First the Breakup. Then the Screenshots.

Compared with other kinds of digital output, a screenshot feels “homemade” — a piece of digital DIY confirming that screen spaces contain as much mundaneness as the “analog” or “offline” world. In a time when so much communication and production is mediated by a set of increasingly powerful corporate platforms and absorbed into the internet’s big c... See more

I have thousands of photos of my children but few that I’ve set aside to revisit. I have records of virtually every text I’ve sent since I was in college but no idea how to find the ones that meant something. I spent years blasting my thoughts to millions of people on X and Facebook even as I fell behind on correspondence with dear friends. I have ... See more

According to iCloud, I have more than 23,000 photos and almost 2,000 videos resting somewhere on Apple’s servers. I have tens of thousands of songs liked somewhere in Spotify. How much is jotted down in my Notes app? How many conversations do I have stored in Messages, in WhatsApp, in Signal, in Twitter and Instagram and Facebook DMs? There is so m... See more

I have thousands of photos of my children but few that I’ve set aside to revisit. I have records of virtually every text I’ve sent since I was in college but no idea how to find the ones that meant something. I spent years blasting my thoughts to millions of people on X and Facebook even as I fell behind on correspondence with dear friends. I have

... See more

We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment.