Wrote this and realized it fits well in this months IndieWeb Carnival. Go check out what some other bloggers are talking about in response to the “tools” prompt.
Anna has a recent post on the ephemerality of digital. I grew up spending way too much time on the computer. In my mind, putting things on paper was the way for it to get lost. My parents seemed to like to moving houses as I was growing up. Each move brought with it a purge of physical belongings. Marie Kondo put to writing what I did years before with each move. Books, toys, clothes, notebooks, drawings, everything was subject to being thrown away. Needing to examine the sentimentality of each item. But if it was on my computer. That I could just keep for as long as I want.
But even my computers had their limits. They would have a bad crash, burn out, or software stops getting supported. A forced moving of house. Each time is a pain because you have to figure out what you want to keep or throw away. Assuming there was even a choice of keeping your old data. I’d occasional gamble on if a tech company will shutdown their product or the “product vision” wildly changes. Hoping that I will not have to re-download the entirety of my past data and re-upload it to some other service. Alternatively, I could to spend a lot of time and money on self hosting. Even that is not without it’s own risks. This happened so many times over the years that I’ve thrown out features for simplicity.
I feel so torn. I grew up believing that the digital format could only get better. And for a long time it seemed to always be getting better. But at some point the industries focus on software changed. The number of times I’ve had to do those gambles seemed to increase. Software seemed to no longer be focused on the simplest solution for a complex problem. Many of the downfalls are rakes being laid out on the yard waiting to be stepped on and be comically slapped in the face. Software feels so close to being good. Like just put the rake away. But it keeps slapping us in the face in ways that seem to surprise us each time.
This gets back to the simplest tools end up being the most resiliant. Pen and paper vs Google Docs. Physical books vs Kindle. Plain text vs “You can’t even download it because it’s in the cloud”. My brother gave me a mechanical watch. It has the mechanism to self wind as you walk around wearing it. My grandpa was amused by me wearing a mechanical watch as I was going to school for computer science. A simple little device that just works. I take more and more paper notes now. But I also spent this afternoon on my iPad practicing to write the kanji for the new address we’re moving to. No need to draw out 100 little squares. I can trivially load up a grid page and erase my mistakes with wreckless abandon. There’s value in some ephemerality. I just wish software would get itself together so we can chose the ephemerality with confidence.