the life beyond, it becomes very difficult to concentrate on being here because the life beyond is so alluring. It is so attractive. It is easier to be yourself there than it is here. That is why you must enter the world in an amnesiac state to enable yourself to concentrate on being here.