#sorry i said flash drive im old. ehat do they even call them now. thumb drives?

[fred-the-dinosaur]

It seems to me that the trouble with digital is it's all still physical objects. Maybe there can be copies of things and they can travel very fast and be in multiple places and be compressed down and stored in unthinkably tinier places and accessed cleverly and take forms we could barely conceive of before we met computers.

But it's still an SSD card, a big server, a powerplant, physical equipment to read a bunch of information inscribed into a very high tech substrate (stuff!)

Old film negatives or plates aren't nearly as useful until you use a bunch of old processes, materials and skills to pull prints from them. Even digitisation requires both image capture tools (objects) and software (runs on objects) to replicate a process that was originally made with objects, and which is therefore modelled on data from having those objects.

Lots of people say 'oh get rid of manuals and physical books and photo albums and go digital' and sure. Tactility aside it's great option for space. Fold your two hundred book library into a flash drive the size of a postage stamp like an old man folding the broadsheet down to a postcard. Saves on a lot of dusting and apartments are pretty small. (First person to use this as an excuse to pile on konmari is getting hit with a saucepan btw)

But putting it all in the digital space is treated like using a magic hammerspace where it's safe, retrievable and doesn't rely on the physical world at all. Just your passwords which are now tied to you specific phone, your accounts which run on servers which are just computers you don't own. Your evergreen file formats. Your hard drives which will not fail of course, and will always be backed up to other infallible hard drives and other people's computers and Google searches which definitely find that blog (dead) which had a link (dead) to a file on a Google drive (deleted) that one time. Electricity which will always be on and legacy software that will definitely still run on the new hardware because the old ones long gone, and WiFi which is a basic utility so will always be flowing and so so much water in the big server farms run by the monopolies bigger than nations.

It just seems. Like a grown-up, acceptable equivalent to stuffing a bunch of stuff under your bed so you don't have to think about it. Because even if you ignore the monopolies and the exploitation for water and minerals, and the planned obsolescence. Isn't it all still depending on stuff? Physical, very dense stuff. That needs to be kept dry and cool and powered on and connected and very Not Near big magnets? But it's still objects to look after.

It feels like when we're selling each other the idea of keeping everything 'digital' there's an undercurrent of 'because it loopholes having to think about the inherent ephemerality, storage requirements and maintenance needs of physical objects'. But just as computing can transcend the forms of the physical, so is it dependent on it. I'm worried what's happening given that as a broader culture we pretend that it removes thinking about objects, rather than adding a whole new bunch of objects to look after.

And at some point that file in that file format on that cloud server or storage device will be as inaccessible to you as an undeveloped glass plate negative is now. That day is coming sooner than we think. And pretending it's not still made of physical stuff is contributing to the narratives that let it get pushed here faster.

(Also my computer harddrive died last week. Pah.)