One Friday night at 9 p.m., instead of going out to celebrate my co-worker’s birthday, I found myself glued to the Evernote app. When I’d opened it earlier that evening, hoping to add a new note, I discovered that the app had more or less killed its free tier. With my Cambridge rent, nonprofit salary, and recent parachute out of academia, I couldn’t justify paying the yearly subscription of $129 a year—but I also couldn’t abandon this treasury of my life. My digital notebooks were filled with gems like “films I enjoyed in 2014 (incomplete),” “imperfect regular German verbs,” and “completely f-ing random unordered thoughts/ideas.” I had over 2,000 notes dating all the way back to my junior year of high school. Where would they go, my recipes, poems, and scattered thoughts, now they no longer had a home?

….Downloading my files off Evernote wasn’t impossible, but it wasn’t easy. Hours later, I had saved most of my most important notes to my hard drive. As a sentimental person, it hurt to think that I might someday lose this digital scrapbook, this time capsule of my teenage and college years. But then I remembered the time when, six years ago, I lost all the photos on my phone when my phone was snatched off a bus; I was sad, but also relieved to be free of the burden of my digital baggage. Today, I can’t remember a single photo I had saved on that phone.

Maybe the real trick to unchaining ourselves from the clutches of Big Tech is to free ourselves from our attachment to our digital things. Only then, we might rely a little less on ephemeral tech. And maybe, just maybe, we might have a real stake in our digital destinies.

Read more:

Lee, J. J. (2023, December 26). Our Digital Lives Are Too Fragile. Slate. https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/personal-data-storage-evernote-google-drive-icloud.html