There are no shortage of theories as to why the internet is so unpleasant these days. The New Yorker blames the shift to algorithmic feeds. Wired blames this on a cycle in which companies stop servicing users and start monetizing. MIT Technology Review slams ad-based business models. The Verge blames search engines. I agree with all these arguments. But here’s another thing. Our digital lives are becoming one closet of shame after another.
An embarrassing closet is a place in your home where you stuff things that have no other place to go. It doesn’t have to be a closet. You can also designate a garage, a room, a wardrobe, or all of them at the same time. Whatever the container is, it is defined by the lack of choice in what goes into that container. There you will find what you need. There’s stuff in there that you’ll never need. But as the closet of shame grows, the task of excavating and organizing becomes too difficult to contemplate.
The era of Internet shaming has begun. It was 20 years ago on Monday that Google introduced his Gmail. If you weren’t an Internet user at the time, it’s hard to explain the surprise that greeted Google’s announcement. Inbox limits often reached 15 megabytes. Google was offering dozens of gigabytes more than that for free. Everyone wanted to participate, but they had to be invited. I remember jockeying for one of those early invitations. I remember how excited I was when I found it. I felt lucky. I felt chosen.
A few months ago, I euthanized that Gmail account. I have over 1 million unread messages in my inbox. Most of what’s there is junk. But not all. There was so much missing to see. Searching didn’t save me. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Google’s algorithm was starting to let me down. There was a discrepancy between their “priorities” and my “priorities.” I set up an autoresponder and told everyone who emailed me that their address was invalid.
Behind Gmail was an amazing technology triumph. Storage costs were collapsing. In 1985, a gigabyte of hard drive memory cost approximately $75,000. By 1995, it was about $750. When Gmail launched in 2004, it cost a few dollars. Today, it’s less than a penny. Gmail currently offers 15 GB for free. What a wonder! What a mess.
The promise of Gmail — massive storage through powerful search tools — became the promise for virtually everything online. According to iCloud, there are more than 23,000 photos and about 2,000 videos stored somewhere on Apple’s servers. There are tens of thousands of likes on Spotify somewhere. How much is written down in your Notes app? How many conversations are stored in Messages, WhatsApp, Signal, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook DMs? Those archives contain the ones I love. We have a lot. There are many things I am happy to have rediscovered. However, nothing important can be found in the quagmire. I gave up trying.
What started in our files quickly reached our friends and family as well. Social networks have made it easy to become friends and follow people you’ve met, as well as many people you’ve never met. We were able to communicate with everyone at once without having to communicate with them individually. Or so I was told. The idea that you could build so much community with so little effort was an illusion. We are digitally connected to more people than ever before, yet we are still terribly alone. Intimacy takes time, but the cost of time is not going down, nor is the quantity going up.
Digital giants profit from my passivity. I currently pay monthly fees to Apple and Google for additional storage. It would take too long to remove everything needed to stay within limits. Various algorithms try to do things for me that I wouldn’t do for myself. They show me photos from my past and offer to sell me a book of my own memories. They offer me songs similar to songs I used to love but lost long ago. My feed is packed with recommended content from influencers and advertisers that mean nothing to me.
A few months ago, I vowed to take back control of my digital life. I started with email. I signed up for Hey, an email service that has a completely different perspective on how email works. Gmail and nearly all of its competitors assume that anyone should be able to send you email, and that their messages should be stored, sorted, searched, and categorized. Hey assumes that only the people you want to email should be able to email you.
The first time someone sends you a message, the message goes into something called a “screener” and the sender must be whitelisted or blackballed. If you blackball them, that’s it. Emails from that address will never be seen again. It also has another feature that I like. It’s a clean screen for replying to emails, so you can think and create without the visual clutter that comes with many other services.
Hay forces me to make a choice, rather than forcing me to avoid it. I always have to ask, do I want an email from this sender or that sender, and if so, where should I send it? That’s not to say Hey is perfect, or that it completely solves the problem I’m describing. Its search is much worse than Google. It’s very difficult to rediscover emails that you’ve viewed but haven’t taken any action on. There is no way to categorize different types of email sent from the same address. Threading long conversations with so many participants is difficult. I miss how easily it integrates with all the other Google products I need to use.
But for me right now, friction is what I’m looking for. I’m so grateful for what Google, Apple, and others have done to make our digital lives easier over the past 20 years. But getting too comfortable comes at a cost. I convinced myself that I didn’t have to make a decision. Currently, my digital life is a series of monuments to the cost of combining maximum storage with minimum intent.
I have thousands of photos of my children, but there are very few that I want to save to look at again. I have a record of almost every text I’ve sent since college, but I don’t know how to find the meaningful messages. I’ve spent years venting my thoughts to millions of people on X and Facebook, all while keeping in touch with my closest friends. I saved everything, but nothing.
I don’t blame anyone but myself for this. This is not what a company did to me. This is what I did to myself. But I’m now looking for software that insists on making choices, rather than whispering that I don’t need anything. I don’t want my digital life to become one closet of shame after another. A new metaphor stuck with me. I want it to be a garden that I tend to, cutting out weeds and nourishing the plants.
