When our digital selves die, does a part of our selves die too?
As an early adopter (and later regretter), I’ve always kept old social accounts as memory albums of sorts. Definitely not as secure as an external hard drive, however I figured it was a decent solution. I knew if I wanted to revisit old photos or posts, I could log into that old MySpace or Facebook account and pull what I needed.
However in 2019, MySpace lost 12 years of user data. With that loss, all my photos went to the digital graveyard. Now, Facebook. I deactivated my account around 2018. Once every other year, I login to pull an old photo. However, when I tried to do this recently, I couldn’t log in because I’ve been inactive so long that none of my devices are recognized. This means I can’t generate a 2 Factor Authentication code. So, even though I have my Facebook password — I can no longer login to my account because I need to login to my account to generate a 2 Factor Authentication password. As Meta support is an infinite loop of frustration, I have no solve.
The folly of storing photos this way aside, I find myself sitting with a kind of sadness. There is a part of myself I can never get back. Memories that I don’t have anywhere else are lost to the void.
I’ve always been someone who writes journals. Since I was 7-years-old, I wrote my life. However my journals were historically not a place where I wrote how fun the night before was. It was usually, “Welp, I got into trouble…” or “God, I need help with this boy.” In fact, I willingly threw away decades of journals a few years ago because 90% of the content was nauseating to me. Oh, the irony.
It is strange to think of the new kinds of deaths that face us. When my father died in 2008, I realized not long after that I did not have one video of him. To this day, I have no audio or visual recording with his voice. No voicemails or videos. In the modern era, most of us fare better. By the time my mother passed, I had made short videos. I have several voicemails. I have an archive. But for my father, I only have photos and the memory of his voice. A digital death.
And now, there is this entire other part of my life that I have no archive for. Pictures have a way of instantly transporting us back to our memories. Sometimes we forget these memories out of convenience, other times you forget who you were and they remind you. As we get older, it’s natural to look back — but it’s difficult when you can’t even do that.
I believe that algorithms actively take friendships from us by not suggesting the content of certain people. Without seeing the content, we often think of these acquaintances less. It is an active manipulation of our lives. On the other side, data hacks or migration errors can cause entire archives to vanish into the void. Decades of life disintegrate as vapors into the ether. We are left with only one archive, our minds… which we hope will remember what we need them to. However, we are often so busy and so mindless, that even making space for nostalgia can be difficult.*
I did not expect a sense of subdued grief over all of this. I wish I had been better prepared. However, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. For now, I’m simply holding a requiem for a part of myself I may never get back. It’s a strange sensibility.**
*Interesting side note, as I have detoxed from a corporate career over the past year — I have had a flood of forgotten memories return to me as I created space for mindfulness.
**…and should you know someone who works at security in Facebook… drop me a line.
