Deleting 30GB of screenshots
On the practice of hoarding evidence, deductive reasoning and Condorcet's Jury Theorem
I spent my weekend (during which I was snotty, feverish and coughing) deleting 30GB of screenshots of text messages. Three things happened at once. The first was that my phone could finally breathe. The second was that I discovered that I'm not very good at extending compassion to a version of me who was still amorphous in ways that I now consider myself to be crystalline. The third is that every deletion is an act of mercy, for myself, for the version and for the ghosts who contributed to the making of those screenshots.
Most of my screenshots required deductive reasoning and group-voting. For example, I have been known to send my friends screenshots of men asking me out in order for them to validate and prove that what I was experiencing was, in fact, being asked out. This is in part because I refused to believe I was attractive, among other afflictions common to those with low self-esteem in their youth. This is also in part because I was alive and struggling to navigate the social fabric at the time when dating apps (as well as dating) were in their ascendancy. It's funny too because I considered myself a very “well-formed person” in my era of Screenshots.
How many y's do you send in a heyyy to indicate sexual interest, and is reciprocity implied if you receive a hey with a different number of y's? There are geniuses amongst us who can infer, from the hieroglyphic placement of emoji alone, whether the date is going to result in a kiss. Some of the best minds of our generation have broken language, time-stamps, "lol" frequency usage and "haha" frequency usage to foretell the day, time and astrological configuration of the breakup.
The screenshots are not just guessing games, they are living images of our anxiety and of our fears. We fear the impending rejection. We fear the impending emotional attachment. We fear wanting, and we want anyway and we want our friends to validate us in this wanting. In my youth, I was so wrought with feelings that I didn't know how to feel or how to express, that the validation of other people witnessing me in that conversation allowed me to feel like I was doing the right thing.
At first, I used to send screenshots to people in the hope that the Law of Large Numbers would apply. That is, the more people I sent screenshots to, the more their opinions would converge to the average (which I considered a rational and just state) and therefore, I would be operating from that state. I believed that asking people for a fair and unbiased opinion through a screenshot would be the correct validation of my feelings, and conducted a voting poll every time I had to agree to meet someone on a date or decide to break-up with someone.
You can tell I’m bad at stats because humans are not rational entities, and the “experiment” I was conducting was not fair or unbiased in any way. I wanted a correct voting outcome, and if I had spent just a little more time studying Condorcet's Jury Theorem, I would have known that the only way to get the outcome I wanted was to get as many people who agreed with me already to vote. Typical of a dead French guy in 1785 to destroy my concept of self from 2013 to 2019. Condorcet’s Jury Theorem was used to valiantly (and mathematically?) defend the rightness of democracy. But unfortunately, the math also shows that the population of voters needs to be predisposed to offering the right opinion if you want that opinion from them. You have to pre-measure this even before the final vote is called.
Nobody asked to cross-check my bad math in 9 years. I’ve deleted screenshots containing the most raw, embarrassing and poetic confessions ever wrenched from me. What was all that turmoil and voting and cross-validating for? Why was I playing a game where I accepted bad information as the norm? Why were all my friends and I part of that messy culture where ambiguity was the main currency even though everyone desperately wanted us to “be real” with each other? I do not doubt the honesty of my numerous friends and interpreters, because in the face of uncertainty we had to be trying as much as we could. But I hate that I had to play this guessing game just so that I could feel something in a culture where I could not play disinterested, “chill”, “laid-back”, or “mysterious”.
I was consistently performing all the ideas that a young single woman in tech in her twenties could be expected to perform against the backdrop of Boston or New York, and I needed the entire chorus to agree with me so that my performance would feel complete.
Deleting the past is a bidirectional process for me. Because not only am I processing the nostalgia (a word that shares its etymology with nausea), but I am also wondering if the current sense of self I have composed now (the one that I call well-formed now) will mean anything in the next few years. I hope I save more screenshots of memes and the silly faces of people I love. I hope I save more screenshots of poems and people explicitly, unambiguously, clearly expressing their love and affection for me. I hope the next time I come to peruse my screenshot folder, I cringe less.