From my Early Classical AI art Blue Period, this one is called Too Many Trunks:
Three times the trunks putting trunks in the trunk or ten times the trunks because, well, Mr. Elephant has a lot of trunks. Depends how you look at it. You could also call it not enough trunks because clearly our friend needs another car or ten to carry all his stuff.
Our Elephant friend is not the only animal that likes to collect stuff. I call this one Octopus and Friend’s Garden: 1
Ringo didn’t write a lot of songs, but this one was a banger:
I'd like to be
Under the sea
In an octopus's garden
In the shadeHe'd let us in
Knows where we've been
In his octopus's garden
In the shade
Helping Octopus tend his garden are the two other big time animal hoarders - Crow and Rat.
We humans are the peak creators and consumers of stuff; it drives pretty much everything we do. There was a time I went full rebellion against the stuff. I was moving out of a dorm room I had steadily filled with stuff at the end of the year, but I could only take one suitcase with me on the flight home.2 Any stuff I couldn’t stuff in my duffel bag got tossed. In that moment, going minimal was super cathartic.3 It suited me heading into summer adventures; I got back to accumulating more stuff come fall.4
Why do we need so much stuff? Stuff is pretty great, that’s why. Maybe it’s an amazing pair of shoes or the perfect backpack for a big trip or a pretty plant in the window or a bar of soap that smells really good. How about a collection or two or 100 - Elvis Paintings, turtles, trains? Or maybe you like creating stuff? Maybe you throw pots or make silly AI pictures. All great.
Here are the Velvet Kings:
Now from atop the food chain we have created a new realm of stuff that only exists online. So much of it.5 I call this one Digital Stuff:
The first time I got paid to play with computers, a high-capacity disk drive was the size of a big trunk. A steamer trunk you’d put at the foot of your bed. Like soldiers, these disks lined up in the air-conditioned computer room alongside a computer about as bit as a wardrobe, a tape backup bigger than a grandfather clock and a printer that would squash a chaise lounge. A disk drive like that could hold about 50 of the photos on your phone.6
The other day I got a cute little drive for David’s Mac.7 No bigger than the phone in your pocket, yet big enough to hold over half a million photos. He needed nearly all of it to back up his Mac.
It’s ok, there’s plenty of space online for all your stuff. Mr. Elephant is no longer stressed; this one is called Happy Trunks:
Storage architecture is a whole thing in computer science with sophisticated techniques that keep copies of your pictures across geographic regions and multiple drives to make sure nothing gets lost.8
All this is very nice until you get a message that you are out of space and how much more would you like to buy? Your phone and the online account on your computer come with enough space to store around 2,000 pictures.9
Seems like a lot but it’s not, because you have videos that take up much more space than pictures as well as lots of other stuff like music or podcasts or documents or - the biggest storage suck of all - all those texts with pics and links and videos and all the loling. Storage is the unseen hero behind all the wonderful things we can do and create on our devices.
Have you ever actually deleted a picture from your phone? Not just an embarrassing whooops one but intentionally gone back and said yeah i don’t need these 1000 dupe pics? Well, you might start … that’ll cut down on your storage or you can poke through storage settings and do some cleanup of say the dozen Netflix titles you downloaded for that trip to Alaska that are still saved on your phone 2 years later.
OR … just buy yourself a few digital trunks in the cloud. $3 a month will get you enough space to save about 100,000 pictures. You don’t need to save everything on your phone or your computer - just the stuff that you personally created (and want to keep) like pics, docs, etc. You don’t need to worry about the bulk of the storage space on your phone/PC that’s taken up by system software or apps. All that is easily reinstalled.
When might you need a backup drive? Perhaps you're moving up to the mountains and putting your computer in storage possibly never to see it again. Or maybe you’re doing something like installing another OS partition on your PC. Likely none of this applies to you and cloud storage will do you just fine.
Go on and make all the digital stuff you want; cleanup is optional.
Check out last week’s article:
Compress the learning curve
Read the story of Marcellus the talking Giant Pacific Octopus who is a great collector of stuff Remarkably Bright Creatures
I wasn’t old enough to rent a car 🐣
Marie Kondo made an entire career of that catharsis with books and a Netflix series on decluttering your life distilling the stuff down to only the things that bring you joy. Then she had kids and gave up on all of it, I kid you not.
I wrote a about consumerism and planned/dynamic obsolescence that drives consumption cycles in one of my first articles:
By 2025 something ludicrous like 175 Zettabytes (ZB) will store all the worlds digital stuff.
These were minicomputer hard drives - living large just as the first PCs were going mainstream. HP 3000 in this case. 100Mb was around 10X the storage of a full height 5 1/2-inch PC drive - 10MB or a measly 5 pictures worth.
5Gb - goes for Apple, Android, Microsoft