Ev BogueIn late November/early December I came home from a yoga class.
I lit a candle.
I sat on the floor, cross legged.
Then, I plugged in the two massive hard drives I'd been carrying with me since I originally left New York.
I moved two folders off of the drives to my new tiny solid-state drive: 1. my music collection. 2. the entire Battlestar Galactica series (can't delete that!).
I took one last look at the contents of the drives. I opened disk utility. Then I clicked erase on the first drive.
It finished within moments.
I selected the backup hard drive, then hit erase.
Suddenly, all of the data from my past self, stretching back in time from that present moment until before high school ceased to exist.
40,000 pictures documenting countless frozen moments in college, at the schoolhouse, gone. Thousands of hours of work writing until the depths of midnight as a Chicago teenager, gone. All of the high-res illustrations that I did working at New York Magazine, gone.
Unpublishable "Fashion" photos of that one girl who cried a lot that I dated for a month many Decembers ago, gone.
I continually destroy my past in order to go evolve faster into the future.
Over the next few weeks, I felt myself rocket forward in space/time in a way that I'd never experienced before.
At times it was way too fast. I almost lost my ground once or twice.
Emailed this to P.R. the other day, in response to a question he had for me about my work:
One of my good friends, D.P. -- a hip hop artist from New York -- always manages to burn his house down/get his laptop stolen/break his hard drive just before he's about to release a new album.
He goes through a few days of being depressed, he throws chairs, he drinks himself to sleep. Then he sits down and records a new album, which is done in about a week, which is 100x better than anything he's ever played for me off the album he lost before.
The work is inside you, me, him.
This is why I purposefully burn things.
I'm not sure if it works for everyone though, might just be me.
G.B. writes about the cognitive weight of data in her new book Digital Warriorship.
I believe that the weight of the data that we save is holding us anchored in space/time.
We want to maintain control of all of those bits. So we save, it -- the data, all of it -- we put it in folders and then we put it in boxes. We moved our data from disks, to CDs, to spinny drives, to solid state drives, and then out into The Cloud.
We feel like we can't delete our blog, because our second self might vanish. If this is true, why is my traffic on Evbogue.com the same as Far Beyond the Stars was (even though I chose to blank slate on February 15th)?
Because your second self lives in-between the data.
Our first evolution was relinquishing the need for physical possessions = accomplished. The second evolution is relinquishing control of our data = something to work with.
I've destroyed my physical notebooks for years, but data always seemed like it wasn't too much of a burden. Until I realized it was. Not as much, but still a tether in space/time.
The truth is that I could never delete all of the data. You can Wayback Machine Evbogue.com and check out some fun stuff. If you can figure out my Livejournal handle, that's another treasure trove of teenage angsty goodness. When you google image search my name, a good deal of the results are Nymag.com illustration work -- everything did there had my name on it.
The act of deleting all of the data on those two drives wasn't an attempt to erase everything.
Instead, it was an act of giving up control.
I want The Cloud to decide.
I'm not interested in determining what is worth saving anymore.
You decide for me.