For nearly a decade, Clean House television host Niecy Nash would start each episode standing on a stoop or in a driveway to introduce “the show that rescues families from a cluttered home.” In a series of cuts rich with delightfully harsh commentary (“how did two little ladies make such a big mess?”) her team turned barely functional spaces into livable homes. The message was clear: clutter is wrong, it is embarrassing, and it is no way to live. Today clutter creeps beyond the home. We are constantly bombarded with digital clutter — emails, texts, and voice messages from every realm of life. And we create our own, snapping photos or jotting down notes, likely with the intention of allowing these creations to “sit” in seemingly infinite “spaces” in perpetuity, mostly out of sight and mind. When we run out of storage space, companies are more than happy to trade gigabyte-sized slices of The Cloud for dollars, and so our digital footprint swells. We may have people like Niecy Nash to save us in the physical world, but who is coming to rescue us from our digital stuff? To classify someone as a digital hoarder is a challenging exercise. Without the physical junkyard, it is difficult to distinguish between excessive and normal twenty-first-century accumulation. An unexpected event helped me begin to see the physicality of my own digital footprint as something resembling clutter; it disappeared. On the morning of the Great North American Eclipse in 2024, I woke up to find that all my digital files were gone, in what felt like a fitting cosmic event. After a few moments of panicked research, I learned that I had been a victim of a process known as offloading — an unintuitive term that “frees” my files from the confines of a $2,000, three-and-a-half-pound machine. The process has good intentions; laptops come with a set amount of storage space, some of which is needed in order for basic machine functionality and the rest of which stores the same files that might be sent to The Cloud, such as photos and documents. My laptop had nearly run out of storage and so, in an effort to help keep my device functioning, Apple had copied some of my data from my laptop to The Cloud and then removed my own copy, which is why I no longer saw my files. Practically, no data was lost; it was as if a company had moved most of my stuff to a storage locker for me to free up space to dance around my home. But as I tried to understand all that I had lost, I couldn’t recall even a fraction of what I had been storing on my laptop, let alone what lived in the additional 871.72 gigabytes of data that I had spread across three accounts in The Cloud. My amnesia reminded me of conversations that Niecy Nash had with embarrassed homeowners who couldn’t recall the contents of overflowing closets. When I did start to go through my folders and files, I found items both meaningful and utterly useless. It took me as long to find old photos shared by my now-deceased grandmother as it did to stumble upon a flimsy high school resume. How did I let my digital home get so messy, so full of meaningless items? Part of the blame surely rests on the gatekeepers of The Cloud themselves. The word “cloud,” a brilliant marketing coup cooked up by tech companies, paints a powerful image. In 1994 an advertisement for AT&T introduced The Cloud in much the same way many of us picture their namesake; peaceful and expansive, dotting clear skies, of the fluffy cumulus variety. Thanks to that word, when I try to visualize my digital self in a room that needs decluttering, I am instead transported to an idyllic, expansive view seen through the oval of an airplane window. To cleanse my imagination of this conception, I attempted to visualize my data as approximately one hundred eighty-five standard single-layer DVDs (for those who can still visualize them), four hundred thousand photos, or nearly eight hundred thousand books of approximately five hundred pages each. This is not just a theoretical exercise — ultimately the digital is physical. Data lives on real tangible pieces of metal alloy excavated from Earth, but knowing that isn’t enough to rewrite my relationship to things I never experience in physical space. The way I do experience digital items is likely part of the problem. It is as simple as navigating to a website in my browser (for me, Google Drive) and clicking on a document icon, the same way I might pick up a paperclip. Behind the scenes things are a little more complicated: my browser makes a network request to Google, which then performs a series of tasks like validating that I am in fact Julia, fetching the document metadata (i.e. discovering who owns the document, who has access), loading it from storage, and then streaming it back to my browser. Technically the document is never even in my possession (unless I download it or configure offline viewing) in the same way that the paperclip is; it remains in Google’s possession and any edits I make get sent to Google servers where they apply my changes. But I need to be able to picture where my files are actually, physically, stored, to start to understand my own clutter scale. I am on the East Coast of the United States, so my first guess is (relatively) local; several Google data complexes in Virginia, South Carolina, or Ohio. To get on the grounds, in the building, and on to the server floor would require authorization through many checkpoints — what Google describes as a “6-layer deep” security model. So instead, I take myself on a Google Maps tour of just one of them, in Moncks Corner, a suburb of Charleston, South Carolina. It is home to approximately thirteen thousand people, the historic Santee Canal, a Piggly
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence