Memories as Data
thoughts spurred on by data centers and a phone out of storage
I am riding the train again, back to New York from visiting home in Virginia. It seems trains bring out my contemplation. The combination of the rolling of the steel wheels on the tracks beneath my seat, the mid-Atlantic towns flying by the window, and the flickering beams of light through the window do something to me. As one of my train ride activities, I am clearing out my phone’s data in the hopes of getting it to stop reminding me how overloaded it was. Combing through my photos and various saved things on my apps, it’s interesting to see what digital detritus was coming up. Various screenshots of articles, cute animals, and accidental blurry images of my shoes at the end of my legs. There’s the occasional snap of friends, my partner, my family, and of course my dog. I saw a video I took of my disco ball spinning in the golden sunset of my old apartment, beams of light scattered across the room. Admittedly, that one is quite difficult to let go of. My phone repeatedly asks me if I’d like to purchase more iCloud storage to avoid the threat of deletion of these precious moments.
While I was visiting my family, we drove out to play Top Golf to celebrate my dad’s birthday. Dotted alongside the highway were massive foreboding concrete buildings, surrounded by barbed wire and security stations. This area of the country has increasingly become known for these data centers. Gigantic windowless structures filled only with a sea of computers, storing the data of the world in the heaviest “cloud” I’ve ever seen. When I think about my pictures of my dog and my smiling family floating somewhere around those wires and boxes in the digital space, there is a part of me that feels uneasy. This thing that gives me so much warmth, that sparks a memory, is (materially speaking) no more than a string of code, stored away in some unknown dark and humming box, burning energy for what feels assumed to be an eternity. Recently, I heard that 90% of the world’s data was created in just the past 2 years.
I think when we lob things into the cloud, we don’t conceptualize these physical spaces where the pieces of our life go to float. When I consider the reality of it, some of the meaning feels sucked away, and I feel afraid. Why do I hold onto these pixels until my phone runs hot in my hand? I feel that part of being human is the desire to assert that I am here. Neolithic humans dipped their hands into red clay and printed along the walls of caves. Thousands of years later, their message remains: I existed, and I walked this place, and there were people that I loved and that loved me. Will my scattered strings of code in the ether do the same? When I am gone from this earth and thousands of years have passed, and the data centers have fallen into disrepair or sunken into the ocean, what will be left of me? What will be left of us?
Being a person in the modern era sometimes feels like walking on a tightrope. I tiptoe between gratitude for the advances and comforts provided by the internet and the weariness of the unceasing pull to a life lived increasingly online. I don’t know what my cave painting will be if I am so fortunate to make one, let alone if it will last a millennium. I am yearning for balance, and for reaching out across time and space in whatever way I can.
One gift I do enjoy from the internet is the ability to make an excessive amount of playlists. Here is one I started while I was in Pennsylvania breathing in mountain air:
Said playlist was also inspired by a PBS show I watched in the hotel room of John Denver performing at Red Rocks in 1974. It was incredibly beautiful and I can tell he had a gentle soul. I’m not sure how to use the PBS website, but if you can figure it out here it is: https://www.pbs.org/video/john-denvers-rocky-mountain-high-2ondol/
On my dad’s birthday, we got Korean BBQ and one of the side dishes we had was Korean corn cheese. Unsurprisingly, it was incredible and straightforward: https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1021553-korean-corn-cheese