Some people are very, very bad at it, which is perhaps a kind of evolutionary variance you’d want to have around. We take photos of our decluttered homes and save them in an increasingly anarchic digital space.
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Thrifters report that it is a glorious time to thrift the shops are full of treasure. She counsels us to clear our countertops. She teaches us to prioritize space over things. In the early years of the twenty-first century, a Japanese woman promises to declutter our homes. To cool the whirring racks, the NSA must pump in 1.2 million gallons of water per day, in the desert, in drought conditions. The enemy of all of this data, of all data, is heat. The true enemy of data is not something against which dogs can protect. But in the blueprints, one can see room for a kennel, where guard dogs must sleep, because American surveillance is partly made of electrons and partly made of tubes and partly made of dogs. The warehouse can probably hold twelve.Īs you can imagine, you are not welcome on this piece of desert. The sum total of human knowledge from the dawn of man to 2003 could be contained in 5 exabytes. Around it the NSA builds a fence, and on the fence they mount cameras. This one cost two billion dollars to build maintaining it and its generators costs millions more per year. A server farm is our age’s answer to the industrial factory: row upon row upon row of racks, ten thousand of them, autonomous, whirring, sucking in a small city’s worth of electricity and pouring out heat. Inside those boxes are magnetic switches - zero one, zero one, one zero - the computer’s translation of all the words it is possible to whisper.
Inside are racks the size of refrigerators, and on the racks, more metal boxes, these the size of dinner plates. The NSA’s upgraded phone is a giant warehouse, the size of six city blocks, sucking in water in the middle of a Utah desert. More data has been created and stored since the year 2000 than in the entire previous course of humanity. In the United States in the early years of the twenty-first century, this has been the approach intelligence agencies take toward information: Absorb everything, all of it, at once. It’s my burden to bear, my weight to carry luckily, since I’m physically small, it’s only a cloud. It’s slightly stressful to know that one’s personal database is bloated and disorganized, but you can’t see my cloud. Throw it into the cloud, whatever that is. It’s best to just take another photograph. This would involve delving deep into our personal histories, our pasts, which may involve feelings we don’t feel like feeling. This would involve decision-making, which is cognitively taxing. It would be better, of course, to go through all of one’s photos and keep only those worth keeping, but the thought of this induces paralyzing exhaustion.
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How much of the burden is in the way we watch ourselves? In the early years of the twenty-first century, everyone is amassing digital information but no one knows how to sort through it. Now nothing would constrain us from taking pictures, all of which still exist, somewhere, because there is no incentive to delete them.
By the time we went on our next trip together, everyone had upgraded phones. To take one selfie we had to delete, say three. On a trip with some of my dearest friends, undertaken largely but not exclusively for the reason of capturing flattering group selfies, every one of us had used up all the storage on our phones before we took a single photo. To study surveillance is to learn, over and over, that we cannot escape ourselves. We all have to have the receipts, receipts for everything, receipts for texts and one-line emails and Facebook messages, an ageless record of the time I made a bad joke in a group thread and my friends twice-tapped haha! so as not to leave me hanging. But it is our fate to live in the age of the indelible. A paper receipt might get trashed or lost or misfiled, out of reach of digital discovery. In our time we have cast disappearance as suspect - “ghosted,” we say, as if it’s a bad thing - while we celebrate the keeping of a kind of terrible track: I have the receipts. Surveillance finds truths, and surveillance serves the creation of elaborate untruths. Willingly you have surrendered many bits of information that, taken together, form a sclerotic social identity with a strange relation to the real. It’s too late, of course you are already known, though the you that is known is not the you that you are.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer Photos: Getty Images
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