Inexhaustible lives We got our first ‘smart camera’ when our children were young. With it, we could instantly upload high definition photos and video—taken with quality optics and a reasonable aperture—to a data centre, provided we had access to wireless internet. The same servers also hosted images from our other devices: computers, cell phones, tablets. This data was stored on our devices and mirrored on the servers of the data centre, located somewhere far off, in America. The data was subject to algorithmic processing to uncover trends; it was bundled and sold. This was the economy of data. The corporation that owned the data centre, once one of the ‘big four’, went bankrupt—but we had all of our data stored also on our devices, so we did not lose it. Instead, we found another, smaller, ‘off site’ server to back up our data. Finally, though, the data centres ceased operating altogether. Despite our travels, there was still a whole world out there that was unknown to us. We were, by then, too old to go anywhere—and, in any case, had no more desire to. The world was confusing and not at all pleasant for explorations: too many barriers. We managed to rig up a series of efficient solar panels on our rock. We still had a device that could store all of those photos we took. There were hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of images and short video clips. We backed them up on robust microflash arrays. For a while, we were anxious about printing them or putting them in albums or organising them. We could not come up with categories that did the images justice. They were marked by year—though some of our devices had recorded this data incorrectly. Our photographs, our memories, we discovered, were a mess. There was no way we could solve this mess. There were software products that would recognise patterns and organise data accordingly—but we couldn’t afford them, and we were unsure whether OUR PATTERNS were the same as the patterns that the products would uncover. Increasingly, though, we enjoyed the lack of pattern. The image data that we had, stored on our one remaining device, was a world in itself — something we could explore, hunched over the device’s small screen. It provided constant surprises. We knew we would never exhaust it. There were often multiple attempts at the same shot, some blurred, some unrecognisable. We learned to love these images as much as the crisp, well-composed shots of our smiling family. We began to occupy this data, to explore it, to see it as a world of discovery: our inexhaustible lives.
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