From the Alt Text comedy column at Wired:
Most of my old games are now eBay-bound — eBound, if you will — as are most of my old books. I don’t think of it as getting rid of them. I still have them, right on my phone.
And if I want them in physical form? Well, I’ve stopped thinking of eBay as an auction site. Now I think of it more as cloud storage for things with measurable volume. I’m putting my possessions into the cloud, and if I want them again I can retrieve them from the cloud for a small fee.
Sure, they won’t be the exact original items I once owned, but that doesn’t bother me any more than it bothers me that the 1s and 0s I retrieve from Evernote aren’t the same electrons I originally stored.
Compare and contrast with the last Viridian Note from Bruce Sterling a few years back:
You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.
- Beautiful things.
- Emotionally important things.
- Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.
- Everything else.
“Everything else” will be by far the largest category. Anything you have not touched, or seen, or thought about in a year – this very likely belongs in “everything else.”
You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers’ marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe – along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.
Then remove them from your time and space. “Everything else” should not be in your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your opportunities. It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.
Of course, even as a short-to-medium-term storage medium, eBay is horribly clunky and expensive to use (not to mention lossy as all hell), but it’ll have to do until fabbing technology and truly ubiquitous digital media archiving catches up. The worrying thought is what we – as a culture, rather than as individuals – might lose in the period between now and then…
… but given that my ridiculous and ever-growing library of dead tree books contributed hugely to making my recent house move a waking nightmare, I’m starting to wonder whether I care as much as I think I do. Or rather, more than I should.
I know that I should read books online — I could choose any book, rather than being limited to the books I own or go to the trouble of checking out from a library. Dead tree books take up space. But I still love them, and I hate to part with them.
Online is great but reading a book online or on a phone or an ereader it’s not the same experience as reading a book on paper. I cherish my books, I re-read them, I like to look at them in my bookshelf, I like how they feel and how they feel when I read them.
Books for me will never be a waste of space and will never lose their appeal
Re: “I’m putting my possessions into the cloud, and if I want them again I can retrieve them from the cloud for a small fee.” Actually, the “cloud storage” service you mention existed long before the internet, but under another name: “pawn shop.” 🙂
I think it existed even before the pawn shop didn’t it, cloud like as it is above our heads, a real/virtual cloud ‘The attic!”
you sound so Feng Shui ish, when you talk about this.