In simpler times, around the mid-noughties, lifestyle prophets and future analysts, intoxicated by the minimalist design of Apple products, designed a new type of human being. If you leaf through their pamphlets and reports, you see a kind of futuristic Zen monk who doesn’t need much more to live than his iPod, a black turtleneck sweater and maybe a mattress covered with coarse linen. Which is free from physical media and the chaos they bring with them. To make it short: The trend researchers were wrong again. The mess is still there. It has only become invisible, has only shifted to digital spheres.
At this point, a confession must follow: There are a little more than 15,000 unopened e-mails in the author’s inbox. It was easy to live with for a long time. The dilemma started almost a year ago. Google announced that it would now include all photos in the freely available 15 gigabytes of cloud storage. It was only a matter of time before the company ended its policy of unlimited free storage. After all, in the last officially available statistics from the end of 2020, Google stated that more than four trillion photos and videos were stored on its servers. And every week almost 28 billion new ones are added.
In the style of a collection agency, the company is now sending out warnings at regular intervals: “Your storage space is almost full and you may not be receiving any new emails.” That’s a tangible threat these days. It’s 97 percent, or 14.67 GB of data to be precise, right now.
Since then I’ve been in a defensive battle. Here and there I keep deleting 200 messages from years long past. In one day there were even more than 3000. An almost painful decision, a quasi-lobotomy. But the progress bar colored in signal red at the bottom of the page, which shows the capacity, just won’t shrink.
There are also messies in the digital world – you just don’t see the disorder
The term digital hoarding was first used about seven years ago. At that time, a Dutch team of psychologists reported about a man who took several thousand digital photos every day. “He never looked at the saved images but was convinced they would be useful in the future,” the authors wrote. Today, the belief that we can store infinite amounts online has turned us all into information hoarders.
Once people thought physical limitations had been overcome, just save anything that might even remotely be of interest. The fear of deleting something that could be used later leads to a mass of data. It’s not just about bad habits. Instead, the storage fetish is an expression of a changing way in which society deals with information. Mailbox hygiene, on the other hand, is a cultural technique that is difficult to learn.
You could now easily fix the problem by including a few euros in the monthly budget for more storage. It’s just stupid that people are still brought up to believe that services on the Internet shouldn’t cost anything. Last but not least, hitting a personal free storage cap and having to pay for more space, no matter how cheap, marks a painful shift in perception. As a late-capitalist socialized person, you have to acknowledge that there is not only the possibility that the flour or oil shelf in the supermarket will remain empty. But that the “cloud” is just another finite resource, albeit distributed globally across databases.