TECHNOLOGY | DIGITAL LIFE
Why We Never Truly Die Anymore
A life within the cloud
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When my dog chewed up the 4MB memory card for my Nintendo GameCube, I thought it was the end of the world. But fortunately, the save files that it held lived to see another day. In fact, they’re still living now — dusty and defeated in the bottom of a drawer inside a cracked, warped and bitten plastic casing. The bite marks have outlived the dog that gave them, and the data has lived through four presidents and multiple paradigm shifts. It lived to see itself be replaced. It watched helplessly as its 8MB, 16MB and 32MB cousins entered the fray and obsolescence began to set in.
“Can you believe memory cards hold 32 ‘mbs’ now?!” I asked my friend one Saturday afternoon in 2004 as we examined the different types of memory cards that lined the game store wall.
“And they’re even smaller in size than the 16 ‘mb’ ones!” He replied excitedly, his mother a mere arm’s length away.
“Those ones are a little expensive — won’t the 16 one do?”
“NOOO!” we exclaimed in violent unison.
We didn’t understand yet that we were children born atop exponential curves of innovation, only that 32 megabyte memory cards…
