Law by its very nature tends towards the constraint of the decision-making of individuals, and so has an inherent – but not inevitable – mythological disposition, especially when in combination with both the sovereign and regulatory power of the State. Thereby it reflects shifting forms of – most recently neoliberal – power and truth. A non-mythological law will need to be framed constitutionally but will also require a rethinking of the rule of law, which is currently mostly comprised of anatomical lists of preferred characteristics. There are alternative approaches in the form of teleological accounts – preferred here – and prominent amongst which is that of Krygier. However, he does not go far enough, settling for a critical exploration of social traditions and seeing the arbitrary use of force as the dominant target. This tends to ignore the spread of sovereign power into regulatory forms, which are as intrusive as arbitrary power, albeit in a different manner. An existential rule of law would be founded on purpose-based, fiduciary principles which committed agencies to promote the non-mythological interests of self-responsible individuals. Trust would play a valuable but secondary role in such arrangements.

Part I has been concerned with the significance of emerging neuroscience for the idea and practice of privacy and with a range of contextual factors through which that significance needs to be understood.

Part II has been concerned with the reimagining of the social infrastructure in a manner that will support and encourage the individual pursuit of the existential responsibility to and for oneself.

Examining privacy theory begins with what is absent from present accounts, that is, the central importance of our personal concerns about our existential reality. These concerns, and the disposition to seek ways to distance and camouflage them with constructed concerns, is at the heart of the inducements of what emerged as the mythological trajectory of Deity, State, Market and Technology. The impact of the ideas and practices left behind by these failed but persisting magnitudes is what is normalised in us and comes to comprise what we see as our private world. However, these ideas and practices are mythological subjections. There are two dominant present accounts of privacy, the ‘Constitutional’ (which is sourced from the ideas and practices of Deity, State and Market), which is primarily a bourgeois account, and the ‘Selected Flow of Information’ account (which is inspired by the movement of information within a social context, especially in the technological age). Given the mythological content of both accounts, the way forward needs to take an entirely different approach. This will relocate existential reality to the centre of its frame but also emphasise an ethic which rejects subjection, one framed by respectful self-responsibility.

Although we are talking about the automated production of memory in this book, these systems are still anchored by classification systems that open them up to a much longer held and well-established, as Foucault (2002) put it, order of things. It is also important to note that ‘The Taxonomy of Memory Themes’ discussed in Chapter Two served as the ‘ground truth’ (Amoore, 2020), so to speak, for the development of Facebook Memories. Established prior to its development, the memory classifications generated by Facebook's research studies were fed into the design of Facebook's current throwback feature. This was effectively a moment in which the formalization of a computational problem occurred and where there was an attempt to render the indeterminable and contingent into something calculable (see Fazi, 2018). Once this taxonomy of memories was in place, it provided the ranking algorithms with a clear-cut computational problem to ‘solve’ and optimize: what to surface, to whom and when. In other words, once there was a system in place for classifying memories within the taxonomy, the system had to then decide which memory, from all these many classified memories, should be targeted at the intended recipient and when they should receive it. Once the classificatory system is active within this social media archive, the focus then has to shift to retrieval and to the way in which this retrieval is instantiated in processes of ranking. Bringing memories to the surface requires, in this logic, a system by which they can be ranked – memories ranked at a certain level are the ones that then become visible. It is this ranking of memory that this chapter deals with.

Feedback loops and the surfacing of memories

In a Facebook Research report titled ‘Engineering for nostalgia: building a personalized “On This Day” experience’, Manohar Paluri and Omid Aziz (2016) outline the software engineering side to building the earlier iteration of Facebook Memories called On This Day. The claim behind this, they explain, is that they ‘wanted to make sure On This Day shows people the memories they most likely want to see and share, especially when it comes to the memories they see in News Feed’ (Paluri & Aziz, 2016).

Even something as intimate and personal as memory cannot escape the reach of social media and their datafied and circulatory logic. In this book we have explored the underlying processes that enable the selection and targeting of past content in the form of repackaged ‘memories’. Here we have highlighted the way that classification and ranking operate together to enable memories to resurface on social media throwback features. Through the combination of classification and ranking, the automated production and delivery of socalled ‘memories’ means that social media users do not need to dig; they are not excavating, as Walter Benjamin suggested, but instead that excavation is being done on their behalf. Benjamin noted that memories were always a way of mediating the masses of past experiences; this has not changed. These automated systems of social media remediate those memories through the classificatory systems that group them and then prioritize them, making them visible or invisible to us, and shaping how individuals and groups participate in those memories. Because, as Benjamin pointed out, memories have always been a mediation of the past, they can readily be reworked by these automated systems. As we have seen though, one problem with the automatic production of memory is authenticity. It is the act of producing memories that lends them authenticity; if that work becomes automated then potential tensions emerge around the legitimacy of that memory.

‘The promise of automation’, writes Mark Andrejevic (2020: 13), ‘is to encode the social so that it can be offloaded onto machines.’ In order to see the consequences this will have for memory and remembering, we suggest that there is a need to better understand the underlying classification and prioritization processes, what they are intended to do, as well as what implications and outcomes they have for people in everyday life. As a result, this book has sought to make a specific intervention into the automatic production of memory. Our contribution here has been to examine the role played by classification and ranking within these processes of automation. Once memories are opened up to classification and ranking, then the memories themselves will change, but so too will our understanding of what memories are. The concept of memory is unlikely to go untouched by these developments – indeed, we have sought to foreground the tensions that these processes of redefinition are already creating through features such as Facebook Memory.

The kind of automatic production and targeting of memories that we have described in the previous chapters is still relatively new. Yet it is already widespread and deeply embedded in how people relate to their past through social media content. As we have shown, processes of classification and ranking are central to how people encounter past social media content as memories. What this will mean for collective and individual memory will take some time to fully understand. However, in this chapter we would like to turn to a project that was recently completed by the first-named author in order to begin to think through and explore what these changes might mean, examining how people might come to respond and react to these packaged and targeted memories. The previous chapters showcase how the memorable is partitioned and promoted. In this chapter, we will reflect more directly on the reception of the classified and ranked memories with which users are presented. Given the scope of the issues, this is not a complete endeavour, but it begins to give glimpses into the variegated reception of automatically sorted memories that might then be pursued further. It will indicate the types of direction that memory making may be taking in the context of social media and mobile devices. In short, this chapter begins to explore something that is well- established but little understood as of yet. As discussed in Chapter One, we may know some of what happens when digital memories or mediated memories become integrated, but this particular chapter is about how people react to targeted memories. Partitioning and promoting the memorable through processes of classification and ranking assumes that the memory categories produced are fixed and distinct (Mackenzie, 2015). Yet, as we shall show, the processes of classification and ranking do not necessarily mean that memories fit neatly into those fixed grids of Facebook's taxonomy; nor are the reactions entirely in keeping with those imagined in the rhetorical ideals of the social media providers and coders. As this chapter shows, the reception of targeted memories in everyday life emphasizes the various nuances and tensions generated by the dual process of classification and ranking.

Inevitably, classification processes are powerful within any type of archive. The way content is classified shapes how documents are interpreted and, crucially, how they are retrieved. If we approach social media as a form of archive, then we can begin to see how the ordering process of classification and sorting that occur within these media may be powerful for how people engage with their past content and how individual biographies are made accessible. As we will explore, the ordering of the archive is crucial for understanding its functioning and what can be pulled from its vast stores.

The types of archives that are used to document life are powerful in their presence and outcomes. For some it has been placed at the centre of modern power formations. Derrida (1996: 4 n1) famously argued that, ‘there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.’

If we treat social media as a population of people effectively participating within a large archival structure, then social media bring the politics of the archive to the centre of everyday life and social interaction (see Beer, 2013). Derrida's point is that the structures of the archive afford its uses and what can then be said with it or retrieved from it. He argues that ‘the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future’ (Derrida, 1996: 17; original emphases). The form that the archive takes also dictates the type of items or documents that come to be stored within them; it imposes its logic upon its content. Derrida adds to this, crucially, that ‘the archivization produces as much as it records the event’ (Derrida, 1996: 17). The technical structures of the archive need to be understood in order for its politics to be revealed, particularly as they intervene in the relations between the past and the future. This is something that we will keep in focus as we move through this and the following chapter.

Social media profiles inevitably leave traces of a life being lived. These biographical data trails are a tempting resource for ‘platform capitalism’ (Langley & Leyshon, 2017; Srnicek, 2017). As they have integrated themselves deeply into everyday routines and interactions, social media have captured a wealth of biographical information about their users. The production and maintenance of profiles has led to the recording and sharing of detailed documentary impressions. This accumulation of the day-to-day has led to the conditions in which prior content can be readily repurposed to suit the rapid circulations of social media. Moving beyond their initial remit as communication and networking platforms, social media have expanded to become memory devices. As people's lives are captured, social media platforms continue to seek out ways to recirculate these traces and to render them meaningful for the individual user. The archive is vast, and so automated approaches to memory making have been deployed in order to resurface this past content, selecting what should be visible and rendering it manageable. It is here that this book makes an intervention – this is a book about algorithmic memory making within social media. What is particularly important, as we will show, are the ways that social media's automated systems are actively sorting the past on behalf of the user.

In a short fragment composed around 1932, a piece that went unpublished in his lifetime, Walter Benjamin wrote of the ‘excavation’ of memories. Memories, the fragment suggests, are something to be actively mined from the continually piling remnants of everyday life. Memories require action, he implies; they are something to be achieved, they are the product of active labour. As a result, digging metaphors permeate Benjamin's single paragraph of text. He pictures the individual pursuing their memories as a kind of archaeologist combing through the dirt to uncover and reveal the items below. He opens by claiming that, ‘Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried’ (Benjamin, 1999a: 576).