Dan Carlin says that history seems to compress events. That a civilization seems to be non existent and then everywhere. There is a point before which it is blurry and we cannot "remember" or accurately trace what the past human civilizations were up to. This perceptual delusion appears to exist in consciousness as well, where once you are conscious it seems to have always been.

This point is commonly agreed to be the partition between history and pre-history: the emergence of written records.

I say this is similar to consciousness because written records are our civilizational memory. When we can't recall our state of mind in the past, we tend to say that we were unconscious.

But what happens when we go from having memory to having perfect memory? In humans, the closest thing is hyperthymesia, a very rare condition. At least one person with such condition, Jill Price, seems to be "burdened" by the constant stream of memories, making it difficult to focus on the present or future.

Could that be how civilizational hyperthymesia looks like? We are certainly seeing some signs of it with the hyper focus on the bits of history that have video (e.g. World War 2).

However, it could also be a different form of historical consciousness. Future humans will perhaps look at pre-internet civilizations as archaic as we look at prehistorical humans.