Even something as intimate and personal as memory cannot escape the reach of social media and their datafied and circulatory logic. In this book we have explored the underlying processes that enable the selection and targeting of past content in the form of repackaged ‘memories’. Here we have highlighted the way that classification and ranking operate together to enable memories to resurface on social media throwback features. Through the combination of classification and ranking, the automated production and delivery of socalled ‘memories’ means that social media users do not need to dig; they are not excavating, as Walter Benjamin suggested, but instead that excavation is being done on their behalf. Benjamin noted that memories were always a way of mediating the masses of past experiences; this has not changed. These automated systems of social media remediate those memories through the classificatory systems that group them and then prioritize them, making them visible or invisible to us, and shaping how individuals and groups participate in those memories. Because, as Benjamin pointed out, memories have always been a mediation of the past, they can readily be reworked by these automated systems. As we have seen though, one problem with the automatic production of memory is authenticity. It is the act of producing memories that lends them authenticity; if that work becomes automated then potential tensions emerge around the legitimacy of that memory.

‘The promise of automation’, writes Mark Andrejevic (2020: 13), ‘is to encode the social so that it can be offloaded onto machines.’ In order to see the consequences this will have for memory and remembering, we suggest that there is a need to better understand the underlying classification and prioritization processes, what they are intended to do, as well as what implications and outcomes they have for people in everyday life. As a result, this book has sought to make a specific intervention into the automatic production of memory. Our contribution here has been to examine the role played by classification and ranking within these processes of automation. Once memories are opened up to classification and ranking, then the memories themselves will change, but so too will our understanding of what memories are. The concept of memory is unlikely to go untouched by these developments – indeed, we have sought to foreground the tensions that these processes of redefinition are already creating through features such as Facebook Memory.