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?