We Invented a Miracle

and Rented It Out to Arsonists

The internet gave ordinary people the power to remember each other, record our lives, & carry proof that we were here. So what does it mean that in an age of unprecedented connection, so many still choose cruelty, denial, & destruction?

We built the closest thing humanity has ever had to a shared memory, & still handed the loudest parts of it over to liars, profiteers, & men who mistake domination for order.

There is something almost holy about the human urge to keep record.

Not official record, necessarily. Not the kind stamped by the state, filed in a courthouse basement, or preserved in a museum by people who decided which lives counted enough to catalog.

I mean the smaller records. The intimate ones.

A family bible with names written in different inks & handwritings. A box of postcards from 1908 announcing a new house, a safe arrival, a birthday, a new job, a death. Notes that read, in their own way, like Victorian tweets. Brief, mundane, loving proof of life.

My late grandmother did analog Find-a-Grave work before most people would have called it that. Wherever she traveled, she took charcoal etchings of tombstones, preserving names & dates that weather & neglect were already trying to erase. Elsewhere in my family’s history there are old genealogical books, the kind with names like Contributions for the Genealogies of the First Settlers of the Ancient County of Albany from 1630 to 1800, trying to trace who belonged to whom, who went where, who endured long enough to become part of the story.

All of it points to the same impulse:

We were here.
We loved & were loved.
We belonged to one another.
Do not let us be lost.

Before the internet, people were always trying to outrun disappearance

Long before social media, people found ways to send themselves forward. Cave drawings may be the earliest example.

By letter. By telegram. By postcard. By church registry. By pressed flowers tucked between pages. By family trees recorded in margins. By word carried from manor to village to ship. By whatever the era allowed.

The technology changed. The longing did not.

The internet should have been the grandest expression of that longing ever created. At its best, it allowed ordinary people to record themselves without waiting for permission. It let people document their own lives, communities, lineages, griefs, joys, & political realities in real time. It gave us a way to root ourselves in where we are, where we have been, & where we hope to go. We literally called it LiveJournal.

Not just for the powerful.
For everybody.

No longer would just emperors & generals leave a trace.
Grandmothers. Cousins. Organizers. Teenagers. The person posting a blurry photo because they want somebody, somewhere, to know this happened.

The internet did not just give us information. It gave ordinary people a shot at permanence.

That should have changed everything.

Instead, we used a miracle to accelerate our worst instincts

Because here we are.

Living in the most documented age in human history, with more access to knowledge, memory, testimony, & warning than any civilization before us, & still watching people lurch toward climate collapse, Christian nationalism, authoritarianism, & war as if history were not already stacked floor to ceiling with cautionary tales.

We do not lack evidence.

We can see the planet changing in real time. We can watch fascism rebrand itself & spread with all the cheap confidence of a franchise operation. We can witness suffering as it happens, with footage, documents, firsthand testimony, satellite images, archived statements, leaked plans, livestreams, Signal chats & receipts on receipts on receipts.

And still, so many choose myth over memory.
Domination over survival.
Spectacle over stewardship.

We are more connected to one another, to history, & to the sum of human knowledge than people in prior centuries could have dreamed of, & yet nations still bicker over oil & gold while drones, like modern dragons, rain hell down on whoever has been designated expendable.

Military drones are modern realizations of dragons

It is grotesque.

Not because people do not know.
Because so often, they do know & proceed anyway.

This is not an information problem. It is a moral one.

That may be the bleakest realization of all.

People love to imagine that ignorance is the main obstacle, that if enough facts were available, enough archives digitized, enough testimonies published, enough evidence made searchable, then surely the truth would win on its own.

But access to truth & devotion to it are not the same thing.

Connection is not conscience.
Information is not wisdom.
An archive is not a moral framework.

You can place the full weight of human consequence in somebody’s hand & they can still scroll past it on their way to defending cruelty, rationalizing greed, or rebranding domination as tradition.

That is what this era has exposed.

Not just that technology can be weaponized. That part should surprise no one.
What shocks me more is how thoroughly connection has revealed character.

Who will look away.
Who will cash in.
Who will call brutality realism.
Who will wrap hierarchy in religion & call it order.
Who will insist that survival for all is too expensive, too inconvenient, too threatening to the people who already have the most.

Tools do not save us from ourselves. They only make us more legible to each other.

And still, the record matters

I do not think that means the whole project was a failure.

Because even now, in the middle of the algorithmic rot, the surveillance, the disinformation, the propaganda, & the flattening churn of the endless scroll, people are still using these tools for something better.

They are documenting what powerful people want denied.
They are preserving family histories that would otherwise disappear.
They are finding lost relatives, lost languages, lost graves, lost context.
They are teaching each other how to survive.
They are raising money for rent, medicine, funerals, & evacuation.
They are naming what is happening in plain language before institutions catch up, if they ever do.

They are leaving evidence.
They are leaving maps.
They are leaving breadcrumbs for the people who come after.

That matters.

It matters because memory has always been a form of resistance.
To record a life is to argue that it mattered.
To preserve truth in an age of spin is to refuse erasure.
To say this happened, this person existed, this was done to them, this is how we endured, is to push back against the machinery that depends on our forgetting.

Maybe this is what the internet really revealed

Maybe the tragedy is not that connection failed to save us.

Maybe it is that connection revealed us.

It showed, in brutal detail, how many people will choose comfort over truth, power over kinship, convenience over responsibility, fantasy over reality.

But it also revealed something else.

That many others will keep choosing differently.

They will document.
They will warn.
They will teach.
They will remember.
They will reach for each other anyway.

Even now.
Especially now.

And maybe that has always been the real dividing line, in every era, across every technology:

Not who had access to the record.
Who felt responsible to it.

We invented a miracle. The shame is not that it existed. The shame is how eagerly so many handed it over to arsonists.

The point is not to stop remembering. It is to remember on purpose.

If anything, this moment demands more intentional memory, not less.

More care with what we preserve.
More honesty about what we are witnessing.
More devotion to the fragile human details that keep lives from being flattened into statistics, propaganda, or debris.

The old postcards mattered.
The family bibles mattered.
The grave rubbings mattered.
The genealogy books mattered.

And the digital traces we leave now matter too.

The question is whether we will use them to deepen our humanity, or merely create a better organized record of how casually we abandoned it.

Anyway, that’s what rewatching Game of Thrones made me think to say tonight.

~AK