I still have a photograph of the breakfast I made the morning I ended an eight-year relationship and cancelled a wedding.
It was an unremarkable breakfast—a fried egg—but it is now digitally fossilized in a floral dish we moved with us when we left New York and headed west.
I don’t know why I took the photo, except, well, I do: I had fallen into the reflexive habit of taking photos of everything.
Not long ago, the egg popped up as a “memory” in a photo app!
The timestamp jolted my actual memory.
It was May 2019 when we split up, back when people cancelled weddings and called off relationships because of good old-fashioned dysfunction, not a global pandemic. Back when you wondered if seating two people next to each other at a wedding might result in awkward conversation, not hospitalization.
Did I want to see the photo again?
Not really.
Nor do I want to see the wedding ads on Instagram, or a near-daily collage of wedding paraphernalia on Pinterest, or the “Happy Anniversary!” emails from WeddingWire, which for a long time arrived every month on the day we were to be married.
Never mind that anniversaries are supposed to be annual.
Yet nearly two years later, these things still clutter my feeds. The photo widget on my iPad cycles through pictures of wedding dresses.
Of the thousands of memories I have stored on my devices—and in the cloud now—most are cloudless reminders of happier times. But some are painful, and when algorithms surface these images, my sense of time and place becomes warped.
It’s been especially pronounced this year, for obvious and overlapping reasons.
In order to move forward in a pandemic, most of us were supposed to go almost nowhere.
Time became shapeless. And that turned us into sitting ducks for technology.
Our smartphones pulse with memories now.
In normal times, we may strain to remember things for practical reasons—where we parked the car—or we may stumble into surprise associations between the present and the past, like when a whiff of something reminds me of Sunday family dinners. Now that our memories are digital, though, they are incessant, haphazard, intrusive.
During the pandemic, most of us were supposed to go almost nowhere.
Time became shapeless.
And that turned us into sitting ducks for technology.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when apps started co-opting memories, madly deploying them to boost engagement and make a buck off nostalgia.
The groundwork was laid in the early 2010s, right around the time my now ex and I started dating.
For better or worse, I have been a tech super-user since then too.
In my job as a technology journalist, I’ve spent the past dozen years tweeting, checking in, joining online groups, experimenting with digital payments, wearing multiple activity trackers, trying every “story” app and applying every gauzy photo filter.
Unwittingly, I spent years drafting a technical blueprint for the relationship, one that I couldn’t delete when the construction plans fell apart.
If we already are part cyborg, as some technologists believe, there is a cyborg version of me, a digital ghost, that is still getting married.
The real me would really like to move on now. Continue reading
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