July 29, 2005, 5.40pm • 46 comments » • 2,238 Views

iLife, myLife and the ghastly promise of distributed peace of mind

If you are the bastard who broke into my apartment this week - stealing my Powebook, video camera, digital camera, 35mm camera, hifi, DVDs, dictaphone, interview recordings and some very sentimental personal items - then, rest assured, if I get even a suspicion that you are ’round these parts again, you’d better pay for some good protection, mate.

Once again, I’m forced to face up to a life gone missing. So many parts of an individual are now stored digitally, on a single little hard disc; parts that once were scattered across individual pieces of paper, film and other media. My photo and music libraries, archives of work completed and yet to do, accounts, email, contacts - bye-bye. Don’t ask me if I made a backup; only the week before I had begun making a backup of my computer but got apprehensive about whether I was choosing the right method and it was taking a long time anyway, so I cancelled.

An increasing amount of our lives, too, is being stored online. Because I’m shy at heart, I’ve always been apprehensive about storing fragments of my life in public online spaces, about daring to show off or share too much - offer too much and you create a permanent, indexed trail of breadcrumbs for folk online to follow and piece together parts of yourself you had wanted to keep quiet, connections that make an undesired assemblage; sometimes you don’t want to show everybody everything.

Well I’ve had extra security fitted here but, suddenly, storing my entire life online makes perfect sense. Even if I had a backup, who’s to say they wouldn’t have taken that as well? After all, the burglars took something from every room in the place and they thought it best to steal a nondescript case of MiniDiscs that were entirely blank and unopened save for audio recordings of some important past interviews I had carried out.

Suddenly one place doesn’t seem enough to keep myself anymore; far more secure to spread yourself around. There’s a certain risk in keeping 1,700 photos in one location alone - it now makes far more sense to keep them on server computers in California, Toronto, London, wherever. I’ve already farmed out my historical memory to Google, my recollection of friends and contacts to my PDA; why not my storage, too?

So here’s to living in so much fear for the security of your life and property, that you’d rather scatter it across the globe.

And here’s to the perpetrators. Maybe if they find this blog on my computer, they can post an entry to let me know how the little thing is doing. And then they might be so kind as to curl up and die.