i lost something once — and eventually you will too
tech advancements mean we can perfect digital memory. It’s going to make real life loss so much worse
There are many important events happening in the world right now. The thing that matters to me more than anything is the fate of approximately twenty two trees.
A few weeks ago, I spent four blissful days in Cottage Lake, Washington, reading book after book while I watched my white wife burn while paddleboarding across a picturesque lake. There were celebrations for my cousin’s high school graduation, smores, hot dogs, lakeside glasses of wine with ice, and the struggle of knowing Splitwise is a superior app for figuring out the post-trip Venmo and ultimately having to accept that no one will ever download it.
After we hopped out of an Uber in our Brooklyn neighborhood, my flight-drugged self wanted to grab my beautiful small poodle, take her outside, and collapse into my bed in record time. But as I walked down the street, I realized something was off. The gorgeous silhouette of the buildings was changed somehow. There was missing air. Or maybe too much air. There had been a disruption. I finally figured that the large tree that used to languidly drape its boughs across our front yard was gone, leaving a patch of city skyline I had never been able to see before. But it wasn’t until I returned upstairs that I made the more devastating discovery. It wasn’t one tree. Every single tree that surrounded our apartment had been hacked to a bitter, stark stump. They were all gone.
Before my partner cried herself to sleep, she kept repeating one mournful thought. “I wish I had taken more pictures”. In an effort to help, I stayed up until the small stabs of sunlight began to make themselves known through our insubstantial blinds, trying to compile all of the snapshots we had accidentally taken off our beautiful trees. It was an impossible task.
For the five plus years I’ve lived in this Brooklyn apartment, I have become intimately familiar with the small intricacies of the faux forest surrounding my home. Every sensory input that I received at home was filtered through those trees: the sound of the train, the screams of children when they opened the fire hydrants, the scratch of squirrels and the coos of the mourning dove that perched on my AC, even the snuffles and growls of my dog as the shadow of a branch made her nervous. Because this entry point was always physical, it never once crossed my mind to take a POV photo of the things I loved most about my home.
This is a problem that tech billionaires, digital experts, and the AI evangelists want you to believe they have fixed. Have a photo that would be perfect except for an odd background? Blur it. Closed eyes? Swap ‘em. AI tools are so good that they can recreate what never was to begin with. Never got a chance to have your grandfather at your wedding? Put him in the photos. Missing a good memory of a beloved set of trees? Find a system that can recreate them, pixel by pixel by pixel.
But what’s missing from these digital advancements is any link to the reality that they came from in the first place. With about an hour of my time, I could reasonably recreate the view outside my living room windows. I could use prompts and revisions to rebuild those solid trunks, ring by ring. In fact, it would probably actually make a better blog if I told you that I had tried and failed. But I never even attempted to try to use AI to fix this lack of photos. Because even if every single line of code worked perfectly, I could not create a day that did not happen, a beam of light that did not lull my sweet dog to sleep or warm the hang-dry-only bras I bought on Instagram or perfectly illuminate the full life that I have built. This makes those photos I do have, the off-center snaps and accidental film photos and deep fried clips that I rescued from my Snapchat history even more important.
Memory has a fickle, easily malleable existence. But in a digital era obsessed with perfection, this constant smoothing of physical evidence means we’re losing the texture of important moments long before we can recognize their precious qualities. And for that evidence created entirely out of thin air, we are making it easier than ever to personally corrupt the snapshots of life that mean the most to us. Digital memory is getting better and better and better. It’s going to make real life loss so much worse.
To my tree, I can only say thank you. You hung heavy with snow and shaded five years of my life and witnessed me tired and joyous and ill and always desperately peeking outside to see if I could glimpse the future through your heavy boughs.
From an outside perspective, this injury is a small one. But I want people to think about what the erosion of memory’s physical presence actually means. What loss will you not be able to recreate? Even worse, which ones will you be able to see again — just slightly too polished, too new, so digitally perfect that they’re unshakably, inescapably wrong?