“We’re all cyborgs now,” the anthropologist Amber Case said in a TED talk in 2010.

Our devices allow us to compress time and space in a way that we’re able to mentally transport ourselves between planes of existence with the touch of a button. (Or, rather, a digital rendering of a button.)

This is the dilemma of being a cyborg: it’s that we’re collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data.

We’ve outsourced our memories to external devices, said science journalist Joshua Foer. “The result is that we no longer trust our memories. We see every small, forgotten thing as evidence that they’re failing us altogether.” As we store more and more of what makes us us outside of ourselves, “we’ve forgotten how to remember.”