["Global forgetting" and extreme communicative events]

The present essay describes the scientific evidence on the decay of memory and focus caused due to overstimulation by digital media - herein dubbed "global forgetting". The argument put forth is that this situation is not limited to individual psychoneurological aspects, but rather to contemporary sociocultural processes comprising and fed by convergent technical, political, and economic vectors. This paper addresses the ethicality of overstimulation through the use of powerful technical devices of communicative curation, which result in the erasure of references that constitute collective identity and facilitate the acceptance of disinformation. We conceive these dynamics of erasure and the destruction of references as a positive sociotechnical process - and not merely a casual consequence. We use the emblematic case of the "people's radio" in the rise of Nazism, showing how extreme communicative events operate through the opposition of anti-versions (historical/scientific denialism) underpinned by disinformation that incites hatred (conspiracy theories) and simplifies complex scenarios in the construction of post-truths. The ethicality of contemporary digital technologies is questioned, which simultaneously cultivate the emptying of individual and collective memory through "global forgetting" with the purpose of rewriting the past and mitigating the cognitive dissonance resulting from contradictions with facts. We thus reject the notion of fortuitous forgetting as a mere gap resulting from unlinked casual psychotechnical phenomena. In summary, we point to the interconnections among "global forgetting", denialism, and post-truths, which are interdependent in terms of causalities, purposes, and dynamics.