Digital Mortality

plato says “death should be viewed as the achievement of life.”

Oh! Of course! Impermanence! I always forget. The Buddhist writer Jack Kornfield wrote of his teacher holding up a teacup, saying: “To me this cup is already broken. Because I know its fate, I can enjoy it fully here and now. And when it’s gone, it’s gone.” The cup is already broken. The phone and wallet are already lost. We have everything we need... See more

In recent years, many travelers have deliberately slowed down during their trips, tossing out the crammed itineraries to fully immerse themselves in one destination. It’s a practice that some travel experts call slow travel.

“Many tourists arrive at the same place, take dozens of photos with their mobile phone and continue running to another point o... See more

“I’m not so full of hubris that I think that it’s a given that everything I have now is going to last forever,” she says. “People on the internet, they think they’re God, like they’re never going to die. And I think that I could die.”

But instead what we’re doing is spending a whole lot of time masturbating, shopping and watching other people do things online. And essentially what’s happened is we’re spending more and more of our energy and creativity investing in this online world, which means that we are actually leaching our real-life existence of our energy and creativity. S... See more

What’s more, nothing on social media belongs to us. Our art, our ideas and our relationships are reduced to data to be mined and exploited by tech corporations, sometimes even used to train A.I. models. We have no backups, either: Few people still keep address books or mailing lists, much less diaries or photo albums. When we lose access to social ... See more

When TikTok was briefly shut down last month, the app’s more than 150 million American users had the same sudden realization. The platform’s centrality to human connection was made explicit and intolerable. Billions of social ties were erased by forces unseen and beyond our control. We had built this online world only to find that it did not belong... See more

We can’t hope to capture every single fragment of the internet, from the first lagging days of DARPA to the videos attached to each TikTok sound, to preserve the fire hose of content we are all wallowing in. But we can have a conversation about which things we value and believe should be kept, which things should be allowed to disappear into the wa... See more

The same accessibility and low barriers to entry, that same easy come — I can set up a website in the time it takes me to finish this sentence — can also morph into an easy go.