The Worthlessness Of Digital Footprints

Does it really matter what you digitally leave behind?

“Image generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E.”

I won’t lie, I do think that the phrase “digital footprint” is a little amusing, but also very definitely tainted with a hint of melancholy too — almost an aspiration of something that’s fundamentally unattainable and pretty much meaningless.

Let me elaborate.

Do you genuinely think it’s likely that the path you’ve trodden during your digital (presumably online) life is actually worth something more than Proustian recollections of smiles, tears, and (a hint or more of) regret to those that live on after you?

Are they not just merely impressions on some soggy wet sand before the inevitable tide of increasingly over monetised technology comes in and wipes them all away, out of the plane of existence, forever?

I see them a lot, footprints that is, during my habitual morning walk along the commonly howling Atlantic coast. Sometimes there are many tracks, all criss-crossing with each other, lives intermingling at the same time or maybe different times as you can’t really tell, other times just a solitary trail leading out of sight to who knows where.

It’s the single tracks that make me feel saddest¹ as I do wonder that if I hadn’t noticed them, then most likely few others, if anyone, would have noticed them at all.

I do sometimes also see solitary prints that disappear out of sight toward the waves, but don’t seem to return. All a bit Reggie Perrin really, and in those cases I just hope it’s the tide that’s washed them away rather than their time in the realm of the Grand Game of Software Engineering or other such realms.

Moving on from what sounds a bit depressing altogether, on a quick re-read to fix the usual spelling mistakes, I do think that’s how it is with the “digital footprint” of your physical existence.

Unless you’ve achieved something especially notable, maybe published some academic work (in a proper peer reviewed and open journal that is), written some meaningful and engaging fiction (and not “AI” generated KDP tripe), maybe even some Medium articles of note (cough), then whatever else you did in the digital realm — assortments of music playlists, book collections, contact lists, browser…