I’m pretty much over trash-talking Google. That was so a few months ago. But there’s one question I regularly ponder as I use Gmail. Why do I need to save every email I send and receive?

Maybe that’s the equivalent of an existential question of some kind in this day and age. To me it cuts to the heart of mostly technological issues and intellectual property rights law now and in the future. But there’s also buried in there that old Don Juan (as in Castaneda) element of “erasing personal history.” Have gotten into that a lot on this site through various conversations. If you missed it, the gist of what Castaneda talks about - and which I’ve found borne out to be true in my real life - is that, to a large degree, our identities as individuals are socially constructed.

That is, you think something about yourself because either (1) mom thinks that about you or, (2) you assume mom thinks that about you based on behavior you observe in her (number two: now, that’s some RD Laing type shit right there. Look into it: Politics of Experience). So then you internalize whatever you’re guessing the other person’s perception of you to be. And you go around and make a composite of how you look at yourself based on how all these other people close around you might (or might not) think of you.

So Don Juan talks about erasing personal history. I only read the first book, but I listened to some podcasts and whatnot about it. But what I got was sort of Jesus’ whole thing with “I came not to bring peace, but the sword”, as in dividing yourself from these projected perceptions of other people’s whatever. And pulling the wool from your eyes means other peoples’ vision of you sometimes gets roughed up too. And they don’t know why because they’ve not updated their inner software. Or some kind of shit like that.

But the point is with the Gmail stuff: why save your emails forever? Why hold onto old memories for infinity? I guess from there, I’ve made it more theoretical and sci-fi… some kind of thing about digital copies of yourself stored in some kind of matrix-like Google controlled agony echo chamber, endlessly recombining for information users in the future, because Google still owns your cells and your pixels and your reference point clusters way down in the year 2050 when everything’s different. Why not just delete your emails? Maybe I put too much animist sentimentality into my every little interaction with a computer. I guess I do assume in the real world that every thing and every moment has some kind of spirit, something which you can harmonize with or clash against is how it generally goes. So why not computers, if not now, then in five years or ten years when suddenly all our little dangling bone bits of conversations we’ve been having online for years suddenly springs to life and starts dancing and spitting out thoughts of its own and teaching us something about ourselves. What then?

Do emails you “delete” really get deleted off of servers? What about back-up servers? What about backups of backups? It makes sense to me, thinking about how best to run a giant corporation, that you’d want to have access to information “deleted” by users, to look at generally what kinds of things have been deleted, figure out why and study these patterns. Maybe you’d find some way to anonymize it or otherwise obscure it, in respects to the wishes of those under whose name it was deleted in the first place. What about in the future: will there be some kind of weird entity, some kind of scavenger of the digital graveyard, of emptied recycling bins and things people long thought hidden, released and erased. Does pressing “Delete Forever” then, once you jump into the “trash” folder, guarantee these data files a speedy death or some kind of quick ride into a future of digital kibble? I wonder what holds up these days in the cultural narratives the Courts tell about technology… if something has been once deleted and twice deleted forever, is it really dead Legally or can it come back to haunt you, just like ghosts and memories of the past you can’t shake or put to rest.