There is no end of for why the internet feels so these days. The New Yorker the to . Wired a in which cease their users and begin monetizing them. The M.I.T. Technology Review ad-based business models. The Verge engines. I agree with all these arguments. But here’s another: Our digital lives have one after another.
A shame closet is that in your home where you the stuff that has nowhere else to go. It doesn’t have to be a closet. It can be a or a room or a chest of drawers or all of them at once. Whatever the space, it is defined by the absence of about what goes into it. There are things you need in there. There are things you will never need in there. But as the shame closet grows, the of or too to .
The shame closet era of the internet had a beginning. It was 20 years ago that Google Gmail. If you were not an internet user back then, it is hard to the that Google’s . Inboxes routinely topped out at 15 megabytes. Google was offering a free gigabyte, dozens and dozens of times more. Everyone wanted in. But you had to be invited. I remember for one of those early invites. I remember the of finding one. I felt lucky. I felt chosen.
A few months ago, I that Gmail . I have more than a unread messages in my inbox. Most of what’s there is junk. But not all of it. I was too much that I needed to see. Search could not save me. I didn’t know what I was for. Google’s algorithms had begun me. What they was a priority and what I was a priority . I set up an -responder telling anyone and everyone who emailed me that the address was .
Behind Gmail was an technological . The of storage was . In 1985, a gigabyte of hard $75,000. By 1995, it was $750. Come 2004 — the year Gmail began — it was a few dollars. Today, it’s less than a . Now Gmail offers 15 gigabytes free. What a . What a mess.
Gmail’s — storage by — the of everything online. According to iCloud, I have more than 23,000 photos and almost 2,000 videos resting on Apple’s servers. I have tens of thousands of songs liked in Spotify. How much is in my Notes app? How many do I have in Messages, in WhatsApp, in Signal, in Twitter and Instagram and Facebook DMs? There is so much I loved in those . There is so much I would in rediscovering. But I can’t find what matters in the morass. I’ve given up on trying.
What began with our files soon came for our friends and family. The made it easy for anyone we’ve met, and of people we never met, to friend and us. We could with them all at once without communing with them individually at all. Or so we were told. The idea that we could have so much with so little was an . We are digitally to more people than and . Closeness time, and time has not in or in .
The digital off my passivity. I now pay Apple and Google a monthly fee for more storage. It would take too to delete everything necessary to their . Various algorithms to do for me what I no do for myself. They me with pictures from my past and offer to sell me books of my own . They me up songs that are like the ones I’ve loved before but ago. My is with recommended from influencers and advertisers who mean nothing to me.
A few months ago, I to take back of my digital life. I began with my email. I to Hey, an email service that takes a very different view of how email should . Gmail and virtually all of its competitors assume anyone should be able to email you and then you should and and and those messages. Hey that only the people you want email from should be able to email you.
The first time anyone sends you a message, it goes into what’s called the Screener, and you have to whitelist or blackball the sender. If you blackball the sender, that’s it. You never see email from that address again. It also has another I love: a clean for to emails, so you can think and without the visual to so many other services.
Hey forces me to make rather than me to them. I have to ask whether I want email from this or that sender, and if so, where it should go. Which is not to say Hey is or that it fully the problems I’m . Its is far to Google’s. It’s too hard to rediscover mail that I’ve viewed but took no action on. There’s no way of different kinds of mail that come from the same address. It has with many, many . I the easy integration with all the other Google I need to .
But for me, for now, the is what I’m for. I am — genuinely — for what Google and Apple and others did to make digital life easy over the past two decades. But too much carries a . I was into the belief that I didn’t have to make . Now my digital life is a of to the of maximal storage with minimal intention.
I have thousands of photos of my children but few that I’ve set aside to revisit. I have of every text I’ve sent since I was in college but no idea how to find the ones that meant something. I spent years blasting my to of people on X and Facebook as I correspondence with dear friends. I have everything and saved nothing.
I do not anyone but myself for this. This is not something the did to me. This is something I did to myself. But I am now for that insists I make rather than that none are needed. I don’t want my digital life to be one shame closet after another. A new has for me: I want it to be a garden I tend, snipping back the weeds and the .