Who was "John Lenin"?

Year 2219: Who were “The Beatles”? Were they a cult, a Gnostic sect? This might be a question someone might ask in a few hundred years. Their first experience might have been through a video of the press conference of John Lennon attempting to respond to his comment about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus, which could be the footing on which that person would form an understanding of them, and perhaps form opinions on that basis. But they will know who Jesus was, just as we know of him now. Very few things are culturally indelible, and if they are, will accumulate myriad interpretations over millennia.

In today’s world, it is almost unconscionable that we could ever forget who John Lennon was, or even the Beatles, once the Silent, Boomer, GenX, and Millennial generations have passed on. But no one ever remembers everything or anything. What relics will remain in the next centuries, and how will those relics be curated, both by institutions, governments, as well as the public, and most importantly, what the public will understand as to how things were in the 2020s. We now see it as popular culture, just as the Romans did with their contemporary culture in the first century. We see the relics in a museum as a kind of "fine art", but is that how they viewed it? How could we know? Historians have created some semblance of certainty, but it is at best a patchwork. If the Romans had a YouTube, present times would be vastly different. If we didn’t have TV or the Internet it would be different again. Remixing and re-matching extant technologies through history is an interesting thought experiment (which we can do easily through art) yet it plays out in real time as a different kind of Experiment. All of reality is always some kind of Experiment because we can’t fully know the past or future, regardless of the magic we seem to expect from technology.

Regardless of the technology used, typically you won't remember the popular culture of even your parents, let alone grandparents. We are just at the leading edge of moving from looking at piles of snapshots in boxes to reconciling the exponentially larger canon of digital assets, some of which will decay through various means: not having passwords, obsolete formats, software, older code, "link rot" and so on. There's also the issue of how something will be reinterpreted. You wouldn't even need for something to be remixed; time will remix it in the passing of generations. Younger people will appreciate things that might not have been there to begin with, including incorrect information that gets blended into the melange of history. Yet there are things that are universal (such as the existence of Jesus as a man) and will never change. Culture is in some sense accumulated as they do in geological layers. The Anthropocene (if it is ever fully defined) will include the Morphic Field (archetype) for a John Lennon: an artist in the right place at the right time that had some degree of success, yet not unlike other similar artists that were not well-known, which are essentially in that same "Field", or rather a universal mental model for understanding. 

Music is an excellent framework for "Fields" of understanding.  All adults have heard Imagine in some context. Boomers recall when it was on the radio, younger generations may have heard it when it was appropriated for TV commercials, yet its essence is an entity unto itself for different reasons. Even just the chord changes of the song itself could be discovered independently by someone that never heard the song and perhaps never heard of the Beatles, and get the gist of what Lennon made possible in his time. Classical composers know the rules of harmony in which the song (and emotion) of Imagine could arise. We all forage in the same cultural forests, and stumble on its perennial nature. In terms of morphic resonance (or however one wants to think about it) the containers are always there for us to fill. Mediums as messages is another example of a container, albeit a new kind of container or frame that gets filled with all the things that could fit in it.

Anything that appeals to us aesthetically or emotionally will last, such as a good photograph, letters (or emails: "I found my Dad's early love emails"). Types of humor usually fade: slapstick is no longer funny because people began doing it without kidding about it. Older generations usually don't get the jokes or don't want to because they are working off different memories.

Even if something is partially faded or obsolesced in culture, there's sufficient ground for exploration and discovery. Discovering just one thing you didn't know about before can be revelatory in one's life. You don't even have to wait for a generation; Now decay (or simple forgetting) can happen in a week, or even a few days, or 12 hours, but it doesn't necessarily have to be ephemeral. Taking one aspect of it, and looking for the best possible truth is the best way forward in taking care of cultural memory. 

The impermanence of memory seems new to some people, but people have been writing on it for a long time. I first began getting interested in it when I became a photographer in the early aughts, as my eye was drawn to the compositional aspects of photography and loved looking at old family snapshots, scanning and restoring them, cataloging and creating a blog for them to archive for prosperity's sake. In the early Web, we believed that if you just uploaded it onto the Internet it was tantamount of etching it in stone, but all of us have learned this is not the case. It is even erroneous to believe that even stone will be the best medium to record Truth. The archetypes of a John Lennon probably existed 4,000 years ago. We just don't know about the people that were like him, even if they were popular.

The article that set this off: http://nautil.us/issue/68/context/how-well-forget-john-lennon