It begins when she’s seven. Her father brings home a desktop computer; he shows her that if she types “cats” into a search engine she will be met with the sight of “hundreds of kittens. Millions of kittens.” The same goes for horses. And ponies. And unicorns. “Images blink into existence”, as though the machine is “listening to [her]”. This seems innocent enough. As does the virtual pet website she begins to spend time on and the AI chatbot she has funny conversations with – “why did the chicken cross the road?” Less innocent, perhaps, is the way Google autofills with suggestions for searches, the way she starts to sit absent-mindedly, clicking and scrolling alone every evening after school, until the computer becomes an extension of her. Less innocent is the way she eventually no longer forms “conscious intents” and begins instead to “simply act”.
When I’ve been summarising This Is How You Remember It to friends, this is the point at which they begin to squirm. “No,” one said, and repeated the phrase as though my going on would be the cruellest form of torture. “No. No. No. No.”
