When did you last delete something?

You have deleted plenty of things. A message, a photograph, a search. What you did was take it out of your view. The message is on a server and on the other phone and in two backups; the photograph sits in a trash folder for thirty days, and in whatever synced before you got there. Deleting is something a person performs, and almost nobody performs it all the way down. Nothing in an ordinary life is arranged to make you.

It used to be arranged the other way. Keeping was the act that cost something, and it cost enough that most things went unkept. Records withered and yellowed, details obscured by no one ever asking. The answering machine taped over yesterday.

For its part, memory disposed of things unprompted. A face blurred, an evening reordered itself, the specifics of a bad year went soft and then went entirely. Privacy was a side effect of entropy, and everyone downstream mistook it for a right.

It was not a kind arrangement. Entropy took the debt and the injustice at the same rate, covered whoever had the most to hide, and lost the evidence of people who needed a record more than anybody. Nothing about it distinguished, and nothing about what replaced it distinguishes either.

The digital age was a change of material. The same photographs, the same correspondence, the same record of what you paid and when, written now to a substrate that neither yellows nor fills, and has never once lost interest in anything. For a while it changed nothing anyone could feel, because the quantities were small and the machines still ran out of room.

Then storage stopped being finite in any way a person encounters. A ten-megabyte disk in the early eighties ran to a few thousand dollars; the same money now buys tens of terabytes, a fall of six or seven orders of magnitude. Somewhere in that descent, keeping everything got cheaper than working out what was worth keeping. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s Delete (2009) caught the reversal early: a default that had held for the whole of human history inverted inside a single generation.

What would you actually have to do, now, to be forgotten? The answer is not that it is difficult. The answer is that there is no procedure, because it was never a procedure to begin with. It was weather.

Nothing has happened to you yet. A record nobody opens is not much different from one that decayed, and most of what is kept about you will never be read by anybody. What has changed is that the material exists, permanently, sitting in a few hundred places that have never been introduced to each other. Whether it stays harmless depends on whether they ever are.

Nobody is watching. You are simply being kept, the chronology of you distributed across a few hundred substrates.