Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [13]
The idea is simple to state: “Record everything, keep everything.” But actually putting it into practice turned out to be a major project. Even though cheap terabytes were still some years off, I felt it was important to start immediately. When the day of the cheap terabyte arrived, I hoped to be able to give people insight into the logistics, costs, benefits, feasibility, and desirability of recording everything. And just what “everything” in your life might mean.
Building my own e-memory became a three-pronged effort. First, I had to make digital copies of everything from my past. Second, I had to start recording and storing everything I saw, heard, and did from that point forward. Then, third, I had to figure out how to organize the information in my digital corpus. This last prong was crucial. Just saving files willy-nilly into an e-memory is easy, just as throwing receipts into a drawer is easy; but come tax time, or if you ever need to find a specific subset of those receipts, you’ll rue your lack of filing discipline. So the big task would be to figure out what kind of software would be needed to make such a massive and miscellaneous collection of information useful.
By January 2001 my sixteen-gigabyte e-memory contained more than five thousand photographs and about one hundred thousand pages of paper: letters, memos, bills, receipts, financial statements, legal documents, ticket stubs, business cards, greeting cards, brochures, meeting agendas, symposium programs, diplomas, warrantees, manuals, purchase orders, circuit diagrams, employee evaluations, annual reports, newspaper clippings, article printouts, stock certificates, report cards, childhood drawings, birth certificates.
I’d hung on to those hundreds of pounds of yellowing paper not because I wanted to help found a thriving community of sil verfish in my home, but because I knew that someday, for some reason, I would certainly need to refind at least one old item. The vast majority of them would never see the light of day again, but I had no way to predict which one I’d need back. I couldn’t possibly know in advance which check I might need to end a payment dispute or whether I would face a tax audit for a certain year. So I’d felt trapped into keeping all of them. It took me more than a decade to throw away circuit-theory class notes from MIT, even though it was clear I wouldn’t be designing any of those kinds of circuits.
Scanning and digitizing that much paper turned out to be a very big job, so in April 1999, I hired Vicki Rozycki as my personal assistant. Over the next two years we would scan, a handful at a time, what we then thought was everything. Then, for several years after that, we continued unearthing more to scan. It took up a large amount of her time. The hard part was finding stuff and getting it ready for the scanner. (Nowadays there are commercial services that will do this sort of thing for you much faster and cheaper, using automated bulk scanners.)
I never knew quite how much I’d resented the need to stockpile so much paper until I saw it dwindle away like dirty old winter snow in the spring thaw. Folder by folder, box by box, week after week, it disappeared. The clutter and hassle of keeping paper files had been like the half-noticed droning of an electric motor that suddenly goes silent, leaving me in a startled state of peace. Not to make light of tragedy, but this passage from a recent novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, struck a chord with me:
[It] was the paper that kept the [World Trade Center] towers burning. All of those notepads, and Xeroxes, and printed e-mails, and photographs of kids, and books, and dollar bills in wallets, and documents in files . . . all of them were fuel. Maybe if we lived in a paperless society, which lots of scientists say we’ll probably live in one day soon, Dad would still be alive.
I also made digital records of all my physical memorabilia.