Delete
On Digital Clutter and Memory
About a year ago I accidentally deleted a folder where I’d been archiving files for years. My initial shock (”what if there was something important”) slowly changed to relief (”I don’t remember what is in there so maybe its ok to let it go”).
I felt lighter.
I’ve always been very deletey — zealously clearing emails, stripping contacts, removing connections from social accounts, emptying cloud-based folders of their dormant content. I’m currently in the middle of manually deleting all of my 2024 private social media posts. Delete, delete, delete. Zap, zap, zap. Kill kill kill.
The files and posts don’t actually exist. They aren’t real. Yet they feel like they have real weight, are tangible and alive. When I go to bed, I can feel them staring at me, waving with a passive aggressive little wink: “Still here.”
In his book about memory, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues that “forgetting is really important as mental hygiene because as we forget, our memories abstract and our brain goes through a cleansing process.” But online we keep everything. Deleting becomes the digital equivalent of forgetting, and we need to do more of it.
To me, a digitally connected world feels like everyone leaves all their stuff in my house. Digital clutter clogs up our systems like space debris. Invisible but looming overhead, threatening to crash through our atmosphere of attention.
Not only does it clutter real world space, but digital detritus also has an environmental impact. All that storage has a tangible carbon footprint when its in the cloud.
We’re a collection of files built up for future reference, and everything is cross-referenced to everything else. In my mind this is so messy, like a thousand people screaming at the top of their voice.
There are external memory banks about us all that never forget, never abstract, never cleanse. They’ll recall that conversation from three years ago, cross-reference it with today’s thread, and that one social media post from 2014 with a flagged word in it. Decades worth of memories you yourself have long forgotten.
Now we’re entering an era where AI systems increasingly remember us. This kind of persistent memory is obviously good for many things, and incredibly powerful for productivity and creativity specifically. ChatGPT Memory does add something. But it can also be really problematic. And shouldn’t we sometimes just leave the past in the past?
And what will AI remember about you? How might its own memory of you shape the way it interacts with you, years from now? Does it remember accurately, or will it be missing context or even distorting your memories somehow. AI often gets things comically wrong, but it may some day not be so funny.
Most important of all, what I find interesting to ask is who do your memories belong to? And how might that ‘data’ be used in unexpected ways? It is very interesting to consider that an ever-expanding version of ourselves exists in the cloud, noticing every click and press of the keyboard, every gesture, voice note or prompt. This isn’t new, and has been a debate since the start of social media. But AI definitely evolves it in radically new ways because of how we communicate with it, like talking to a person.
We’re losing one of our most fundamentally human processes: the natural forgetting that allows our minds to clean up, abstract memories, and move forward without too much baggage.
I love the idea of a phone with bad memory. Or forgetful cloud storage, so only the meaningful files remain over time. Zap, zap, zap. Kill kill kill. It’s impractical of course, but appealing. Should AI agents have the equivalent of sleep cycles where they abstract and cleanse their memories of us, or will we become dependent on perfect recall so we don’t have to remember at all?
Perhaps we need AI systems with intentionally short-term memory. Digital companions which remind us occasionally that forgetting is as human as remembering.
We build games and products for wearable devices that feel organic and human. We write about the (un)intended consequences of new technology and the merging of the real and virtual worlds. By Anrick, Grace and Liam.