A Momentary Diversion on the Road to the Grave

The ability to store our data externally helps us imagine that our time is limitless, our space infinite. It frees us, in theory at least, from the defining constraints of being human, and sometimes that freaks us out. It strikes me that the current fetishization of analog technology has less to do with nostalgia than it does with an urge to slow down the transfer of data from the internal to the external, from the individual to the collective, and to make it all less instant, less ephemeral, less interchangeable, and more tangible, more linear and more contextual. “People my age are products of a culture of the capital-F Future,” William Gibson said in 2010. “The younger you are, the less you are a product of that. If you’re 15 or so today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory.” Maybe our desire to digitize and archive every little thing is not proof of a fear of forgetting. It’s a manifestation of our urge to remember how to remember.