Man’s greatest natural deterrent, besides me I suppose, is the red notification atop the email app. She looms over our inbox, growing stronger and stronger each day, while my own will or ability to engage diminishes. This ballooning number functionally renders all forms of email communication obsolete, and as we progress further and further into the digital age we see this commonality across various platforms.
When I first got my email account I really did feel like those early Internet ads. You know the ones, three 90s kids straight out of a Gap commercial and the deepest computer monitor you’d ever seen. It’s center part city— we used to be a proper country. If I had to describe myself at the time I would say I was a very cool dog wearing sunglasses and a backwards cap on a skateboard. I believe the term I’d use at the time was rad. And email was just that. My first account (one that I still have today) allowed me unfettered connection to my close friends and cousins. This may sound quite commonplace now, with the advent of connect ability services like Snapchat and FaceTime, but in 2005 the novelty of the internet was still absolutely rocking my shit.
As technology and the internet became more intertwined with our lives I saw various other communication platforms rise and fall. My classmates and I jumped from AIM to Facebook to Instagram to Tumblr and so on. We felt more connected than ever before, all the while creating a digital footprint that more closely resembled a mountain of unsorted laundry.
Growing up I was lucky to have a family that loved home videos. There were tapes and tapes dedicated to our first steps and birthdays. My mother brought her point-and-shoot camera to every function and worked tirelessly to print and store our most important memories. One would think with the capabilities of our phones and modern storage solutions that personal archival must be in its renaissance. But, as I wade through the 536 emails I received this morning I realize the glut of data we receive may be more akin to a digital dark age.
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Think of the storage on your first device, perhaps it was a small MP3 player or an iPod. Try to place yourself back in the mindset of early data storage, before the advent of things like “the cloud” or terabyte external hard drives. The first iPod I had only could hold 8 GB of data. I remember at the time feeling that if I only had a few more gigabytes (a word that had only just come into my consciousness, and which still eludes me to this day) that I would be fine. I remember going through and deleting mass swathes of videos and apps just to free up some room for Temple Run. At the time it felt like a fair trade-off. I now have a phone with 256 GB of storage (don’t ask me to do the math on that one, I had to delete the calculator app on my phone to make room for a TikTok video) and even still I find myself needing to constantly free up space.
I used to eye roll and the neo-hipster zealots who proclaimed, “We should be printing out our photos more,” or, “We need to be writing each other letters,” as if it was a new thought. It reeked of “get off my lawn energy,”and so I blatantly flew in their faces, and supported as many new tech ventures as possible. Why print a single photo when you could instead upload your entire photo album to a photo book printing service for only $19.99 a month? Why buy a CD when you could have endless access to nearly every song imaginable through streaming? Why curate or collect your physical media when you could instead pay a monthly service fee to have a sexy Silicon Valley startup do it for you instead?
Their sentiment used to drive me buck wild, like a fundamental misunderstanding of what a phone was used for. My iPhone, I thought, was just used for frivolities, and besides, all my best images are already shared to Instagram (and at one time Facebook, but let’s just keep that between us girls.)
But I believe the medium is beginning to make the message a bit too fiercely. Instead of photos as keepsakes they act as digital tokens of personal value, instead of home videos as reminders we create content for an algorithm with hopes of one day, I don’t know what—monetizing our memories? The content itself— what once we might have called mementos— has become just another aesthetic facet of our online personas. What once was just a meaningless iPhone photo has become the last vestiges of our life in reality, one which we immediately upload to a faceless server.
A server which we now know is scraping our content to best market to us or in some cases simply stealing images to create their own AI replacements. With burgeoning technologies like AI and Web3, I am starting to feel the internet is a slightly less rad place than it used to be.
I remember first hearing about NFTs. In the same breathe I was told that this digital asset was somehow bad for the environment and contributed to global warming. Now I am no expert on this type of thing, and I am sure the Crypto-bros would have something to say about this explanation, but it is MY understanding that NFTs are so insidious (amongst a plethora of other reasons) because of the energy needed to complete their complex computing functions. Essentially, there are thousands and thousands of equations that these algorithms need to spit out, and all of that requires storage and energy— two things that feel hard to imagine when looking at my own Cardcaptors Sakura flash drive sitting on my desk.
As our own personal data balloons, I wonder just how much more computing power will be necessary. What happens when the 100 GB of photo storage we use yearly is multiplied across a lifetime, across every lifetime? Where will all of these digital archives go? It seems as though we are monitoring every aspect of our lives, from our calls with our mothers, to our messages to our friends; but what happens when we run out of space? What happens when servers fail or platforms shut down? As we invest more and more of our identities, of our personhood into digital forums, we are also cosigning our inevitable deletion. Lives vanished from the record entirely.
We spend so much time discussing the ways in which our resources are limited. There’s only so much livable space on earth, only so much drinkable water, farmable land and so on. Since the advent of the internet, we’ve thought this not to be true of our digital media. We often think of the Internet as limitless and infinitely renewable. However, eventually servers will no longer be able to keep up with the content. Eventually, these programs will run out of funding, or begin purging old accounts. Perhaps the technology itself will become obsolete, perhaps the programs needed to open an mp3 or open a USB stick will become paywalled or otherwise lost to time in the same way that DVD players and cassette tapes have gone out of fashion— banished to some thrift store back room.
There’s this tilt I am noticing of interest into lost media. YouTubers create these sprawling 2-hour epics tracking down the whereabouts of one pilot episode of a television show from the early 90s. Their findings are lauded as they brandish the only VHS tape known to man that contains the last known copy of this “lost media.” As more and more of these videos crop up, and the media itself becomes more recent, I can’t help but wonder will our own media be next? In a few years time will there be a hunt to find Ariana Grande’s wedding announcement post, or more personally your our own daughter’s graduation video?
You can document every facet of your life, and oftentimes many of us are trying to do just that, but none of these records are any good if the archives to which we submit burn down. What good is record keeping when we have exhausted every imaginable form of documentation?