The jet lag from the trip has finally worn off. It feels like a long time that I was away.
I still get the occasional flashback to the phone snatch moment I wrote about in #82. It still replays in my mind like a bad dream. And I keep thinking through what digital memories are now lost forever - each replay uncovers a small sliver of something else that is unrecoverable. This piece on the effect of digital ubiquity on memory and loss by Noga Arikha is a lovely read.
“Yet we continue creating our « digital memories », so clean, so free of historical dust. We are all hoarders now. Each of us, alone with our digital devices, is engulfed in a vast world belied by the small screen. Our smartphones are, quite extravagantly, our cameras. Words and images have become entwined, a return of the imprese of the Renaissance: motto and image aligned to make a point about ourselves, or the world, or our place in it. Record-keeping has become a lived life’s parallel activity. I would even venture that we (I included) obfuscate with picture-taking our melancholy inability fully to inhabit the perpetually fleeting, complex, ungraspable present.”
The phone itself has now reported itself as in Shenzen. I’m fascinated how it still reports it’s location despite it being erased. I don’t even know if it’s the entire physical phone or if it has been disassembled into parts and it is just one assemblage that still communicates, amputated from its case or screen. A phantom limb. It is a kind of technological magic that reveals the terrifying global traceability of even indirectly network connected devices. The phone is using other phones of a similar model to piggyback off their connections to link to the grid. A decade ago Edward Snowden’s revelations about state-run/state-sponsored technological surveillance felt shocking and new, but now it is expected, and frighteningly ordinary.