Memory as History

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Memory as History records what was said, what evidence supports a claim, and how adopted judgments change. It provides a SQLite-backed MCP server with explicit consolidation, source checks, revisions, narrative versions and forgetting.

Why history, and not just memory

An assistant I’d been working with for months told me something about my own project, stated plainly, as fact. I asked where it got that. It couldn’t tell me. There was nothing to tell: what it had kept was a sentence that scored high enough to survive. Who said it, what it was supposed to support, whether anything had contradicted it since — none of that had been kept, because none of that was what the scoring was about.

I don’t think this is a bug in any particular system. Importance weights, recency decay, embedding similarity — they are all answers to “what should I keep?” I wanted an answer to a different question: why do I believe this, and what would make me stop.

That question isn’t about storage, and I got nowhere with it reading about memory in software. Where I did get somewhere was in historiography, which has spent a century on a worse version of the same problem.

The historians had it harder

A historian’s material is fragmentary, written by people with stakes, copied from other copies, and impossible to follow up on because the witnesses are dead. Nobody gets to re-run the query. And yet the discipline produces accounts you can argue with and correct — not by finding better sources, but by building a method around bad ones.

Marc Bloch wrote Apologie pour l’histoire in hiding, from memory, before the Gestapo shot him in 1944. It’s an unfinished book about craft, and the part that stuck with me is his insistence on splitting a question most people collapse: whether a document really comes from where it claims, and whether what it says is true. Those are separate investigations. He also points out that testimony which agrees almost word for word usually means one source copied three times, not three witnesses — which is, unfortunately, exactly what a scraped web page looks like.

Then there’s the part I almost missed. Trouillot’s Silencing the Past argues that the gaps in a record are produced, not accidental: something wasn’t written down, wasn’t kept, wasn’t narrated. So “no record of objection” is not “everyone agreed.” An agent that can’t distinguish those two will keep confidently reporting consensus that never existed.