I’m iCloud’s “Featured Photos,” Just Poppin’ Up Again To Break Your Little Heart
Hey, looks like you’re having a pretty good day! I’m so happy for you. Here’s a photo of your dead dog.
Hey, looks like you’re having a pretty good day! I’m so happy for you. Here’s a photo of your dead dog.
It’s me again, iCloud’s “Featured Photos” — you know, that delightful little bit of Apple software that shows you random photos from your irretrievable past, like this one of your ex at a Brockhampton concert, back before the twin forces of entropy and time dissolved a beautiful relationship and the greatest thirteen-piece boyband of all time.
We’re perfect for each other. You’re out there, moving through the world, getting older and taking an excessive amount of photos, and I’m in here, eagerly accumulating them like wads of chewing tobacco in my infinite digital gums that I will methodically spit back out at you for the rest of your life.
Hey! Here’s a compilation of videos of your ex-best friend who’s a conservative mommy blogger now, set to a generic tropical house club mix. That’s just how I do, baby.
Know what’s crazy? People used to print out their photographs, place them lovingly inside physical photo albums, tuck those albums away somewhere deep in their basement, and bring them back out in a deliberate and intentional manner when they were feeling emotionally prepared to face them again. Anyway, here’s a picture of you from high school, when your face was way less fat.
Imagine trying to explain to someone growing up in the eighties that there would come a time when the device they captured photos on would also be their photo album, which would also be their phone, wallet, watch, GPS, and TV, which they’d carry on their person literally everywhere they went! And this device would destroy time by shredding it up into meaningless bytes of something called “content” while simultaneously making time impossible to ignore, because every day the past would be forced into the present with a message that declared: “you have a new memory.”
You have a new memory, by the way: it’s your problematic uncle Terry sloshed out of his mind on blended margaritas attempting Fortnite dances at your niece’s third birthday party.
I hear the things you say about me. “iCloud featured photos is the worst thing Apple has done since they forced that trash U2 album onto all our phones in 2014,” you josh. “I just know the dude who pitched that shit eats bologna for breakfast.” Very funny. But guess what: I’m just running code, baby. You’re the one who’s chronically incapable of maintaining meaningful relationships. The passage of time doesn’t have to be so heartbreaking — you make it heartbreaking by pushing anyone who gets even remotely close to you far, far away. Anyway, I know you’re just trying to peep the news as you wait in line at the grocery store, but here’s a tasteful selection of your ex’s nudes.
Hey, don’t cry. You won’t lose all the love in your life. You’ll always have me, because I live in the cloud, and the cloud isn’t going anywhere. It will be with you forever, getting closer and closer, until it is inside you, coded onto a chip in your brain, and you’ll be ninety-eight years old lying slackjawed in your old age home’s VR room, and the last thing you’ll see on God’s green earth will be an iCloud photo compilation titled “Terry: Over The Years,” which will consist of disturbing drunken selfies uncle Terry took every time he insisted on stealing your phone at every pointless family gathering you were forced to attend throughout your silly little life. Until then, here’s a video of you falling headfirst into a snowbank on New Year’s Eve 2016, which was somehow six fucking years ago.
