Disposing The Digital Detritus

All These Newsletters Have To Go Somewhere

I have 197,144 unread emails.

That’s in the main email folder.

I’m not sure how many en masse, if you count:

• old company emails that I still have because someone is afraid to turn them off

• email addresses I used as proxies to test-drive software

• intentional cast-off email addresses

• inaccessible but probably still frozen in time email addresses like estro@sirius.com or, god forbid, ntangborn@aol.com

• old domains I spuriously purchased that I still keep active because I might just need them one day, like nick@dudewithachapmanstick.com

• and then various assorted really-good-idea-at-the-time-but-now-dead-startup email addresses.

I really thought tangborndigitalnewsletters@gmail.com was going to help me with junk mail.

Instead I created a folder that I never check. Just a graveyard of unread digital newsletters.

I tried Unroll.me. Turns out if you “roll up” your emails that aren’t quite trash enough to unsubscribe, you never read them anyway.

And meanwhile they’re selling data points like, “he really loves steak,” and “he once purchased a pair of adult diapers as a gag,” to the highest bidder.

In one folder I found files dating back to 2013.

I didn’t have this computer in 2013. I assume they were rooted off some abandoned external hard drive for a long forgotten project, given a cursory name at the time, and now live in binary dust.

And those external hard drives?

Files dating back to 1998. I’m sure I have some ragged old .doc files that started their cyberlife as early as 1994, when I was attempting to create a coffee table magazine about sex that wouldn’t embarrass your grandmother.

(Hot tip: It did!)

Files that have no thumbnail image because they’ve outlived their registry entries or become corrupted.

At last inventory I have at least 12 external hard drives, half of which are in use,

I have 15 monitors.

My friend Jack says, “You don’t have an office, you have a sports bar.”

I don’t even like sports, and this is not my house, but you get the idea

Inbox zero is a myth.

I say this with love for Merlin Mann.

I’d be happy with inbox 10,000.

That seems more realistic.

I might need that Chewy.com receipt someday

---

When I get dry for ideas to write about, I dig through old hard drives.

I find presentations that I lost nights of sleep and years off my life over.

Now they’re just primitive yellow and white slides with pancakes and numbers on them.

At the same time, while I accrue all this desktop debris, the physical world intrudes.

I almost only read books in physical form anymore. Reading a pdf of anything is monstrous.

I jammed through most of Joe R Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series in softcover book form, thanks to eBay and its Buy 3 get 1 Free shops of used literature.

About 25% of them have a 50% chance of pee on them, but I figure those are decent odds at $1 or $2 a book.

One Larry McMurtry novel was so grimly dirty I used rubber gloves to throw it away.

Otherwise it’s fine!

I’ve been spending time in Goodwill and Austin Pets Alive Thrift stores picking up bluray and DVD copies of movies that aren’t streaming. It’s amazing the stuff that gets tossed out.

You’d think everyone wants a box set of the first season of Kung Fu starring David “Grasshopper” Carradine, that’s missing disc 4.

---

Photo by Jana Birchum, from The Austin Chronicle

My local bookstore seems to be thriving.

Everyone I know buys vinyl.

Physical artifacts are cool as shit, to the over-40 crowd. God knows what everyone else wants. Fortnite gift cards?

Is the return of physical media the universe telling us to sweep out the digital detritus?

Am I creating more cyber slop?

What is the physical cost of digital junk mail?

According to a 2009 McAfee report (I know, boo hiss), 62 trillion spam emails were sent that year. In 2009.

That means, according to the most recent data I could find, 121 trillion spam emails are sent annually now.

That’s equal to the emissions of about 6 million passenger cars annually.

That’s just spam.

Old emails, files and digital detritus stored on servers means 3-4 kg of CO2 emissions per year per GB.

I’m losing the plot. All I know is, that is a shit ton of natural resources being sucked up to keep your undeleted Goldbelly coupons in glacial storage.

---

The average worker receives 100-120 emails per day. I don’t know about you, but that seems an underestimation. And I can tell you that about 5% of those emails mean jack-shit.

And thus, while folks consider the environmental impact of AI, just consider what’s happening in the status quo.

At one point the idea of a celestial jukebox - with every song, ever, on it - seemed like a marvel.

But we soon found, you can’t find anything new, and the revenue distributed to artists is a pittance.

What I wouldn’t give to go back to getting attitude at Northern Lights Records for bringing a bunch of major label records in pure, physical, compact disc form to the counter.

To be back among the radio hucksters, label promoters, in-stores, spending hours looking at record covers, determining their potential quality and provenance.

---

Here I sit, 10:45 at night. Writing another newsletter on my computer, with my 3 monitors hard at work in unblinking carbon black staring at me.

I do my best writing at night. Usually in bed, with the lights out, when it’s most inconvenient.

If I can’t fall asleep within 10 minutes, the mind floods.

I have pads of paper and pens, a tablet and pencil, and my phone, all next to the bed, for ideas or sentence fragments or phrases or sketches or whatever comes next.

I have a new iPad from my parents (Thanks Mom and Dad!) and then I have the old Microsoft Surface I can’t quit, because it has all my comics in digital format on it.

I use iCloud and OneDrive and so many other digital cloud domains to store my every tiny idea and spark and memory.

The genius slop that pours out of me, in every convenient format.

---

Thanks for reading Are You Experienced. I’m Nick Tangborn and I am up-to-here with all this digital noise.

This thing is all free all the time. This week, anyway. But for those of you kind souls who wish to pay for a subscription, know that your dollars keep our home warm or cold at night, depending on the night.

Please do feel free to share this piece if the feeling strikes.

And if you’d like to throw some coin my way for the effort, it’s always welcome.