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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reached memory studies in earnest. This partly reflects the hype around recent developments in generative AI (genAI), machine learning, and large language models (LLMs). But how can memory studies scholars handle this hype? Focusing on genAI applications, in particular so-called ‘chatbots’ (transformer-based instruction-tuned text generators), this commentary highlights five areas of critique that can help memory scholars to critically interrogate AI’s implications for their field. These are: (1) historical critiques that complicate AI’s common historical narrative and historicize genAI; (2) technical critiques that highlight how genAI applications are designed and function; (3) praxis critiques that centre on how people use genAI; (4) geopolitical critiques that recognize how international power dynamics shape the uneven global distribution of genAI and its consequences; and (5) environmental critiques that foreground genAI’s ecological impact. For each area, we highlight debates and themes that we argue should be central to the ongoing study of genAI and memory. We do this from an interdisciplinary perspective that combines our knowledge of digital sociology, media studies, literary and cultural studies, cognitive psychology, and communication and computer science. We conclude with a methodological provocation and by reflecting on our own role in the hype we are seeking to dispel.

This article explores how “the left” meme and the character and emotional reception of taboo-breaking therein via the case of r/DankLeft—a USA-centric Marxist, Anarchist, and Democratic Socialist Internet meme community. It asks: what themes do popular r/DankLeft Internet memes relate to, how does taboo feature within popular r/DankLeft Internet memes, and can any differences in the ways in which taboo-related r/DankLeft Internet memes are received be discerned. In turn, it carries out a thematic analysis of 366 popular memes, a multimodal critical discourse analysis of 41 taboo-related popular memes, and a comparative sentiment analysis of the comments these and other memes have received in r/DankLeft. The article finds that popular memes in r/DankLeft primarily relate to perceived threats to its community of users. It also shows that taboo-breaking does feature in r/DankLeft memes and that when it does correlative patterns emerge in terms of popularity and emotional reception.

In this article we explore the extent of the digital connectivity and character of the mediated solidarity discernible between a selection of militant antifascist groups in the USA and UK on Twitter. By studying the geographical scalarity of the retweet practices of six case study groups in these two countries (from New York City, Philadelphia, Portland, Brighton, Liverpool, and London) and the content of a sub-sample of these groups’ retweets we highlight that their Twitter connectivity is relatively limited. We also suggest that the sorts of mediated solidarity, or as we specifically refer to it here ‘retweet solidarity’, that this connectivity reflects is rather shallow. As such the article’s broader contributions relate to firstly the need for studies of digital connectivity within social movements that do not preemptively assume that translocal or transnational activism is an automatic by-product of social media use, and secondly the necessity to continue problematizing the idea of solidarity in digital contexts.

This editorial introduces the 12 articles collected in this special issue on Remembering Activism: Explorations in the memory-activism nexus. It frames the articles within current debates in the field of memory studies and social movement studies on the entanglements between memory work, on the one hand, and activism directed towards social transformation, on the other. In particular, it highlights the ways in which the memory of earlier activism is mobilised within later movements; in the process, it also identifies various forms of activist memory work where remembrance is an integral part of the activist repertoire and one of the means used to achieve political ends.

Departing from personal memories of protests in London and Berlin, in this article I make space within the memory-activism nexus to consider how contemporary activists are remembered by that which they conventionally target: the state. To do this, I first recount existing understandings of that nexus and the position of the state therein. I then emphasise how states remember activists via police surveillance databases before discussing the digital activist traces held in such databases via the concept of mediated prospective memory. Thereafter, I empirically ground these conceptual contributions via a discussion of the surveillance databases used in the United Kingdom and Germany and the growing adoption of automated facial recognition technology in these countries. This discussion relies on the work of police monitoring groups whose activism contributes, alongside the various actions of the state and its agencies that I foreground, to the complexity of the memory-activism nexus.

As LEGO was being introduced to West Germany in the mid-1950s, similar plastic construction toy systems started to be produced in East Germany by companies including PEBE. While these companies no longer exist, their products remain part of the material culture of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Subsequently, and like many other GDR products, they have engendered specifically East German forms of nostalgia otherwise referred to as ‘Ostalgie’ (a portmanteau of the German words for east (ost) and nostalgia (nostalgie)) or, in its anglicised form, ostalgia. Adopting a contemporary archaeological perspective, this chapter draws on the notion of object itineraries in order to trace and track these companies and their products across time and thus explore the material and mediatised forms of (n)ostalgia that circulate around the remnant plastic building blocks of GDR state socialism. First it traces the history of PEBE but also that of another company PLASTECK (later FORMO) and their products. Secondly it discusses the politics of play surrounding these products initially as toys that contributed to the socialisation of children in the GDR and then later as heritage and material foci of ostalgia which indexed political distinctions between East and West Germany. Thirdly it follows these companies and their products onto social media in order to track the forms of mediatised (n)ostalgia and autobiographical memory that are starting to circulate around them online.

Composed of a foreword, introduction and six parts (each with their own introductory discussion) and, in total, 78 individual short essays involving 91 contributors, The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism is without doubt the broadest discussion of memory activism to date. For the organisational feats needed to bring such a publication to completion, its editors and their supporting team of section editors should be congratulated. Reviewing such a wide-ranging handbook comes with challenges. I have read about a third of it including essays from each of its parts and in time I will read much more. My review cannot reflect on each of the well-written and researched essays (although I mention some). Instead, it discusses what the handbook conveys about the current state of memory activism research more generally. It also prioritises my own current research interests, not least those regarding the place of the state within the manifold connections between memory and activism.