#180: Ocean Size

Last week I wrote a piece for Wired about Google’s promise of infinite data storage and how that expectation has turned us into digital hoarders over the past decade. I like the analogy because hoarding always implies a misuse of scarce domestic space—filling your home with unnecessary detritus that you’re unwilling to discard, and having to live on top of it as it takes over. From what little I know about hoarding, which is partially firsthand (we’re all somewhere on the spectrum), it’s never actually about having enough space. Those with the most pathological hoarding issues seem to live in bigger homes, as if a tendency to hoard is correlated with available capacity. That would make sense, because hoarding is actually a form of decision paralysis and more storage volume enables the hoarder to defer more decisions—the spatial equivalent of busy people getting things done more quickly. I cut a section from the Wired article about Marie Kondo, the anti-hoarder par excellence, whose popularity surely derives from her key insight that many objects are just the physical manifestations of information: memories, obligations, intentions, and outstanding choices. Bruce Sterling says that if you’re only keeping something because of what it reminds you of, you should take a picture of it and then get rid of it.

If more available space makes us more likely to hoard, then the widespread assumption of infinite digital capacity means that information hoarding is basically inevitable. But space online is never really unlimited, even when storage is. Why else would there be so many spatial analogies for the internet? If physical objects are just manifestations of information and feelings and intentions, then the inverse may also true: Information has weight and heft, even when decoupled from any material vessel. The experience of being online, particularly on social media, has always conveyed a sensation of constraints and limits that, on the surface, seems to contradict the nature of the technology itself. But we undeniably perceive digital space as “real estate,” if only because its abundance, in its most extreme form, turns us back upon ourselves and forces each of us to acknowledge that we are the final bottleneck when all the others have been removed. Even before it reaches that point, we crowd one another. Someone once called Twitter is “a party that too many people showed up to” (I can’t find the tweet now). That was several years ago. A lot more people have showed up to the party since then. The most desirable digital places have the equivalent of a big city housing crisis (with an accompanying homelessness crisis).

Charlie Warzel published a newsletter today that riffs on my piece and discusses his own experience with digital hoarding, particularly on his camera roll, where he has amassed 26,000 “Recent” photos. He describes how these photos, along with his email inbox and various other apps, have externalized his memory across their various repositories, and not necessarily in a bad way. Our memories are also limited—among the most finite storage spaces of all, where hoarding is thus impossible. Something Warzel and I both noted was how inconsistent and spotty that process of externalization can be: Our personal records of the past have significant voids where a laptop malfunctioned, a phone was lost, or an app or platform vanished altogether, along with all of its data. Many of us have a hard cutoff at some point in our past, before which there is little trace of any digital records remaining (mine is somewhere in the mid-’00s). Warzel makes another interesting observation about his relationship to his camera roll: “For me, iPhone photos have become more about the action of taking them than what I do with them. They’re meant, instead, to add texture to that near-infinite scroll of the camera roll.” This feels like the truest description of where we’re headed, or where we already are: a post-literate approach to information (in the McLuhan sense) in which the sheer volume of information makes us less concerned with rigid documentation or classification, where data just becomes a source of texture and we bob up and down calmly on the digital waves that spread out around us in every direction. The ocean, after all, is one place that always still feels infinite.

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In recent subscribers-only issues I’ve written about:

• How we use “algorithms” as shorthand for everything we don’t understand about the internet

• Williamsburg as accelerationist gentrification eating itself

• Google Maps dividing cities into “interesting” and “uninteresting” zones.

Reads:

• The Great Reset is real. Disaster capitalism, pandemic edition.

• A Japanese startup says its technology can inflict actual pain in the metaverse, “via a wristband that dishes out small electric shocks.” Finally, something cool about the metaverse.

• Actually, everyone is thinking about you. The liberating axiom that “nobody is really thinking about you” is not really true.