Dear Reader,

I’ve been thinking a lot about damnatio memoriae. In the ancient world, if the wrong person was mad at you, they’d scratch your name from the history books. This mostly involved chiseling chunks from stone inscriptions and blotting out faces from statues and murals, and the whole process kind of reminds me of that Chris Rock joke about how bullets should be really expensive—erasing people from history sounds like a lot of work and hardly worth the effort. Damnatio memoriae remains everpresent in the modern era, but we no longer strike from tombs or tondos the names of those consigned to be forgotten. Too little now is writ in stone, and too few of us have chisels. Instead, we purge them from virtual machines in the depths of data centers, erasing bits through lines of code. We choose not to speak their names.

Such acts of intentional forgetting occur again and again. A few years ago there was a terrible stabbing in Southport, England. The perpetrator had, as a child, appeared in a BBC advert that the news service scrubbed from their platforms after his crimes. My advisor’s newest book Everyday Ecofascism opens with a discussion on the racist 2019 mass murder of mostly Latino shoppers at an El Paso Walmart but refuses to name the shooter. And a very well-known actor was famously removed from the 2017 film All the Money in the World after numerous sexual misconduct allegations surfaced. They reshot all of his scenes with another actor at a cost of ten million dollars. Is it overly dramatic to think of these as a condemnation of memory—the chiseling of names from our digital stones? These are people who should remain unnamed, but there is plenty of scholarship out there on the weaponization of forgetting as a colonial, often racist act. Archives are intentional creations, and “what history remembers” often emerges through the hegemonic criteria of inclusion and exclusion in those archives. But I can’t help but think about how AI fraud acts as its own little damnatio memoriae.

Forgetting is an action we take against others, but we may also do it to ourselves. And if selling fiction or poetry to small SFF presses is, in some tiny way, the act of inscribing your name on the stones of history, of adding yourself to the long and ceaseless ledgers of eternity, then publishing fake stories under fake names becomes an act of forgetting in itself. The firehose scammers that spray their slop at every open call are a nuisance, but I can almost understand them. Their fraud is simple theft. It’s the handful of others who are actively trying to build a name and reputation in the industry through AI-generated submissions that instead shock me. This is a fraud in spirit. They say Oh, remember me, but please not the real me. And in some ways, that fraud will keep them safe. They can never face the condemnation of their memory, their own damnatio memoriae, because they were never real in the first place. You cannot exorcise the ghost of something that has never lived.

Think about it, dear reader, and thank you, as always, for reading,

Leon

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Leon Perniciaro, Editor
Haven Spec Magazine

© 2026 Leon Perniciaro