WIRED’s spiritual advice columnist on external hard drives and the value of digitized memories.
I suppose what I’m trying to say, Curating, is that there appears to be a deeper, existential angst lurking within your question, one that extends beyond simple concerns about file management. Your acknowledgment that your memories are “attached to these bits and bytes” signals an awareness that your identity is mysteriously bound up with those files, that to lose them would be to lose, in a very real sense, an extension of your own mind.
We are constantly offloading parts of our minds to our tools, blurring the boundaries between ourselves and our devices. The fragility of those externalized memories dawns on you slowly with age, as portions of your former selves get buried with defunct hardware or fade into the digital void from whence they came, casualties of content drift and link rot. The sudden nostalgic impulse that spurs you to Google your undergraduate blog ends at the impasse of a “Page not found.
But I’d argue that your angst is even more complex. It’s difficult to witness a device on the fritz without thinking about the fragility of your own personal OS . Our culture’s long-standing dualism endures in the popular notion that the mind is a software program running on the hardware of our physical forms.
Poets and writers have been contending with this problem for centuries, and you might find some solace in their words. D. H. Lawrence, for example, wrote memorably about the human desire to endure, after death, as information. He was skeptical of the philosopher who believed he would live on in his work, or the saint who believed his teachings would make him immortal.
Although our technologies have since advanced, the truth of his words remains: Data is merely a fragile vibration, capable of traveling across great distances but stuck, ultimately, in a meaningless limbo so long as it is without witness. All those files you have stored on external hard drives or ensconced in the cloud are not “informative” in any meaningful sense unless they are experienced by another mind—or, as Lawrence put it, until they “reach another man alive.
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