Every civilization eventually forgets what made it strong. Ours is forgetting faster than any before it — not because we lack memory, but because we’ve outsourced it to machines that do.
The web that once promised universal knowledge has become a patchwork of walled gardens and incompatible truths. The Splinternet isn’t coming; it’s here, and its side effect is cognitive decay.
The collective Ebbinghaus curve — the rate at which a population forgets — is now visible in everything from market reactions to politics. We are living inside a forgetting machine.
In the early days, the Internet was a cathedral of connection. That drove me to write my book Broken Web in 2012. Back then? Protocols were open, bandwidth was shared, and information wanted to be free.
That was the dream. But as every engineer knows, dreams get patched, monetized, and eventually fenced off. Each firewall, each algorithm, each national censorship node split the network’s once-coherent fabric.
We didn’t notice the fracture because the lights still came on — but the light was no longer the same everywhere. The Internet of things became the Internet of factions.
For investors, this fragmentation isn’t just cultural; it’s financial. The same Ebbinghaus law that measures how quickly we forget words now applies to market memory.
Traders forget so crashes happen faster. Consumers forget scarcity sooner. Corporations forget lessons learned about leverage and risk.
The result is volatility without conscience — capital chasing momentum through an amnesiac network that can’t remember yesterday’s mistake. In a world of accelerated forgetting, valuation becomes a hallucination shared by algorithms.
That’s where this week’s Peoplenomics report begins: at the intersection of systemic amnesia and digital fracture. This ain’t just another TA shop.
We map how the Splinternet undermines not just geopolitics but investment stability, how the “Ebbinghaus-Ure Effect” explains recurring cycles of risk blindness, and why the next crash may not be caused by war or debt — but by the sheer inability of markets to remember what coherence looked like.
The real danger isn’t disconnection; it’s forgetting what connection meant.
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