The Vanishing Point

What if the data that bankrupts strategy is the data you literally can't keep in mind?

The Space Where Memory Should Be

Mission Control, January 17, 2003. An engineer points at a blur on the screen. Foam from the external tank hitting Columbia's wing. They note it. They discuss it. They file it.

Sixteen days later, Columbia breaks apart over Texas.

That gap between seeing and disaster stays with me. Not because someone failed to act. Because the memory never formed. The foam strike was documented, entered into records. But it never became knowledge that could change decisions. Never became knowledge that could save lives.

This happens in every boardroom, every risk committee, every strategic review. Things get seen but never quite remembered. Knowledge exists but doesn't exist. Organizations develop ways of unseeing what they've already seen.

The Presence of Absence

How do you know what you've forgotten?

Not simple things like names or why you walked into a room. I mean this: How does an organization know what it no longer knows?

Memory carries what philosophers call "the presence of absence." We don't just forget things. We carry the ghost of what we've forgotten. A void that shapes us as much as what we remember.

You know the feeling. Sometimes you sense you're forgetting something important. You can't name it. If you could, you wouldn't have forgotten it. But your mind detects its own gap.

An organization with thousands of people, decades of history, terabytes of data. What voids does it carry? What absences shape every meeting?

It has no way to know.

Your brain can sometimes detect its own gaps. Organizational memory is scattered across minds, systems, processes. When it forgets, no single part feels the absence. The void distributes itself until no one carries enough of it to notice.

NASA didn't forget about foam strikes like you forget a phone number. The information was there. Databases, reports, engineers' minds. But it didn't become institutional memory. It existed in limbo. Known but not remembered. Documented but not alive.

Take Wells Fargo in 2016. For years, employees opened unauthorized accounts. Ethics hotlines documented it. Exit interviews mentioned it. Data showed anomalies. But the knowledge wouldn't stick. Each signal dissolved before forming a pattern.

That absence shaped everything. Every sales meeting that didn't question quotas. Every audit that missed the right questions. Every presentation showing only growth. The missing knowledge bent decisions around itself.

There's an ethical weight here that's easy to miss. When organizations develop ways of not-seeing, they fail not just in knowing but in responding. Each warning, each anomaly, each signal asks to be seen. Demands response. The forgetting that prevents learning from the past also prevents responsibility for the future. The employees who suffered under Wells Fargo's sales culture, the families who lost astronauts on Columbia. Organizational forgetting has human cost.

The Antimemetic Organization

Some knowledge literally can't survive in your organization. You'll never know what's missing.

In 2008, writer Sam Hughes imagined "antimemes" for a horror fiction series. Ideas that resist being known. Concepts that evade memory by their nature. Not hidden secrets. Knowledge that hides itself.

Hughes wrote fiction. But apply this to organizations and it clicks. Organizations constantly generate knowledge that evaporates on contact with collective consciousness. Not because anyone suppresses it. Because certain information is incompatible with how we've built our systems for knowing.

Organizational memory is designed for efficiency, clarity, action. Dashboards with green and red lights. Reports with clear recommendations. Systems that surface signals and filter noise.

But what about knowledge that doesn't fit? The pattern visible only across silos? The risk that shows up as drift, not spike?

This is antimemetic knowledge. Information that organizational systems reject because they can't digest it. Here's why certain knowledge can't stick:

Stories beat specifics. Organizations make sense through narrative. Beginning, middle, end. But some knowledge won't fit narrative shapes. Seventy-nine foam strikes before Columbia weren't a story. They were scattered data points, each explained away individually, forming a pattern too subtle for narrative.

Category problems. Anthropologist Mary Douglas showed that "dirt" is just "matter out of place." Stuff that doesn't fit our categories. Antimemetic knowledge is cognitive dirt. It lives between categories. Impossible to process, so impossible to remember.

No owner. Memory is social. We remember through others, with others. But antimemetic knowledge often lacks ownership. When knowledge belongs to everyone and no one, it disappears.

Convenient forgetting. Organizations unconsciously forget information that would be costly to remember. Truly remembering certain risks might mean questioning the entire business model. The knowledge isn't suppressed. It just can't overcome institutional inertia.

This isn't rare. Your organization is swimming in information its architecture can't process. This knowledge exists in your systems right now. Your organization can't see it. Not won't. Can't.

The Recursive Abyss

Organizations don't just forget. They forget that they forget. They lose track of losing track.

I call this recursive forgetting:

Level 1: An organization fails to retain knowledge. Risks are noted but don't become memory.

Level 2: The organization forgets it once knew this. The original concern fades completely.

Level 3: The organization forgets it can forget like this. It loses awareness of its own limits.

Each level makes the problem worse. At Level 3, organizations exist in memorial unconsciousness. Unaware of their unawareness. Blind to their blindness.

A consultant told me about a bank that survived 2008 through conservative risk management. By 2015, they wanted to understand their "excessive risk aversion." They hired her to investigate.

"I found recursive forgetting," she said. "They'd forgotten the close calls that created their risk protocols. Forgotten these were responses to danger. Forgotten they'd ever been less conservative. Forgotten their conservatism was learned, not inherent."

"They were trying to fix what saved them. But they couldn't see it because they'd forgotten the forgetting."

This is the deeper problem. Not just amnesia but being unable to recognize your own deficits. The organization thinks its memory works fine. It doesn't remember it working differently.

How can you learn from mistakes you don't remember making?

You can't.

And you don't know you can't.

The Architecture of Absence

Organizational memory is distributed across multiple systems. Each has its own way of forgetting:

The real problem? These layers don't connect. The database doesn't inform the culture. Social networks don't update formal procedures. Individual knowledge doesn't become collective wisdom.

This creates gaps where knowledge falls and disappears. The organization acts differently because of what it's forgotten, even though it can't name what's missing.

What Forgetting Feels Like

What's it like being in an organization that's forgetting something crucial?

Usually? Nothing.

That's the problem. Antimemetic knowledge doesn't announce its absence.

But sometimes you sense it. Employees describe it:

"Like trying to remember a dream. You know something was important, but it keeps slipping away."

"We have the same conversations. Not similar. Identical. Nobody notices but me."

"I'll search for something I know we documented. Can't find it. Months later it appears exactly where I looked. We've already repeated the mistake."

You might recognize these feelings:

• The discomfort when everyone agrees too quickly
• The "unexpected" crisis that keeps happening
• The detailed report everyone mentions but nobody's read
• The sense your organization once knew how to handle this

This is life inside an organization with antimemetic knowledge. Constant, low-level dissonance. Swimming through fog no one admits is there.

The Cruel Paradox of Documentation

We live in the most documented age in history. Every email archived. Every meeting recorded. Every decision tracked. Yet organizational forgetting seems worse than ever.

Information isn't memory. Information is data points. Memory is the connective tissue that gives them meaning. More logs don't mean more insight. They often mean more noise.

The distinction that matters is between retrieval and recognition. Systems can retrieve. Search the archive, surface the document, return the result. But only humans can recognize significance. Only humans can look at a data point and understand that this is the thing that matters, this is the pattern we've seen before, this is the warning we need to heed.

When organizations confuse documentation with memory, they create what I call "write-only memory." Archives where information enters but never returns in usable form. Knowledge preserved while being forgotten.

These archives create false security. "It's all in the system," we say. But the system can't recognize. It can only retrieve. And retrieval without recognition is just noise with better indexing.

In the Space Between

So where does this leave us? If organizations naturally forget, if some knowledge is inherently antimemetic, if forgetting compounds itself, is there hope?

I don't have easy answers. The problem runs deeper than better databases or knowledge systems. It's built into how groups of humans try to know things together.

But recognizing the phenomenon matters. You can't address what you don't know exists. Most organizations don't know they're forgetting. Can't know. Because they've forgotten they can forget.

The NASA engineers who worried about Columbia's foam strike weren't ignored. They were heard. Acknowledged. Then the knowledge entered that twilight zone. Present but not present. Known but not remembered.

What would have had to be different? Not more documentation. There was plenty. Not more meetings. They had those. Something about how the organization held knowledge would have had to change. Something about the architecture of attention itself.

Somewhere in your organization, right now, similar knowledge is forming and failing to form. Signals are being seen and unseeing themselves. Warnings are being filed in systems designed for storage, not recognition.

We can't eliminate that vanishing point where organizational knowledge disappears. But we might learn to see it. And seeing it is the first step toward building organizations that can hold what they know.