Our Digital Lives Are Too Fragile
Reading Time: 4 minutesWhen Evernote killed its free tier, I had to find a new home for my digital things., Our digital lives are too dependent on tech platforms.
One Friday night at 9 p.m., instead of going out to celebrate my co-worker’s birthday, I found myself glued to the Evernote app. When I’d opened it earlier that evening, hoping to add a new note, I discovered that the app had more or less killed its free tier. With my Cambridge rent, nonprofit salary, and recent parachute out of academia, I couldn’t justify paying the yearly subscription of $129 a year—but I also couldn’t abandon this treasury of my life. My digital notebooks were filled with gems like ‘films I enjoyed in 2014 (incomplete),’ ‘imperfect regular German verbs,’ and ‘completely f-ing random unordered thoughts/ideas.’ I had over 2,000 notes dating all the way back to my junior year of high school. Where would they go, my recipes, poems, and scattered thoughts, now they no longer had a home?
I opened a word processor instead. A warning popped up: ‘There is not enough space to save this document to iCloud. Purchase additional storage or remove some documents from iCloud.’
The death of free Evernote is just one example of how our datafied lives are entangled with the fates and whims of tech companies. In August, users on X (formerly known as Twitter) lost three years’ worth of photos. And last month, Google Drive started hemorrhaging files, with some users losing years of data. Our digital life has become increasingly impermanent and is mostly outside of our control, making the threat and pain of digital loss ever more acute.
The days of true digital ownership are long gone. Streaming companies like Spotify and Netflix have changed the status quo, so that instead of permanently owning a media library, we only temporarily license one. Meanwhile, the terms and costs of cloud storage services like Dropbox and iCloud mean that access to your data is always asterisked. In 2012, the file-sharing website Megaupload was shut down by regulators for hosting pirated content; in the process, users with legal data were locked out of their accounts for years, unable to access their files. The situation only gets worse—this year, from bankruptcy to hacks to fires, cloud-based services are dying faster than lanternflies.
Even if we apparently own a digital good, continued access to our digital purchases is not guaranteed. Since the late ’90s, digital rights management has enabled companies to copyright and thus fence off digital goods. DRM is at the root of everyday frustrations like the inability to play music, games, audiobooks, or e-books on a different platform than the vendor used to purchase them. Can’t read a Kobo book on a Kindle? Thank DRM.
Most alarmingly, DRM accelerates the transience of our digital goods. A few years ago, a Tron video game stopped working after Disney ended its business relationship with a DRM provider. And in an Orwellian twist, in 2009, Amazon remotely wiped the e-book 1984 off consumers’ Kindles due to a copyright dispute. DRM affects all sorts of digital devices, not just media. After one company merger, patients with retinal implants were left wondering if the proprietary software behind their sight-enabling devices would continue to be supported.
Thanks to tech monopolies, we have even less agency than before over our data and digital goods. After Amazon acquired Audible in 2008, they promised to kill its DRM. But 15 years later, consumers are still waiting. Because Amazon dominates more than 90 percent of the audiobook market, we are forced to choose between yielding to Amazon or not being able to listen to audiobooks at all. Consumers will suffer as power gets increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few tech giants. When those companies are cut at the knees, as was the case for Google Drive—which holds the largest market share of file-sharing software—there is little recourse.
To be fair, nonprofit, open-source alternatives are also fallible to a fragile economy. Open-source software relies on a community of volunteers that are liable to burnout. And decisions are sometimes still beholden to the interests of very few—aka ‘benevolent dictators for life.’ The funding model for nonprofits can also threaten digital longevity—either relying on crowdfunding, like Wikipedia, or relying on grants from foundations that still favor corporate interests. The problem is not the digitization of our life, it’s in the lack of real options for securing the durability of our digital world.
A Google search for how to archive my digital life only returns suggestions for backing up my data to the cloud. With the precarity of cloud-based services and subscription-reliant models, I’m not reassured. But one thing gives me hope: We’re starting to come full circle. In a study by the American Library Association in November, millennials and Gen Z were found to prefer print books over e-books. And film photography has been on the rise among young people, with film sales increasing twentyfold from 2020 to 2022. Ever the mainstream hipster, I’ve started to carry a disposable camera on vacations, printing hard copies in addition to keeping digital copies. Call me a Luddite, but I’ll take it as a compliment—after all, Luddites started the original rebellion against Big Tech.
Downloading my files off Evernote wasn’t impossible, but it wasn’t easy. Hours later, I had saved most of my most important notes to my hard drive. As a sentimental person, it hurt to think that I might someday lose this digital scrapbook, this time capsule of my teenage and college years. But then I remembered the time when, six years ago, I lost all the photos on my phone when my phone was snatched off a bus; I was sad, but also relieved to be free of the burden of my digital baggage. Today, I can’t remember a single photo I had saved on that phone.
Maybe the real trick to unchaining ourselves from the clutches of Big Tech is to free ourselves from our attachment to our digital things. Only then, we might rely a little less on ephemeral tech. And maybe, just maybe, we might have a real stake in our digital destinies.
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