By Connie Liu - This is a version one, fully interactive version coming soon~
In high school we visited a landfill for class, I'll never forget what it felt like to stand there with miles of waste surrounding me, getting compressed to eventually turn into a grassy hill or burned. Later that same day we visited a recycling plant, on top all the bales of heavily compressed plastic, the operator told us that only 5% of all plastic of all plastic ends up getting recycled. All of a sudden, I became viscerally aware of the weight of everything I consumed - the plastic straw with my smoothie, the plastic spoons with my takeout, the plastic bags overflowing my drawers.
It was around the same time, my high school became part of the pilot to digitize classrooms, claiming increased environmental friendliness because we were now on the cloud and paper free. If we were to get granular, it was likely true, but it consequently made cloud computing seem so effortless. In reality there is an immense physicality to the internet, connections made through underwater sea cables, data is stored in massive data centers amongst the midwest, and the massive processing needed to train new technologies. Similar to how I became aware of the pervasive weight of plastic consumption, I became aware of the overwhelming weight of data - an hour of Netflix is 1GB of data, an AI query is 3 times the amount of a google search, even using upper case letters is more energy than lower case. When trying to optimize my personal website, I realized the majority of the weight was in images, and I manually resaved each one as .webp in an attempt to decrease the weight. And like plastic, it became incredibly difficult to escape the convenience of technology as protest against the global entropy from consumption.
However, not all fault can be on the consumer level, the infrastructure of the internet is monetized to remember everything, we pay more as we hold more data, and so the data centers are only incentivized to increase. Consumption is basis and underpinning of American capitalism, both in the physical and digital world.
Yet, the internet still bears likeness to ecological principles - links rot and decay; one day I discovered the link to my favorite video no longer exists. Overnight, entire ecosystems erase - in January, I discovered an online design community was fully winding down - by May 16th all data would disappear from the site. When I went to an event in November at the Internet Archive - they opened with a 5 minute video about their fight to preserve the internet as supported formats disappear and news and media outlets cease operations. Beyond preserving nostalgia and culture, archival was particularly important in recent times as the Trump presidency began to obfuscate important information for HHS and CDC websites.
However, we can't save everything; what if we embrace the ephemeral and temporality? Isn't that what the living do? Internet artists have been exploring this idea of decay on the internet for a while - Laurel Schulwst's Internet Onion project that had the lifespan of five weeks (of an actual onion), or Everest Pipkin's Anonymous Animal - a web essay that only plays on the hour, or Elliot Cost's File Life - in which the artist went around collecting people's files on a usb to symbolically destroy it at the end of the tour; coincidentally enough, the very website dedicated to that project has fully decayed and disappeared as well.
But what these projects show is embracing the temporary is to embrace the shifting version of self, to march of time, the ebbs and flows of life. Growing, changing, and decaying is what the living do. Similar to how our current societal infrastructures don't incentivize closer living to ecological patterns, I wondered if the issue was with the current web products we have today. If that was the case, I would have to build it myself.
I saw principles in the cycles of creation and decay shared across both natural cycles and creative cycles, and saw an opportunity to join the two. As a serial digital hoarder, I save so much - screenshots in-between photos, thousand item are.na channels, a notes app of one-liners: I'm holding onto so much it falls through my hands. We collect as a form of noticing and remembering- perhaps it colors a perspective or recalls a feeling buried inside us. We collect with the intent of synthesizing and creating- an ever running to do list. But if we don't act, creativity will linger at the door and disappear.
I created transient file storage for creatives (you can try it here). You can save idle sparks of inspiration throughout the day on a locally stored web canvas (no user accounts necessary). The catch is, these files will disappear within the user-defined set of time, to only be saved as a CSV for local storage - so essentially nothing is stored on the cloud. By embodying the transience of inspiration, temporaneous file storage will serve as a catalyst for creating.
Sometimes I think the internet is purposely built for remembering too much as a revenue driver - as we hold more data, we pay more. But we need to let go to allow for transformation of our ideas, and ourselves. To allow a proper goodbye to remnants of the past, what better than to create from the experiences which made us who we were in that exact point in time?