Michael Haneke, the German director of really great films like Cache, The Piano Player, and Code Unknown, made a comment in an interview with the German magazine Zeit that "Market forces are erasing our cultural memory." I just watched the absurdly beautiful Kar Wai Wong's 2046 , the theme being a man in search of lost memories, and it really threw me for a loop because it does seem that modern Capatalism and our appetite for what it provides, is destroying, or erasing, parts of our memory that require, as Hanake puts it, "more effort." In 2046, the Protagonist never stops trying to remember even as it seems always just out of his reach. This is an important question here so let me take a giant leap. Could it be that tribal jihad (terrorism) is also a  fight to preserve socio-political memory against Global Capatalism? Hmm..might be too early for questions of this nature. Too much caffeine..