The Algorithm Age

Milan Kundera opens his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with a scene from the winter of 1948. Klement Gottwald, leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, is giving a speech to the masses from a palace balcony, surrounded by fellow party members. Comrade Vladimir Clementis thoughtfully places his fur hat on Gottwald’s bare head; the hat then features in an iconic photograph. Four years later, Clementis is found guilty of being a bourgeois nationalist and hanged. His ashes are strewn on a Prague street. The propaganda section of the party removes him from written history and erases him from the photograph. “Nothing remains of Clementis,” writes Kundera, “but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.” Review: Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember – Ciara Greene & Gillian Murphy (Princeton University Press) Efforts to enforce political forgetting are often associated with totalitarian regimes. The state endeavours to control not only its citi...

As my eyes scanned my local library’s notice board, something stopped me dead in my tracks. Among the flyers for gardening and painting clubs, I spied one from the National Autistic Society about the challenges autistic adults face, such as struggling with daily routines, the impact of sensory difficulties in a busy world, and how relationships with others may be hard at times. It resonated with me straight away, even though I wasn’t really sure what autism was. This was the beginning of March 2019 – and this poster is what eventually led to me getting an autism diagnosis just before my 40th birthday. As a child, I was often drawing or reading alone – away from the hustle and bustle of everyone around me. The noise of school was chaotic and just too much, but I learnt to mask my discomfort with it. I didn’t realise I was doing that at the time, but masking is a strategy used by some autistic people – consciously or unconsciously – to appear neurotypical. Finding ...