The Moving Test

I have an entire stack of 45s I stumbled on walking down Fifth Avenue (Brooklyn) last week. When I’ve had time, I listen to one or two and imagine what the songs meant to the person. It had to at least warrant investing in a single disc to listen again and again.

This made me think of my first iPod, which I hung onto for years. I remember charging it during a move to see if it even started or I should just throw it out. Miraculously, it lit up and as I scrolled through my library, I was immediately transported to that period of time in my life. Eventually it failed the moving test and I let it go and lost an archive of that period of time in my life.

This was years before the cloud so all your music lived on the computer. To get it on the iPod, you had to sync via a USB cable. It had no internet access. Dinosaurs still roamed the earth.

But now, everything syncs harmoniously and lives in the cloud. Except you have to pay for that. Each month. Until you die. And then what? What happens to that archive of your life that your grandchildren, or some random woman in Brooklyn, may want to experience?

I would love to be able to hear the music my grandparents specifically, not just their generation, listened to. I think of the movie cliche of children reading their parents love letters. Now sweethearts are e-mailing or texting. So much of the artifacts of our lives seems positioned to evaporate.

Or have I just unearthed a new digital undertaker service? You purchase a plot to store the digital artifacts in the cloud forever. Your children can pay to get a gravestone page where people can post messages, or for a small monthly fee, contribute flowers.

All your digital content will be accessible to your heirs for eternity, for a small fee. But what about the items that live within a separate platform? For example, that golden knife you busted your ass playing “Zhengtu” for. Recently, Chinese courts said that too can be inherited [link].

It seems reasonable to me that things we ‘buy’ become our property in a legal sense. We make a conscious choice to ‘buy’ instead of ‘rent’ something based on this understanding.

But here’s where physical and digital reality collide. When I say ‘cloud’ you may think Amazon and see Charmin Bears, but it is just other people’s computers. Those computers have limited space, they just interconnect to give us the temporary feeling of infinity.

Unless we are committed to sacrificing a large amount of Earth and its energy to other people’s computers, it seems time to figure out what we retain and what we let go. Who gets to keep their family history and who doesn’t?

I suppose we’re all making that choice in the physical world as well. At some point, these records I found just didn’t pass the moving test. I would argue my iPod itself had in fact passed on.

But you experience that transition. You get a moment to revisit them and then let them go, they don’t just vanish after a few missed payments.