Poetics of Virtual Space

Although I have many issues with Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, he does have some interesting insights into the house as a daydream space, which is both realized by the author and also realizes the author in a reifying movement. Bachelard is referring to the childhood space (in a very limiting manner by the way) as a secure, safe place which is seen always in a positive light (apparently he had a really happy childhood). However, this daydream that is both made by and makes the human agent sounds a lot like Kate Hayles theory of Informatics. Essentially it is a recursive feedback loop only instead of the loop coming between a computer and a human, the loop finds itself in memories. Bachelard applies this idea to memory space, which isn’t all that different from a digital feedback loop.
However, a large part of the digital feedback loop deals in reproduction without destruction—or how a digital image can be reproduced infinitely without limitations (essentially). Can memories do the same thing? If a memory is altered, doesn’t it destroy the original, making the new memory the genuine? That seems to put a giant knife through the heart of human agency as a form of the genuine, or essentially it makes us postmodern.
So what if we apply Bachelard’s idea of the memory to a computer. A computer can replace the original item with a new one, but it can also hold both simultaneously. It’s history, say in the cache files or your browser history, can also be manually changed through the code, wiping what one could call the genuine history out of reality. A skilled hacker would leave no traces of a coding change, which automatically calls into question the computer’s hold on what is “true” even within its own programming.
I don’t have a lot of answers here, but I found Bachelard’s memory loop toward agency something worth appropriating and overlaying on the digital realm. If computer memories are so easily alterable, then so are human memories according to Informatics. However, if those memories actually reify who we are as humans, then the ability to change memories takes on a very immediate concern. When we toy with our computers, we are really toying with ourselves. Perhaps we should have more respect for what we do with our computers, respect for our own agency, not only with words or images, but actual physical alterations. Or we can just keep downloading porn.