Digital Hoarding- An Essay

Earlier, there were hardcopies. Floppies and hard disks held onto for dear life. Although pen drives, hard disks and the like are still widely used, a sense of relief lies among the general population. The internet made things faster. It also brought the ends of the world very close together. One other crucial thing it did for the data we make of ourselves is that it made everything lighter. It made it possible to digitize the solid, decaying, mould or silverfish ridden memorabilia or collect any new already digital objects to put safely in the world wide web forever.

The internet stands like a vast vaporous giant, ever generous and ready to scoop up anything that falls on it. It’s almost eerie actually, the way it takes the smallest bits of information you generate and preserves it for posterity, even if you might not know that it is still out there. The clouds have come up! Big puffy volunteers of Master Internet, looming on all corners, casting huge murky shadows on the ground.  They’re even more nuanced, endless and complex than the internet. And they promise to hold up just about anything. Millions and trillions of gigabytes folded on itself into miniscule data pellets tucked away into every fold inside them. They’re altruistic, so none of their crazy storage facilities are charged too highly. They just give and give and give, like a soup kitchen that is too stocked to ration out supplies. Photographs, files, presentations, clips, home videos, films, movies you love, art you’ve created- it can all get balanced on them. Cloud storage has flipped the way we look at the information we create everywhere. If everything can be preserved for life, at no cost and with no obvious repercussion, why not just store everything?

Black Mirror, a show portraying the ill effects of technological intervention when gone out of proportion in human lives, touches on this in several episodes as well. Your body regenerates itself every 7 years. In effect, none of the cells in your body are the same as the ones you had till you were 7, or 14 and so on. That would indicate the transient nature of our life and how each memory that gets created per day doesn’t have a physical flag point to mark it. The only constant to your life and its events that personally affect you is your physical body which isn’t even the same for longer than 7 years. That makes the concept of your past and the memories that have occurred itself seem shaky. “The past is just a story we tell ourselves.” The line from the movie Her goes. The movie Waking Life that is about a nameless man bumping into a number of enigmatic people and discussing issues about dreams, action, freedom, the continuity of life and other philosophical debates with them, also comments on how there is no constant thread linking each age in our life. As our body progresses through each age, we leave everything behind and no part of the past truly remains a composite part of us unless events have left physical marks (scars etc.) on our bodies that remain for long periods. Hence, the only traces of the past lie in our heads, in our memory of the events that have passed.

The memory of our actions and experiences define our life up until the present moment. They give us context about the general patterns of our actions and reactions to it that the world and people around us have had. From it, we draw inference about our interests, past priorities and even mistakes we had made. It is our only source to refer to when we have to understand our identity. Apart from that, this memory of the events need not be consistent with the true nature of the event, and have more of an emotional validity than an objective one. Still, the narrative it constructs informs us of how we’ve been doing things so far and provides the emotional value to various events and people of the past.

It seems to be the component that gives our identity the content to formulate itself with. Moreover, campaigns, aims and messages that are consumerism friendly are virally passed around and absorbed as trends among the population- ‘You only live once.’ ‘Live while we’re young.’ ‘Life is short, every moment counts.’ ‘throwback to’ and Google’s recent ad that went with the slogan- What if you could store every memory you had? Naturally, for people to internalize and fully agree with it would work very well for the economy in terms of the products/ experiences they would feel the need to purchase to enhance meaning and entertainment in their life. Apart from that, to reassure themselves and establish that their lives contain that entertainment and glamour, the digital platforms of social media would be used profusely, thus pleasing Facebook, Instagram and the like as their human sub-products advertise their service and its features to the rest of the population for them.

Donna J Haraway spoke about the way Western culture has penetrated most urban citizen’s minds due to most products of their lifestyle having been made to enforce those ideologies and thoughts. The Western ideals like having an open, try new things mindset, being over non-being, the spoken over non-spoken, constant progress, appropriation of nature as resource for production and the development and strengthening of one’s identity amidst other people. (having something to say about oneself/individualism) It is understandable that such forces could considerably influence people into holding onto memories of events in their life with desperation. There is also resultant panic at the thought of losing meaning and the reference points in one’s life for their identity has been growing.

When cloud computing services come into this insecure picture with their shiny bait of limitless, free storage capacity for every moment anyone has ever made, the chances of the product going unused are slim. Moreover, apart from subtle forces influencing consumer’s minds, the main issue is that of a consistently uninformed audience. Information about the actual meaning, processes and nature of systems (technological or others) isn’t provided in a transparent, accessible format to the unaware audience. Whether it’s the breakdown of work at Facebook, what IoT really means, the true state of political upheaval and its effect on the marginalized in India or every other phenomenon, media companies are too bound to the purse strings of capitalist groups and industries to give the entire picture of an issue to us. No mainstream news is given with the intent to educate and provide honest data to the masses about the state of affairs. It doesn’t help that the other brilliant, observant content writers that provide in-depth analyses of issues, concepts and ideologies through their academic articles proceed with such an elitist format of obscure language that the articles are too exclusive for the general public. Finally, a small group of people remain who strive to explain and simplify nuanced concepts to make them accessible to people not working within those fields. The chances of that content getting viral, replicating and embedding itself amidst the general population is slim to none. So, overall reality remains largely unnoticed.

George Carlin pointed out, “They don’t want well-informed, educated people capable of critical thinking. That’s against their interest. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 years ago. You know what they want? They want obedient workers.”

In short, the simple fact of the nature of digital waste isn’t provided in an unbiased way to the public for them to be aware of data centres, servers, how much electricity they consume and the like. It hasn’t been prioritized as a programme that must be provided hand-in-hand with the product that it is about despite cloud storage having become such a widely used product.

When big data is computed, information stored and consumed through the internet by people, the processes are made possible by physical blocks of servers. These data servers come with their band of cooling units, batteries and acres of space in buildings all over the world. There are underground centres as well to account for their growing need. Apart from that, it is reported that they require more energy than even the paper industry. Every email you decide to store in your inbox as keepsake is adding to the need to set up server farms to process all the data being created across the internet.

It is the physical manifestation of the several gigabytes of information users of the internet as well as technology based companies store and utilize for various purposes. It breaks the common understanding of the virtual and digital space being waste-free because of its intangible dimension of storage. There is a whole set of infrastructure, from cooling systems, back up- diesel generators, lead-acid batteries and the heavy servers itself to support it. It will only demand those many more watts of power to be run as information storage increases.

A growing trend is of equating digitization with ‘going green’ due to the absence of paperwork. It seems like a wireless, non-tangible method of getting work done which would imply a lesser strain on the environment. What hasn’t been pointed out to us are the watts of electricity required to enable these processes to occur in the digital space without buffering or delay. Moreover, the source of their computation has a very physical reality in the servers that are built to accommodate all of it. Electricity, at this stage is still being drawn mainly from exhaustible sources like coal that take much longer to get replenished than trees would.

It isn’t wise or helpful to conclude various layers to a complex issue with a single simplistic solution. It wouldn’t account for tiny inconsistent nuances in the problem as well as dynamic shifts in its nature that occur without prediction. What could be done is to present the facts to the concerned people for each one to embark on their own experience with the product with a more informed mindset. One could decide for themselves how to alter their way of handling this product once they know its true effects on their personal lives as well as the planet. Digital waste isn’t more of a threat than the other types of waste that are excessively generated due to over consumption. Electronic waste exists and so does all the paper and plastic waste with their supplementary energy intensive procedures of making pulp, use of thermal plants and the like.

What is your identity? How many objects are really necessary to help consolidate it? Can you stick with its definition without its physical manifestation in objects in your life? How important is every single moment you experience to the extent that you might want to store all of it? Will you really get the time to go through gigabytes of data accumulated over decades and do justice reminiscing about each of those recorded moments? Were they supposed to mean as much as you put them up to be? What effects would deletion of data have on your identity far ahead in your future? It would do all of us some good if we would reexamine what we want to preserve and what to let go because digital waste is as real as the rest.