Becoming Less
I’ve collected (and created) millions of words of content during the first 20 years of my digital life; subscribed to thousands of…
I’ve collected (and created) millions of words of content during the first 20 years of my digital life; subscribed to thousands of services and exchanged billions of bites of data. I used to spend hours organizing and collecting. Now, I’m working on becoming less.
*I have another post about this topic as well.
My first mobile phone had restrictions on how many text messages I could store. And I vaguely remember struggling to decide what to keep and what to delete. There weren’t good ways to backup or recover messages (or I wasn’t patient enough). I felt horrible each time I had to remove some section of my life.
Even when I could back it up. When I could restore and look through, I never did. That intense pain of possible, dramatic loss was equally fleeting. And entirely pointless. I never referenced back the messages. And even if I had them today, I doubt I would be interested to review them. We individually send hundreds (and many of us thousands) of texts a month.
Then things changed. Suddenly (within the window of my memory), I could easily export, backup, transfer, screenshot, edit, manipulate, analyze, combine and optimize all of my messages and content. On top of SMS, I now had a limitless addition of short-form content — emails, phone records, other messaging services (Whatsapp, WeChat, Telegram, Facebook, LinkedIn…).
And besides transactional forms of messaging, I was building massive stores of long-form content (Wikipages, Google Docs, Blog Posts, Reviews, Evernotes, Quoras…).
One Pain, Made Worse
These services we all build to address the pain I felt so many years ago with my Nokias and Sony Ericssons. All of these new services made “data transfer” (now “data portability”) a sales point. Even notable exceptions like Facebook quickly built the features due to massive user pressure. There are services which backup cloud backup services to give that extra, extra secure feeling that our data is going to be there, when we need it again.
With every new service, came a new opportunity to produce, store and share content. I was often oblivious of the growing content debt that I was building. I was happily producing more content like planting trees in a dessert. It didn’t matter whether the trees grew, whether anyone cared or even noticed. I gained joy and satisfaction just from the utterly pointless endeavor itself.
Then like flashes, I would panic. My anxiety would increase and I’d wonder about what was out there. “Won’t I duplicate content?” “Maybe, I wrote something like this before?” “What if I can’t find this again?” “What will future me’s/other’s/children/etc think of me when they find things that even I have forgotten about?”
Even if my opinions and views change over the years, the content is static. I can’t take back that SMS once written. I can’t remove that viral post. I can’t recover or update that which I’ve even forgotten that I wrote. Even as I write this, I have pricks of doubt. Parts of this seem and sound like something I’ve written before. The worst kind of Déjà vu. Knowing that it is and being completely helpless to find an answer.
And while the mass of data the I continue to produce is even more accessible, secure than ever before, I attempt to access it even less. Or I never do, purposefully. I have 5,000 notes in Evernote. I’m not looking through those on a weekend.
Content Exhaustion
Maybe it was the privacy scandals. Or the hacks. Or becoming exhausted with the social media circus that we are all forced to participate in without really enjoying or understanding why we even showed up. Or how content and commenting has become more about trolling, anti-trolling, and all the other adjectives used to describe the locker-room shit-show that internet media has become. Whatever it was that pushed me over the edge, got me started on the slow and painful process of systematically deleting parts of my history.
I decided that I would only keep tools that I needed to do something specific, and I would only put up content that I was happy to loose. I would make the assumption that any online tool that I give any data will find a way to use that data (without my permission) or will be hacked and loose that data in some way, at some point.
Noise Destroys Meaningful Content
I wrote hundreds of posts on Quora, sincerely trying to answer questions and enjoying the rush of seeing my up-votes and comments. I used to challenge myself to write more than 5 posts per day on Twitter and make at least one post on LinkedIn every day.
At first, the interactions and recognition is exciting and empowering. I want to do it more and maintain it because of the way it makes me feel. Over time, it simply destroys any meaning that the content once had. It all becomes noise because it is too much. It overwhelms all the meaning and depth that the post or concept might bring and turns it into simply an emotive. We have to produce ever more content as the value of it declines. Stuck in a death spiral.
That is where some people have done well on social media and in the content islands of the internet. By treating posts completely emotively, they can gain some personal or create some network effect (most seem to be doing this to eventually get to the point where they can use the leverage to push borderline scam promotional advertising-ish junk content). Likewise, there are people who invest massively in being credible, content leaders within their area of expertise. I find that I’m willing to invest in meaningful content (randomly), if I stop doing everything else. So that is what I’ve been doing and will be doing for the years ahead.
The First “Delete” is the Hardest
It took me a few years to get to the first delete. I spend hundreds of hours trying to optimize, export, streamline and retain the mass of content I had produced on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere. I’d convinced myself that all of the content needed to be retained before I could delete it.
It seems logical — sort it, filter it, evaluate it and then decide what to keep and what to throw. This process works exceptionally well when you have 10 boxes of documents in storage. It is the worst possible approach with digital content with an effective per-item value of zero. You could even argue that due to the massive time-cost of dealing with the ocean of digital content we have created (or digital debt or digital “rotting” legacy), the per-item value of such content is negative.
The passage of time struggling through this process helped. I realized after the first few years that I hadn’t once looked back at any of that content I had painstakingly exported and organised. Not.One.Piece. This made it easier to simply focus on a one-time export, archive and wipe. The encrypted archive sits in cloud storage, tucked out of sight. I figure that even if I never look through it, some future alien race may find it on a fossilized redundant server farm and gain some fleeting insight into how utterly pointless our social discourse is.
‘Our Work is Never Done’ to rephrase part of the old rhymed couplet. I’ve removed Facebook and Twitter from my ecosystem of content. I’m pacing myself for a long game with contacts, emails, documents, other web services, Quora and random content in Evernote.
I’ll likely never delete everything. It’s impossible, unless I did a full nuclear reset on everything. I have turned off the factory and taken a step back. Since I produce so little content now, manually and slowly. I have time to take my time, clean up the messes I’ve left behind.
And it’s easier now — export, archive, delete. And move on.