By John Dimatos (February 9, 2009) (Technovelgy Group Assignment)

excerpt from the memnet promotional brochure:

Welcome to Memnet, where everyone has everyone’s memory. Have you ever had a broken toilet but wished you could just fix it yourself? Well now you can! just put your memnet nose sheath ™ and connect to a subscribing plumber’s mind. While you’re connected to memnet, you’ll have immediate access to all online members, instantaneously able to see the inspiration for a blockbuster movie in a writer’s memory, or even your best friend’s great family vacation. The possibilities are limitless once you realize that all human knowledge and experiences are nothing but memories, and just because they’re not yours doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy them. Remember: you don’t always have to be a part of memnet, just when you choose to. This service is completely free and brought to you by a consortium of non profit and government organizations from 40 countries.*

The memnet operation has the amazing ability to make billions of people conscious of each other’s humanity. By allowing one person to access other people’s memories at will, we hope that memnet can lubricate the machinery of worldwide peace. We don’t condone accessing traumatic memories, but we fully expect that given the full access provided, many people will venture into the darker recesses of human memory, allowing a level of implicit empathetic correspondence to occur spontaneously and globally. One man’s memory of war cannot in its truest form be that different from another man’s memory of war. The sheath will also revolutionize security intelligence, providing a wealth of sources that can be cross referenced with existing databases. Specific incidents of security interest can be better informed by simply accessing the memories of people in the vicinity of the incident and looking for noticeable common threads. The era of the CCTV is dead; long live the memnet.

excerpt from “memnet: destroying humanity from within”.

What have we created? The memnet will have unthinkable and serious repercussions throughout our social structures affecting them at every level. Individuals with memories deemed valuable will start to barter for online memnet time, and their perceived social value will shoot through the roof, creating even more inequality in a society plagued by pre-existing flawed notions of hierarchy. In addition, there is no replicated research that has proven conclusively the notion of objective memory. The memnet organization has brushed off several studies indicating memory as completely subjective, which would further exaggerate cultural differences. One great example referenced in a study by Dick, Heinlen, Niven et. al. is war (ironically an example used in memnet promotional material). The authors point out that two individual memories of a single incident, say the burning of a village in the Bosnian war of the late 20th century, will produce diametrically opposed perspectives (a common issue in historical analysis). What exacerbates this situation is the ability of these two individuals to pull up each other’s memory and relive the incident, creating additional antagonism, where calmer minds without memories of the incident would be better suited to sort out the fallout of the incident.

*A full liability release contract must be signed and notarized before delivery of the memnet nose sheath ™.