utensil birds

We find, moreover, that the new nostalgia is a symptom of the
death of history. The more we learn about the present, about
humanity's perception and interpretation of the present, the more
suspect history becomes. When Fuller remarks that our most
polluted resource is the "tactical information" (news) to which
humanity spontaneously reflexes, he echoes Hermann Hesse's view
that "history's third dimension is always fiction." The present has
discredited the past, while the history of the present is recorded by
machines, not "written" by men, and is thus out of our hands as a
"man-made" phenomenon. "The computer," says McLuhan, "abolishes
the human past by making it entirely present." We don't "remember"
the assassination of John F. Kennedy because we never
experienced it directly in the first place. For millions of people who
were not actually present in Dallas, Kennedy's death exists only in
the endless technologically-sustained present. We "remember" it in
the same way that we first "knew" it—through the media—and we
can experience it again each time the videotapes are played. Since
we see and hear and feel only the conditioning of our own memory,
a great flood of nostalgia is generated when technology erases the
past and with it our self-image.