Forgetting is the Last Human Thing

digital memory, modern compulsions, dating shows

This thought first popped into my head while editing my final for a film class. Shoulder-deep in Premiere Pro, sorting through hours of footage from the past few years that my poor MacBook was woefully unequipped to handle. I am disastrously greedy with technology. I will redownload an essay five times in a row, changing a single word each time, then refuse to delete any of the earlier copies. I am all too familiar with the “disk space full” pop-up, deleting the largest file I can get to in order to put it out of my sight and mind. Too lazy to sort through all of those file duplicates, too desperate to track down an external hard drive. We have not been taught to grapple with running out of space. Terabytes exist not so we can talk about them, or know how to concretely define them, but so we can buy them when we want to download a new episode of Drag Race. These words mean nothing to the average person, they are linguistically pretty useless. They are signifiers of a space that is created to be filled. How much storage space is too much? A quick search brought me words like “pettabyte” and “zetabyte,” the “Bekenstein bound”--words that I will never have to fully comprehend. According to a ZDNet article from 2011, the world’s max data storage capacity is 295 exabytes, a quantity that has to then be explained in twenty different, more digestible metaphors–a stack of CDs reaching to the moon. 

What I’m looking to confirm through these searches is this idea that, as it currently stands, we are never required to consider the effects of holding onto everything. The reluctance of this technology to delete anything enables our own behaviors–I am personally so easily swayed to record everything I do. BeReal, One Second a Day. Some of it is capitalism, compulsive productivity etc, and some of it feels more reminiscent of a why not outlook on life. If I have the physical ability to hold onto everything I’ve ever done, why wouldn’t I? Just in case? There’s a sense of apathy around what I am keeping around–I’m not choosing to hold onto a memory, I’m functioning by default. 

I say that forgetting is the last human thing because when I empty the trash can on my desktop, it asks “are you sure?” My computer doesn’t want to forget, wants to cling onto the data that I give it. The choice to let go is in my hands, I only take it when I have to. There’s that Infinite Jest quote going around on TikTok that says “everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks in it.” When every day is captured in photos and files, the memories feel like separate entities from the living–you don’t have to consider scratching.. 

In thinking about this piece, I struggled to find some connective tissue–some Loraxian sign that this idea of limitless storage, limitless memory feels like the start of a fable. Then I watched the finale of The Ultimatum. The Ultimatum: Queer Love is a dating show that tests the strength of preexisting couples by pairing its members with new partners, and then asking if the first two want to come back together, this time in marriage. Lexi and Rae, a young yet impressively stable couple, leave the show–and the reunion–engaged, even after an intimate moment between Rae and her “trial marriage” partner caused conflict and feelings of betrayal in Lexi. After the reunion episode, the screen goes black–“Lexi and Rae are no longer together” it announces, shocking viewers. In a follow-up interview with Netflix’s Tudum platform, Lexi cites “things that still weren’t sitting properly…things that she had done when she was in her trial marriage that we were just having trouble getting past,” referencing the sexual dalliance. 

We talk a lot about the age of digital surveillance, the citizens’ arrest of West Elm Caleb, cancel culture and its consequences–all through the lens of the writhing mass of an internet audience that descends onto a stranger’s Instagram to dole out punishment. We don’t necessarily talk about this punishment when it becomes more internal–not from the audience, but from those who are directly affected. Lexi was deeply affected by Rae’s choice to sleep with her trial partner during the show’s filming, this much is clear. Maybe that impact would have dulled with time, become more digestible, if it hadn’t been filmed–the show’s cast watched the final cut of the series before the reunion, and presumably again while it’s been airing. To stay in a long lasting relationship, you have to be able to forgive the things that sting, that poke at your insecurities–the distance that time effortlessly creates allows this forgiveness to function, so that everyone can go on feeling very martyred and self-satisfied of themselves for getting over their grudges. Like a fever that jolts you awake in the middle of the night, this documentation of every painful conflict in their relationship made moving forward as a couple impossible for Lexi and Rae. It’s a trap. Documenting your life on the internet, TV, your friend’s camera roll leaves you vulnerable to being slapped in the face with everyone you’ve ever been. Even though the digital memory of their relationship is housed on a Netflix supercomputer somewhere and not the documents folder of a laptop, knowing that this memory is now concretely preserved in a thousand different places can’t make the relationship, or healing from it, any easier. 

Sometimes I feel a profound sadness that I will never know a time before the internet. It’s not that I don’t want Spotify and that website that tells you if it’s raining where you are, it’s more that I have a nagging voice in the back of my head that tells me I’d appreciate all of those things more if I had spent some time working up to them. I do hear myself whining whenever I say anything like that. Everything I’m talking about here, this vague concept of people who are especially susceptible to hoarding gigabytes of storage, rewatching their relationships until they can’t stand them–they’re me. I’m anxious and inclined to constantly compare myself to others, I am the least ideal candidate to test the effects of growing up with modern technology. Having spent my whole life with Google at my disposal feels a lot like reading the last line of a book, or watching the finale of a dating show. You can never un-know what couples stayed together and broke up, you can never un-know how it ends. I find myself wanting my right to never forget to become a privilege–I wonder if a sudden limitation in the wake of endless choice would be a wake-up call. I want to reluctantly have to hold onto a thought or memory like water in my hands, so that I can learn to accept the kind of temporality that the internet has shielded me from ever facing. 

When I was 14, I went on this big class trip to France–the day after I returned, my phone crashed, losing every photo of the trip with it. I didn’t take the time to recount my memories to my family, I didn’t shrug and move on. I spent weeks redrawing every photo until they appeared fully realized in front of me, just as they had looked on my screen.