Tactical Forgetting
The bot cleans up information after users, tactically covering traces in a neighbourhood chat. These chats appeared as a response to the impossibility of centralised resistance during the revolutionary situation in Belarus in 2020–2021. Using the map, you can find your yard—a place of meeting and struggle, between several open residential blocks that can easily be walked through—and join the discussion on collective actions with other chat participants just like you. Here, the information is temporary; this is not a place for archiving. If you do not make it in time, you will not see it. The temporality that emerges from neighbourhood chats continually re-actualises the present, offering participation in the here and now.
I open a chat that I haven’t looked at for a week and think about how to quickly scroll through all these messages and avoid getting get stuck in past conflicts and logistical arrangements of the day before yesterday. A moment, and the chat interface will refresh on its own. Messages are automatically deleted. Parts of the chat interface that you ‘fly through’ while moving between locations begin to move at an inhuman speed, rushing past me like blurred spots in 3D photograms. April 14th. Then May 18th. And between them there is emptiness. Only dates are stuck in the interface. This is automated tactical forgetting. All that remains are the unsynchronised bodies that only remember a few messages; cached memories in the bodies of those who look, read, observe, write and act based on this unsynchronised thin layer of the present.
The technical impossibility of being led by the fear of missing out is a liberating impossibility. An archive interface that cannot be viewed is scrolled through as a transit zone. At that moment, there is a pleasure to be found in the fact that there are many interesting things ahead and there is no need to rake over past troubles. All you need now is inside pinned messages. (eeefff)