Facebook’s ‘On This Day’ wants to rewire your relationship to the past. Here’s why that’s strange.

[Commentary] The Internet is obsessed with the now, the new, the “trending”: It takes only minutes for Facebook posts to fall out of our News Feeds or for tweets to disappear into the past. (On the ephemeral messaging app Snapchat, it takes even less time than that.) We are frantic with the pulse of the present; we are pummeled by the thunderous, unending cascade of breaking news. And because that’s stressful and unpleasant and overwhelming, and one of the primary reasons people start floating phrases like “digital detox,” tech companies have sought to manufacture a solution to a problem that they themselves created: They want to return your sense of the past. “Facebook’s emphasis upon memory, both personal and collective, allows for an escape from history and, therefore, linearity, order and narrative,” the media scholar Joanne Garde-Hansen once wrote. Maybe “On This Day” is an attempt to restore that narrative -- but it’s a narrative that Facebook itself broke.