Flip Phone Diary #4

On outsourcing memory to the cloud

A few days ago, I walked to the Auckland Central Library without my smartphone and passed a cafe I’d never seen before. It had a selfie booth on one side and a robot arm that made coffee on the other. The sense I got was that you could take a selfie and it would print your picture on your coffee as latte art. It looked interesting, and I mentally categorized it as a fun place to take people in the future.

I almost walked away from the cafe, thinking “I’ll just Google it if I need to find it again,” before realizing I wouldn’t remember its name unless I wrote it down. If I didn’t write it, I’d have to go into my smartphone at home, go into Google Maps, and pinch and zoom around the library til I found it. I wrote “Folletto Cafe, on Mayoral Drive near the library” in my Moleskine Cahier pocket notebook and carried on to the library. As I walked, I wondered what it meant that I was reflexively ready to outsource my memory to the cloud.

I think the way we file information changes the way we remember it. A friend recently told me that she noticed millennials are more likely to create digital filing systems, with folders and subfolders, while her younger colleagues rely on search bars. Like her younger friends, I also rely on search bars, and I’m starting to think that’s not a good idea. I type half-remembered document names into my work search bar and it spits back what I’m looking for. I pose questions to Google Search like it’s a digital oracle and it gives me instant answers. I’ve abdicated my memory structure and investigative processes to a company that erased Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza Strip from its maps. I don’t want to do that anymore.

In 1945, American war scientist Vannevar Bush envisioned the Internet as “a device…in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications,” to become “an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” He called his idea the Memex and he fantasized about it replacing the women in his office. He didn’t like the agency that record-keeping afforded his secretaries, writing that “a girl strokes [a stenotype’s] keys languidly and looks about the room and sometimes at the speaker with a disquieting gaze,” and sought to automate them out of existence. His misogyny goes hand-in-hand with contemporary American tech barons’ desire to control reality.

The benefit of paper records is that you have to shred or burn them to destroy them. You can go into a physical encyclopedia from a hundred years ago and find the names of countries that no longer exist. Digital records, by comparison, disappear without a trace. There’s no ash, shredded paper, or empty filing cabinet to indicate they existed. The very technology that makes them shareable makes them easy to destroy. If it weren’t for the Internet Archive, or, in the British Royal Family’s case, different countries’ papers, powerful information brokers could use our digital dependence to wipe their embarrassments from the public record like someone remotely deleting text from physical newspapers.

American right-wingers made hay out of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server in 2016, but they capitalized on a real problem: she used technology to avoid public record rules so she could accept bribes through the Clinton Foundation. Now, Elon Musk is gleefully destroying HIV research he would’ve once had to burn or shred with button clicks. We need to practice archiving information in forms that anti-intellectual genocidaires can’t destroy or they’ll destroy our collective memory. I think we should do this by developing our own archiving systems and fiercely defending our libraries.

Across the world, western universities are moving their library books offsite and turning their libraries into social spaces. It usually happens floor by floor, from the bottom to the top, until the library looks like a WeWork and its books are in a warehouse. To get a book in these libraries, you have to request it using the library website and wait days for it to be delivered to an “On Demand” shelf. It precludes contact with books that would’ve previously sat next to yours on normal shelves. Once everything’s offsite, you’re unlikely to discover a book of critical essays about Virginia Woolf next to a copy of To The Lighthouse, nor contemporary essays about Mao next to Marx. Warehousing books makes the physical world resemble the search bar. We need to fight for human archiving so the corporate algorithmic version doesn’t swallow our minds.

To practice this, I now write questions I develop in my notebooks and try to find their answers in encyclopedias and books. I sometimes compare the answers I get from those books to Wikipedia to see if there are differences. Recent questions have included “Who is Papageno the Birdcatcher?” after a trip to The Hamilton Gardens’ Mozart’s Magic Flute garden and “How do they turn [a specific type of grey plant] into red dye?” Saving my questions to investigate them makes me roll them around in my mind and think about why they interested me in the first place. Pondering why the question fascinated me is often more interesting than the answer itself.

I also plan on sending people letters when I want to tell them something important now. I like the thought of them stumbling across them when they clean their rooms, which you can’t do with a digital communication scroll. I want to remember things that are important to me instead of trusting Facebook and Google to do it for me. I think the best way to do that is to record them in mediums they don’t control.

Recommended Reading

• I particularly liked this essay by David Roth about his trip to this year’s Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, and about how AI is choking everything good like vines killing a tree.

• I liked this essay by Alicia Kennedy about the role tradwives play in the media ecosystem. She writes “a perspective that takes concerns [about corporate food processing] seriously while also advocating for abortion, universal health care, and trans rights doesn’t get as much airtime in cultural conversations as the tradwife. Reaction is easier than production.”

• I also liked this essay by Marlowe Granados and this essay by Sarah Miller in Dirt’s new Tennis vertical, Strung. Marlowe’s essay, in particular, has a line that will make you gasp in shock, but you’ll have to read it to find out.