Today I decided to say goodbye to the pictures I took in March 2020. In the area I lived, I saw empty supermarket shelves, deserted streets, and stay-at-home notices posted at park entrances. I put the pictures I took in an album called “Life During an Outbreak.” My word choice likely reflected my assumption that it would be one-time thing that would soon go away.
I didn’t dwell on what had come to pass in March 2020 when I went over the pictures one last time. I did, however, reflect on what made me hold onto them for so long, and how I finally come to the point of letting them go.
I remembered asking myself a while ago: if I delete those pictures, how will I show to others what I saw? That was a silly question. I’m sure most of us have something to say about where they were, what they did, and how they felt about that particular month in that particular year. On the other hand, I’m not sure if it’s a subject you and I will want to broach again. I doubt you would be interested in the pictures I took, and I doubt my own willingness to reciprocate if you showed me yours.
Not being sure about any of those was likely the reason I had held onto those seemingly weightless pictures for so long. The problem: if I need to hold onto something, it is not weightless to me. I also had the fear of losing them forever. There is something anxiety-inducing about pixels on a screen that can be easily turned into nothingness. Physical things, on the other hand, require work to be disposed of. Or they degrade. Or they get lost. I also suspect we don’t blame ourselves that much when a physical object degrades or gets lost to forces beyond our control. Digital data, on the other hand, seems to be entirely our own responsibility.
I recently started to wonder whether the prevalence of digital technology has also made the hyper-atomized, individualistic ethos a default mode of our life these days (such technology and ethos are also mostly American exports, perhaps not coincidentally). That I felt I was solely responsible for my crumbs of mementos shows that I don’t have a lot of places to go to be able to affirm that what I had seen, heard, and experienced did happen. There aren’t many manners through which I can remember the past with others. All I have is the gigabytes that I either go to great lengths of safeguarding in the drives I physically own or take the easy and lazy path of letting gigantic companies do that for me—and I have more confidence in their doing a better job of such safeguarding.
That the gigabytes or the terabytes don’t occupy any physical space is not true. Your phone, your hard drive, your memory sticks are physical objects that will eventually degrade and be no more. For that reason most of us choose to entrust the data to a big technology company. Because the cameras in our phones produce such high quality photos, many of us soon find ourselves in the situation that we have to buy extra storage space, year after year, so that our pictures don’t go away. It’s a virtuous cycle for those companies: the more pictures we take, the more space we will need to buy; the longer we keep the pictures around, the more reluctant we are to see them go away. A few seconds of video or a quick burst of takes quickly produce a few dozens of megabytes of data that three decades ago could amount to an entire week of records or transactions for a mid-sized organization. Those bytes need to live somewhere, usually in a data center far away, and we now know that data centers don’t exist out of thin air. They are technological wonders in the sense that they are the most efficient computing operations that engineers barely a generation ago couldn’t even have imagined. It does not mean that there are only positive things we can say about them.
Of course, I could have made an effort to bring the data back and store it in a medium that I own, but then my responsibility as my own data’s guardian and custodian only increases. There’s a reason why the term bit rot exists. A printed photo may fade, but it’s not like that if you won’t be able to look at it ten years after you last opened the album it is in: the same thing cannot be said of your own storage media. Even with all the issues with Big Cloud, we have collectively chosen to shift the burden of keeping our bits fresh to those companies.
All this is to say that my intent to remember properly got distracted by all those other aspects and emotions. The medium is the message, and I now wonder if it is also the emotion. Digital remembrance is therefore a strange thing: the digital part induces in me fear and anxieties I’ve described above, which are separate from the act of remembering itself and the emotions embedded in such an act.
Instead of helping me remember what once took place, my pictures were demanding my attention, care, and thoughts because of their digital existence. My intent to remember was nowhere to be found: something else has subsumed it long time ago. Having realized this, I went over the pictures, and I said goodbye to the digital embodiment of something that was no longer the mementos I meant to keep.
2026-05-15