Digital Hoarding

I recently had to update the OS on my phone, which meant removing roughly 7 years of photos to the computer to clear enough space. I have since gone through them, and all I can ask is – why do I feel compelled to save pictures?

When I was a teenager, gifs were new, and it was exciting to save sparkling pictures of faeries from Neopets to my files. My friends and I sought out pictures – glamorous pictures, pictures of things we liked, pictures we aspired to. As our aspirations and definitions changed, so did the pictures, but we kept on saving pictures of fashion and films and musicians we liked. Instead of scrapbooking them, however, they were saved to some long-deleted folder on a cloud somewhere, a graveyard of interest. Apparently now I do the same thing: photograph something to remember it, then never look back. I recommend the same book to some nebulous future self three times, I keep screenshots informing me of events that were once future and are now well past, I hoard things I thought were funny or informative. Hoarding things I aspire to, but keeping them in the dark.

My camera roll is stuffed full of events or exhibitions or bank holiday discount codes from three years ago. My will to delete them is low – every one is something that inspired me to actively engage with it, from ‘x person would find that funny’ to ‘I could dress like that’. My camera roll is stuffed so full of content that I went through it this morning, went to have lunch, and forgot most of the things in there. The human brain is not designed to work this way – my aides memoire are shallow water that I wade through; I do not remember them, but I do feel guilty that I forgot them.

It’s better since I’m not on Twitter. The amount of screenshotted tweets recommending content or sharing memes is atrocious, though I will say that as I was going through these pictures I found myself missing the community of Twitter five years ago. Where nowadays would I find the new books of Romantic scholars, unreleased Lana del Rey leaks, stills from films that make me yearn to see them? Where do I get out of my siloed interests in order to encounter a person from history I’m glad to know about or be struck by poetry prompts, and people answering its call? Where does one discover rare culture in an age where the algorithm has killed browsing and fascism has destroyed the Palatine Hill I used to frequent? I no longer acquire snippets of poetry in my daily life now or have a feed which balances memes that are only half-joking about pop culture and serious academic analysis (all too often it was memes about academia and serious analysis of pop culture). Without it, my love of life and all the things I do seriously wanes; I have no network disconnected from the locus of power. With it, I lack the attention span to commit to anything and suffer information and attention overload. I am less gay, for lack of community. I am less insightful, for lack of a specific audience who understand my jokes. I am unable to scream into a void, for better or worse, or let the void I’ve screamed into twenty times a day for thirteen years wash over me.

Since quitting Twitter in 2023 (after literally years of abortive attempts at leaving) my mind is at rest for the first time since I was fifteen years old and we texted a number to update our status. I have kept a document called ‘things I would tweet’ and at first it was six or eight things daily, observations on the things around me; now, it is one a month or less. I am less observant, but less catty; less engaged in public affairs and debate, but less drawn into stupid ‘main character of the day’ non-issues. The anarchic spirit of Bacchus has left me, and with it, my ability to engage with the world without being shrouded in an armour of cynicism and irony.

I can’t say, though, that it was only Twitter: it’s pictures taken in Waterstone’s, maps screenshotted in 2022 for journeys that were new to me then, somebody’s handwriting I want to imitate. A low-res image of a woman in clothing I think I actually did buy, a confirmation of return from last year, a hairstyle I wanted to copy when I had enough hair. All of my devices are so full to bursting of pictures that play a different role to the picture historically: these are not my memories, as a photograph in the 20th century was, they are not art, like a painting or a mosaic or a sculpture. They are not reportage, not even of the kind from the 2010s where ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ combined with group chats meant communicating in images. No, this hoard of images are some sort of magpie’s nest, a hideous amalgamation from which any one twig can be excavated but where no strand means more than another. They are images cherrypicked for no reason, to be forgotten by me, the person to whom they meant… something.

Before I continue the road to end my own digital hoarding and move on down a path of tranquillity and deletion, enjoy some choice morsels from a time when the internet was different. Next week I will be sharing an entire month-long game of recommendations, pulled from this half-arsed archive.

On This Topic:

• Now that you know glitter gifs exist, you too will end up working on Guy Debord until you can prove there’s no such thing as tacky. Or just writing content for millennials only at Cosmo.
• The last gasp of Twitter sent this guy viral and he was the best thing about its final year.
• Amongst the debris I waded through were reminders of that time I pre-ordered a book on the off-chance Taylor Swift was involved…

To-Do:

• Order groceries done
• Set date for book group
• Reply to emails

Today’s Culture:

• Finally found a fude-nib pen! Now I only have to learn calligraphy…
• Creating baskets on stores and not buying them. I will not be spending £100 on stickers, nor books, nor ebooks. Not today, at any rate – I will think about what I want, decide, and wait for it to come on sale.
• Deleting things. Go and delete something now! I’ve deleted something every day this month.