Why We Never Truly Die Anymore




When my dog chewed up the 4MB memory card for my Nintendo GameCube, I thought it was the end of the world. But fortunately, the save files that it held lived to see another day. In fact, they’re still living now — dusty and defeated in the bottom of a drawer inside a cracked, warped and bitten plastic casing. The bite marks have outlived the dog that gave them, and the data has lived through four presidents and multiple paradigm shifts. It lived to see itself be replaced. It watched helplessly as its 8MB, 16MB and 32MB cousins entered the fray and obsolescence began to set in.

We didn’t understand yet that we were children born atop exponential curves of innovation, only that 32 megabyte memory cards could hold a lot more data than the 16 megabyte ones from the year prior. We didn’t understand that we were witnessing the beginnings of a trend that would continue tirelessly alongside us throughout our lives as we grew into adults.

As the years passed, that 32 megabyte memory card hanging on that GameStop wall grew to feel like a symbol of our ever-spinning world. The tech we marveled at in our youth was just the tip of the digital iceberg. The scale of our digital universe had begun an explosion of Cambrian proportions. And the pace of progress has accelerated so quickly that we’ve all become highway blind.