What We Store, What We Delete
What We Store, What We Delete
My laptop’s battery has been behaving badly so I made an appointment to have it looked at. The confirmation message said I should update my software before my appointment so I set about making that happen. Unfortunately, I did not have enough storage space to update my operating system, so I had to set about clearing some stuff out.
I’ve had to do this many times since I bought this computer four years ago. I’m consistently running out of space. This is largely because this laptop has dramatically less space on it than my previous one did (and also the one before that and the one before that). When I bought this one, I didn’t even think to check its storage as every computer I’d ever bought before had given me more space than the one previous. But apparently storage is no longer a priority for Apple.
Faced with making more space, I was confronted with my own relationship to storage on my device. I had to look at what was there and decide what to delete entirely and what to store over on my external hard drive. What does it really mean to hold on to these things? What am I saving and why?
You might think this is going to be a story about learning to let go of things, about clearing out the old to make way for the new but weirdly, that’s not what this experience made me think about. One of the things that I found taking up a lot of space were podcasts I’d listened to years ago. They were podcast episodes that iTunes automatically downloaded and stored. In those early days, when I liked an episode, I just, didn’t delete it. I thought I might listen to it again at some point. I kept them, because I liked them. I don’t do that anymore. 1) I know I am extremely unlikely to re-listen to any podcast and 2) there are so many podcasts, I just listen and move on, listen and move on. I’ve gone from cherishing them to churning through them.
Something about this makes me feel very sad. On one hand, it’s probably good that we have become a culture that doesn’t horde things the way we used to. We don’t have stacks of records or CDs anymore. We don’t collect DVDs. We don’t put as much value on owning things as we once did, which is probably good. But we also don’t value things like music or movies the way we used to. Now that we can stream everything, we don’t feel like we need to possess what we like anymore. But we also have lost a sustained relationship with the things we like. It feels like everything has flattened out. The movies I loved are in the same place as the movies I hated. The music I love is in the same place as the music I hate. Whether I liked a podcast episode or was entirely indifferent to it, once I have consumed it, it’s all gone, it’s all vanished into the “listened” category. It feels like a much flatter existence somehow. Once I have watched something on a streaming platform, the streaming platform then proceeds to try and get me to watch that thing and then it tries again and then again. It doesn’t know I just watched it and it doesn’t care. There is no distinction between watched and not watched, no distinction between liked and not liked. There is no distinction between anything. It’s all one thing. Just a sales platform, really.
I think we have an idea now that all content will be available to us all the time, that, because things live on the internet, we can be unattached to them because we can always listen to (or watch) them again. We have an illusion that it’s all going to be there forever. But it’s not, actually. A lot of film and TV makers have watched in horror, as things that they spent enormous amounts of time, effort or money on, have just been removed from the platforms they were on and became impossible to find. They don’t have a copy of their work because we don’t do that anymore. They don’t have a DVD. They don’t have a digital file. The Guardian just did a chilling piece about this last week.
Everyone just assumed everything would stream somewhere forever.
But it turns out streaming is not forever. It’s for as long as a company feels like or as long as that company stays in business.
In the early days of digital music, I was in the habit of burning all the digital music I had onto CDs, just in case. I had very little faith in anything I could not hold in my hands. I don’t do that anymore — but not because I have more faith — just because I feel more accepting of losing it all. Maybe I think I might have more chances to get it back, or find it elsewhere, than I used to.
I deleted all the old podcast episodes from my computer. I needed space for the new operating system after all. But I did pull some of them over onto my external hard drive, not because I think I’m going to listen to them any time soon, just to honor them somehow, for being a thing I loved enough to save once. And I suppose, as someone who makes things on the internet and knows my works will be forgotten as quickly as they are consumed, maybe I somehow hope there is one sweet weirdo out there, keeping my podcasts on their external hard drive out of some affectionate desire to keep hold of something they liked — and will maybe, maybe listen to it again one day. I know it doesn’t make sense to do that. I certainly don’t do it anymore but I still like to imagine it. And come the apocalypse when we lose the internet but somehow still have the ability to play digital files — they’ll have my works to listen to as the world burns. Anyway — my new operating system works great! Thanks for the journey, Apple!
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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on October 7, 2024.
