by A few months ago, after a presentation in which I defended the erasure and mourning of data, someone approached me and pulled me aside. He wanted to tell me his story. He had just suffered a separation and his friends and therapist, concerned, advised him to delete the messages and photos of his now ex-partner, to which he was clinging in vain. “I don’t dare,” he repeated to me.
I have never deleted photos of past loves. I rarely feel the need to review them. But I have sent some of your messages to the trash without even reading them. Sometimes I do the same thing with work emails. They accumulate in such quantities that I know they will never be able to answer and eliminate them all, without ceremony or remorse. And so, there are so many people waiting for an answer, mine, that never comes. Their hopes and expectations, along with memories, precious information and digital garbage accumulate in an amalgam, in a detritus of experiences that algorithms stir and filter, like archaeologists in search of pasts, presents and futures. A compost that could fill hundreds of museums. Photos, emails, messages, memes, displayed on screens, inside showcases, on pedestals, hanging from the walls.
Unlike objects that gain value due to their uniqueness, bits of information added without apparent meaning and renamed “big data” become the new object of desire. Every day we accumulate reflections of our existence, the messages sent, the unread ones, and even those that never arrive, but are hosted on data center servers.
“Delete everything,” I told him.
They interrupted us while I was trying to defend the idea of erasure, when I told him that the objective of erasure is not to forget, but to remember in another way. And, furthermore, erasing is today an ecological imperative, a necessity. Through scientific and technological efforts, as well as the activities that organize our daily lives, humans and artificial intelligences are producing so much data that it will soon be impossible to store and process it. Given this perspective, some advocate simply building more data centers. But in reality too many have already risen. Tens of miles of them, packed with servers working around the clock, processing technological ambitions, scientific advances, emails, videos, selfies and intimate sessions with Chat GPT. Together they devour energy, water and vomit CO2 at a rate comparable to that of airplanes.
And when the earth warns that it can no longer bear it, visions emerge of data centers submerged in oceans or floating in space, orbiting our world. Thus, pursuing an outdated idea of progress, we ignore the limits of the planet. But the limits reach us in the same way. Experts are already predicting the moment, not too distant, when the production of digital information will surpass the scalability of existing storage solutions. The moment when we simply will not be able to save more. An inability that will soon affect machines, and is already affecting us humans, overwhelmed by enormous volumes of information.
Despite everything, driven by fear of loss or perhaps the pure greed of technology corporations, and ignoring the fragility of our ecosystems, we continue to accumulate information as a valuable asset, the new gold. Paradoxically, this accumulation is a reflection of a loss that precedes and pursues it: the loss of sovereignty over our knowledge and memories, transformed into mere databases, and the irreversible environmental devastation caused by their storage and processing.
“Delete everything,” I said. “And make a party of it.”
In the same way that we mourn objects, places and people, letting go of data requires a grieving process that recognizes its emotional charge and allows for the reconstruction of the symbolic world shaken by its loss. A San Juan night with bodies jumping over fires where mountains of junk and memories burn. A party that lasts until the next day, when, still hungover, we find the ashes of our belongings and hardships, their stain stuck to the ground.
This tension between remembering and forgetting, which over the centuries has manifested itself in countless mourning rituals, is now integrated into the routine of the digital world, where our memories are stored in bit code. Deleting, that seemingly simple action, is actually an existential mess. Because even having emptied the trash, our digital files, all the words and images that built our relationships, those stored on our devices and those of colleagues, strangers, friends, family, their duplicates and backup copies, will continue to be stored somewhere. . of a server, within a data center whose location we do not know. And they will persist, whirring the fans that cool computer systems, consuming resources to keep our information alive beyond ourselves.
This is how all those fragments of our self that we thought were lost or had left behind without even knowing it, are now being added to databases mined by algorithms. And then reconstructed in digital profiles analyzed not by psychoanalysts but by platforms that return us, packaged, in experiences and merchandise with which to patch our miseries and our emptiness. Every day we navigate the remains of our ashes, unable to completely erase or consume grief.. We are invaded, then, by that overwhelming feeling that revels in recommendations, related content and reminders; in those moments rescued and classified by operating systems, then converted into digital stories animated by transitions and melodies. The other day, my phone made, without being asked, a compilation of the best moments of the year. It included my stay in the hospital and images of the holidays with my ex-partner.
“What if there is something left after the party?”
I know it seems absurd to advocate for deletion when I’m saying that it’s virtually impossible to delete digital files. But we have already seen that saving is not easy, nor is it always feasible. In fact, the information that is preserved does not remain unaltered. Recently, when trying to open a folder of photographs that I had saved on an external hard drive for years, I found unreadable files. Over time, advances in hardware and software alter the perception of the code that reads files, making them incomprehensible. Archivists know that data stores, like physical records, are in states of proliferation and decay. Digital documents are continually renewed through maintenance practices, software and hardware updates, and of course new interpretations that update meanings.
Remembering, in this context, is a dynamic practice that involves acts of remembering and forgetting, the generation of knowledge and its loss. The problem, finally, is who decides what is forgotten and remembered. An agency that is, now, in the hands of technology corporations, and that brings them excessive profits every quarter. Therefore, instead of aspiring to a storage medium that allows unlimited accumulation, in addition to an ecological, political and social practice of erasure. May it recognize our intimate relationship with data and accompany us in processes of detachment, mourning and memory. A practice that will help us overcome the compulsion to accumulate. And demand the same from multinationals and digital platforms, whose storage media seek to last beyond the human presence on the planet, when our bodies, territories and ways of life have disappeared and our data, a bunch of bits lacking apparent meaning. . , be a memory, and raw material, for bacteria, viruses and machines.
I don’t know if that person ever erased his story, or if he celebrated it with a party. But my mind returned to our conversation the other day, after learning of the death of a friend. The news came to me in the form of a text message loaded with an announcement of an imminent end and a final wish: that I attend the launch of his book, an event he would never witness. I felt the impossibility of staying at home, so he let me take him through the streets and that’s how I arrived at a museum. There were fifteen minutes until closing, and there I was, among relics of past civilizations – sculptures, paintings, jewelry – and looking to appease the loneliness surrounded by objects. It’s funny that sometimes we wish things would go away, and other times we love them in a pathetic way. I then decided to send one last message.
“I love you very much. I will be at the presentation of your book.”
There was never a response. I also don’t know if anyone read it, or if the message remained unopened forever, on the phone, on a server in some corner of a data center. I am aware of how clumsy it is to talk about the future to someone who is about to say goodbye to theirs. I wish I had known how to do it better.
Now, that message, and all the ones we share, conversations in which we did not say enough and in which we said too much, are all being recomposed into digital realities that transcend our ephemeral and vulnerable condition. In interwoven realities that reveal and complicate the links that mutually build us, often without us knowing it, inside and outside of servers. And so, just as I wrote it, I also deleted that message and all the ones that preceded it. Still, as my friend wanted, we have the party left: a posthumous presentation of his book, and what remains after it.
Marina Otero Verzier She is a Spanish architect and researcher. In 2022 she received Harvard’s Wheelwright Prize for a project on the future of data storage. Otero is part of the Architecture and Design Advisory Committee of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. She was Director of the Master in Social Design at Design Academy Eindhoven (2020-23) and Research Director at Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam (2015-20). Previously, she was Director of Studio-X Programming, Columbia University GSAPP. She has curated various exhibitions and biennials.
