Descending into the digital void forever
I'm drowning in a never-ending pit of data
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In my first memory of social media, I’m 12, I’m giggling as I sit on my bright pink bed with a friend.
That would put us in 2012, as I’m a 2000s baby. We were taking photos of each other, and she was telling me about all the people she had met online through her Kik chat – a platform kids used to talk with people they didn’t want their parents finding out about.
Instagram had only been around for two years, but we were already on the hunt for followers and likes. We posted a selfie together, accented by the hideous orange-yellow light in my room. The possibility of who might like or comment was exhilarating. Snapchat didn’t have Stories yet, but the platform’s disappearing messages were still coveted.
I was beginning to learn how to look for a good angle and flattering lighting. I loved taking pictures of everything in my bedroom – my dogs, my socks, my bookshelf. I plotted out my brand to be a consistent all pink, all the time on my feed.
The weirdest part about these memories is that they don’t just live in my head – they live in the cloud as photos, videos, and screenshots, since my dad taught us early to back everything up. Because of that, I have first-person documentation of my life since the age of 11.
Fourteen years later, I’m drowning in data.
I’ve been telling myself for the past year that I need to clean up my digital footprint. Delete needless photos, clear unused files, unsubscribe from brand emails I didn’t sign up for. Backups are important, vital even, but often high and low quality content are treated equally. Cleaning everything up feels impossible.
I’m afraid it will continue to be that way. Let’s take inventory of my digital life so you can understand why.
I have a cellphone and a personal laptop. I have 2,298 photos and videos in my iPhone camera roll after getting a new phone last year. I have 379 Notes and 94 open Reminders. I’ve used 319.3/994.6 gigabytes of data on my computer.
I have four email addresses I use consistently (ouch). My primary account has used 75.25/100 gigabytes, or 75% of my storage. 72.6 gigabytes of that comes from Google Photos, where I back up all my photos and videos. I have another 11.2 gigabytes of Google Photos data stored on an old email address.
I have accounts I use consistently on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Reddit, TikTok, Bluesky, Spotify, Threads, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Snapchat. From what I recall, I’ve had a Snapchat account since 2012, a Facebook account since 2013, an X account since 2015, a Reddit account since 2018, and a TikTok account since 2020.
I have 202 posts on Facebook and 199 posts on IG1, but that’s not counting those in my archive, which probably puts me at twice as much since I opened my account in high school. I have 241 playlists on Spotify and consistently listened to between 60,000 and 70,000 minutes of music a year for the past two years.
How about the number of people I follow and who follow me? (I’m not a large account by any means, so understand I’m looking at these vanity metrics2 for demonstrative purposes).
My ratios3 are as follows:
I’ll continue to aggregate data as well as my following and followers for as long as I’m on social media, which I predict will be as long as possible. For example, if I befriend 20 people I’ve made authentic connection with on Instagram every year, in 50 years I will follow almost 3,000 people.
That might not seem like a lot, but consider if I’m using social media from a relationship-focused standpoint rather than a consumerist standpoint. In other words, I use my follows as a way to keep up with the lives of people I know personally, rather than to just consume content about other people’s lives.
Do I have the capacity for relationship with over 3,000 people, let alone 20, at once? To exert the mental energy on life updates and fun vacations and filler content from 3,000 people? I mean, how many birthdays are we really expected to remember? The cognitive energy for 3,000 people sounds exhausting. And that’s only on one platform.
According to a psychological concept called Dunbar's number, humans can only comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships at a time. That means – based on point-blank follower counts without taking into account brands and celebrities – I’m already 993% over my limit.
Of course, there’s this funny little thing called the algorithm that will separate the wheat from the chaff and only show me accounts it thinks are relevant to my interests, but that still doesn’t negate the fact that some sort of relationship, whether parasocial4 or mutual, exists between my followers and I. If our paths cross in person, this social contract will be put to the test.
Estimates say over the course of a lifetime, the average person meets up to 80,000 people. (Great news for you LinkedIn lovers out there). Before social media existed, this wasn’t a big deal. Now, rather than a fleeting interaction staying a fleeting interaction, there’s the possibility we add another contact to our phones. Do you want to have 80,000 contacts in your phone, or even half that?
I’m a bit of a sentimental person. I like to keep my childhood diaries, old assignments from high school, graduation tassels. The problem is that it’s translating to the non-physical space where it’s harder to sort disorganized data and unfollow mutuals.5
I run into this problem with bookmarking posts on platforms like Instagram, X, and TikTok. I loooove to save posts for later. I collect them like little artifacts. Ah, yes, love this meme. Love this couch. Love this news article. It’s undeniably satisfying. What if I do need to reference them again? But the reality is, I rarely go back to look at them. Or if I do want to look at something again, I’ve forgotten to bookmark that specific thing.
With every new screenshot I acquire or every new password I have to come up with, I get more and more defeated. If I don’t intervene and do some digital cleansing, my data will continue to roll over despite every physical device transition I go through. If I don’t clean out my followers on social media, I’ll continue to see people and things that might not be relevant or productive to me anymore.
Anyone with any sort of digital footprint could run into this problem too unless they’re super diligent about space management. (You sum-zero email inbox people out there – kudos). It’s not as easy as paying someone to clean out your home in the event of a hoarding habit. I’m going to guess you’d prefer to be the person with primary access to your data.
I can’t come up with a solution that doesn’t exert what feels like a ridiculous amount of effort. Because, really, what this is about is me not having the energy to delete, archive, and back up my content to the cloud while also lacking good automation options.
So, yes, I do believe I will be descending into the digital void forever. But how big is forever, really?
Read my last story: What is the "AI em dash?"
My weekly roundup:
🎶 What I’m Listening To: Chappell Roan on Call Her Daddy
🎞️ What I’m Watching: I very much believed the White Lotus season finale was last week 😬 I was very wrong
🔎 What I’m Reading: Emily’s French Dispatch (and you should too because she’s an amazing writer and funny person)
📱 What I’m Scrolling: Check your group chat additions, my friends
⚠️ What’s On My Radar: According to Pop Crave, “Luigi Mangione is requesting a laptop in jail to view documents, video and other material surrounding his case.”
Note: If I did any math wrong in this newsletter, oopsie, I’m just a girl
Read the full Gen Z Dictionary here.
IG: Short for “Instagram”
Vanity metrics: According to Hootsuite, “a social media metric that looks impressive at a glance but doesn’t necessarily indicate a company’s overall success in reaching its goals.”
Parasocial relationships: A one-sided relationship where one party feels like they deeply know the other, going so far as to consider themselves friends when they’re not
Mutuals: People you have mutual social media followers with but don’t actually know