Was this essay forwarded to you? Join for Free Here

Super Man Helps Every One. Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, Ontario.

Or maybe this one resonates…My Very Energetic Mother Just Sat Upon Nine Pizzas. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.

I wrote both of those from memory. Like many, I learned those mnemonic devices as a kid to help me better remember the geography of the Great Lakes and the order of planets in our solar system. And they have stuck with me all of these years.

It’s hard to rewrite memory, but not impossible. But memory only lives as long as a person can recall it. Then it’s subject to being overwritten for future generations.

Last February, I was flying down to the Caribbean with my family and I pulled up the aerial map on the seatback display. The news had just broken: the Gulf of Mexico was set to become the Gulf of America.

On the way down to vacation, the map read the Gulf of Mexico. On the way back, days later, it read the Gulf of America. And I’m sure if I was flying over the Great Lakes last month, I would have had a similar experience since it was declared that Lake Ontario should be henceforth known as Lake America.

It’s amazing how one edict or decree can so quickly change everything.

Last year, 71% of Americans opposed renaming the Gulf in a Marquette Law School poll. The remaining 29% favored it. Among independents, 16% favored it and 82% opposed (Marquette Law School Poll, 2025). The majority disapproved.

I want to focus on the sheer speed at which a decision can be made and how, now, with technology, everything we have is rewritten almost instantly. This is not a debate over opinions for or against renaming landmarks. Technology and power have allowed this acceleration to occur at a faster pace than ever in history.

Renaming something isn't novel to this administration. Name changes are part of life. They’ve often been used to celebrate or to create momentous occasions. Traditionally, in Western culture, a woman takes her husband’s family name, although that’s changing rapidly. A college building is named after a wealthy donor. A fountain out front gets named for a prolific professor. Usually, there's a committee, a process, and ultimately some pomp and circumstance.

But with technology, we are experiencing accelerated changes that have massive implications. Within weeks of the renaming of the Gulf last year, the EPA, the FAA, NOAA, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Bing, Britannica, Rand McNally, BP, and Chevron had all changed the names in their respective platforms. Similar speeds were noticed with Apple and Google and other mapping authorities with the Lake’s name change just a few weeks ago.

However, after the executive order to change the name of the Gulf in 2025, some changes occurred, dare I say, retroactively. The EPA’s enforcement page for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster now reads “Deepwater Horizon – BP Gulf of America Oil Spill” (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, n.d.). Eleven men died on that rig.

I want to be careful here. While that’s not exactly rewriting the narrative of the historical event itself, it does rewrite the name of a historical moment. That should give everyone pause.

Fort Bragg is less than an hour and a half from my house, and sits halfway between my house and the beach. In 2023, we were driving and literally saw workers taking down the green metal “Fort Bragg” exit sign and putting up the new sign with “Fort Liberty” shining in reflective white letters. Then just last fall, driving westbound on I-40, signs for Fort Bragg were back. Three iterations in three years.

What’s fascinating is that most people don’t know who Bragg was. Or that the pre-2023 Bragg was actually a different Bragg than the post-2025 Bragg. To appease the naysayers, the “naming committee” chose a different Bragg. Braxton Bragg, the Confederate general, became Roland Bragg, a private who fought at the Battle of the Bulge (U.S. Army, 2025). Nobody blatantly deleted the first name. They wrote over it.

Not every change comes down from the top.

Last fall I wrote about six-seven, the nonsense phrase Gen Alpha spread through carpools and recess and classrooms. Nobody legislated that one. Nobody could stop it either. I went so far out of my way to avoid saying those two numbers in sequence that I stopped counting out loud. I’d stop at six, say something in between, and move to seven. Literally rewriting mathematical counting.

But not everything goes “viral” like six-seven, and not everything is mandated like a body of water name-change. Some words move slower. I ran into the slower evolution of language a few weeks ago, reading The Chronicles of Narnia to my kids. In The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis uses the word “queer,” a lot. He means odd. He wrote it in 1955 England, and that is simply what the word meant. I was line editing on the fly as I read, because we were already half an hour past bedtime and I was not about to open a conversation about defining an unknown word, let alone giving a history lesson. Words evolve and change, and that’s fine. It’s part of linguistic evolution.

We’ve seen other grassroots linguistic changes like master bedroom becoming primary suite. Homeless becoming unhoused (which is eerily similar to Orwell’s bad becoming ungood). Those are absolutely bottom-up, and then institutions adopt them and rewrite modern-day language. The Houston Association of Realtors dropped “master” in June 2020 (Houston Chronicle, 2020), and the listing sites followed.

And it’s not just politics. It’s the Real Estate Association. It’s activist groups that reclassify groups of people. In my lifetime, I’ve watched phrasing migrate from “Indians” to “Native Americans” to “Indigenous people,” a shift activists began pressing for in the 1960s, and that kept moving through the end of the century (Britannica, n.d.-b). We are constantly rewriting the vocabulary. It is just becoming faster and faster and faster, and more widespread. And technology is making it evolve faster than human memory can keep up.

We’re living in a digital age where it’s so simple to change something and have massive scale and impact. Not just today, but tomorrow, and yesterday as well.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Persian empire had the fastest communication system on earth at that time. Herodotus described a relay of mounted couriers stationed a day’s ride apart, handing messages down the Royal Road like a torch race, and he wrote that “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness of night” stopped them (Herodotus, Histories 8.98). That road ran roughly 1,500 miles from Sardis to Susa. Normal travel took about 3 months. The mounted couriers did it in 9 days (Britannica, n.d.-a).

There was a road built and maintained for the purpose of communication, relay stations lining the whole way, horses and riders posted at every one of them so a king could be heard at the far edge of what he ruled. But that message took more than a week, and likely any changes or actions as a result of that decree took even longer.

Alaska spent 40 years petitioning to rename one mountain, and it finally took a Cabinet secretary to do it (U.S. Department of the Interior, 2015). The order renaming the Gulf gave the Secretary of the Interior 30 days. So did the order signed this August renaming Lake Ontario (The White House, 2026).

That’s the Velocity Gap. One person with an edict, another person rewriting a database, and hundreds of millions of users get the change instantly. Google Maps passed two billion monthly users in 2024 (Alphabet, 2024). It literally takes one person to retype how that’s defined.

And it isn’t only speed. It’s scale.

It’s no longer the AAA maps that were already printed and would be continued to be distributed until that batch ran out. And it’s not like the TomTom or the Garmin, where you had to hook it up to your computer and get the latest CD-ROM with the newest maps on it. No, this is instant everywhere. In the air on the seatback monitor, in my car navigation system, and on my phone.

Orwell’s Party had a slogan for it. “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” (Orwell, 1949).

Somebody somewhere decided to name Fort Bragg Fort Bragg, and generations called it Fort Bragg. Even when it was legally Fort Liberty, people still called it Fort Bragg. People still say Gulf of Mexico. Canadians are still saying Lake Ontario, and their officials have said flatly that it isn’t changing (CBC News, 2026).

No matter what level of Newspeak there is, there is still some distant memory. But when everything moves digital, those physical remnants become harder and harder to retain, which makes it easier and easier to change things for the future.

Technology has enabled frictionless change, not only to the future, but to the past.

I’ll probably always call it Lake Ontario. After Super Man Helps Every One.

And My Very Energetic Mother Just Sat Upon Nine Pizzas. And Pluto, you will always have a place in my heart because you can’t leave out the pizzas, otherwise the sentence doesn’t make sense. 😉