Rewriting God’s Move: Narrative Revisionism and the Memory Hole in Lee Sedol’s Memoir

Bae Incheol /June 20, 2026

Abstract
This paper presents a critical analysis of Lee Sedol's 2025 Memoir, published a decade after his historic match against AlphaGo.Unlike Garry Kasparov's Deep Thinking (2017),which seeks the truth behind defeat, Lee's narrative is characterized by‘narrative revisionism’and memory reconstruction designed to provide a post-hoc justification for a heroic myth.By retroactively framing Move 68 as a pre-planned gambit to justify the Divine Move (Move 78), Lee's account exemplifies the cognitive distortions Charan Ranganath warns against and instantiates the logic of the Orwellian memory hole. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of symbolic power, this study examines how Lee's authority as a dominant narrator neutralizes public critical distance and entrenches an unverified narrative. Ultimately, the paper argues that the replacement of criticism with myth leads to a profound intellectual poverty indiscourse on human-machine relations in the AI era and calls for a correction of this constructed and subversive narrative that has taken hold amid collective social silence.

Keywords: Lee Sedol, AlphaGo, narrative revisionism, bug-triggering theory, memory hole