#241: The fantasy of the “saved folder”

I recently came across an Instagram Reel in which a woman asked viewers if they remembered what video they’d watched two swipes ago. Understanding her implication right away, I combed my memory with a fighting spirit. Two swipes ago was extremely recent—somewhere in the range of 30 to 60 seconds prior, and only two “chunks” of information back. Unfortunately and of course, I couldn’t remember. My spirit in fact hadn’t been fighting, and my memory had been knocked unconscious. I do not remember anything else the woman said.

Yesterday, while bookmarking a post about how to get your kids to be quiet in quiet spaces (a tip I’m sure I’ll use one day), I recalled the Reel and wondered if this action was rejecting or confirming its premise. The bookmark—a feature of every social media app I can think of, always depicted as the classy snipped end of a ribbon—seemed to be a hedge against swiping oblivion. I have hundreds of bookmarks saved on every platform I frequent (Instagram, Twitter, TikTok), the gems borne from my years of attentional labor, the things I actually cared enough to keep around, unlike all the other forgettable garbage.

Well, I recently paid my bookmarks a visit. It took me a couple tries—I kept opening Instagram, getting immediately distracted by my feed, then closing it and returning to my notes without actually having looked, which felt like its own kind of answer—but eventually I got there. Upon arrival I was back to being lost. Revisiting my bookmarks felt like reading an old diary entry I’d written while high.

A natural spring in New Jersey worth visiting!
Beautiful bathroom tiles
A sewing tutorial on how to turn a short-sleeve T-shirt into shorts
A woman describing Dungeons & Dragons
A demonstration of a child using a kid-friendly chop-saw
A Japanese woodblock print of some mice sleeping near a ball of yarn
A recipe for “high-protein green pesto pasta”
A red carpet clip of Jennifer Anniston and Adam Sandler remarking on how tall their interviewer was

Some posts were familiar to me—they contained information I’d actually retained and therefore had no need to return to: A talk by Erin Meyer about how conversational overlap (or lack thereof) functions in different cultures. Orna Guralnik saying she used to believe compatibility was the most important quality of a relationship, and now believes that “the capacity to love someone who’s different from you is the best source of growth.” Dr. Michael Grandner on how sleep is something that happens to you, not something you can “try to do.” Maybe one day I wanted to reference these videos in my newsletter or share them with a friend—fair enough, here they were. It just so happens I never did.

The bookmark is a kind of fantasy: Not just in the sense that we can convince ourselves, while employing it, that we will one day transform an old t-shirt into shorts, but that by using it we’re not merely passive observers of our social feeds, but active participants, explorers, collectors. Gathering resources for a life we’re bound to start living. At Man Repeller we had a series called something like, “My Week in Bookmarks.” It was meant to tell readers something about the writer’s life and tastes, which I suppose it did, just maybe not in the way we intended.

In “Going Postal,” a 2020 piece by Max Read that explores The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymore, together they posit that the nature of algorithms is such that online consumption has become its own kind of creation:

“Our addiction to social media is, at its core, a compulsion to write. Through our comments, updates, DMs, and searches, we are volunteers in a great ‘collective writing experiment.’ Those of us who don’t peck out status updates on our keyboards are not exempt. We participate too, ‘behind our backs as it were,’ creating hidden (written) records of where we clicked, where we hovered, how far we scrolled, so that even reading…becomes a kind of writing.”

The bookmark similarly imbues the scroller’s life with a creative spirit. Whether we use our bookmarks (I sometimes earnestly do), I’d wager most of us use them less than we imagine we will while bookmarking. This discrepancy feels representative of the dissonance intrinsic to online life, which purports to reflect something about life offline but usually obfuscates it instead. It’s always useful to keep this in mind, if not to change our behavior—sometimes I’m in the mood to resist the feed, other times not—than to at least be aware of what we’re doing, what it’s doing for us, and what it almost is but ultimately isn’t.

In an essay last June about deleting 10 years worth of notes and bookmarks, Joan Westenberg wrote that her so-called “second brain” had become a mausoleum: “A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.” Invoking Borges’ fable about a “map that swallows its territory,” she describes an archive built for her reflection that subplants her ability to reflect.

What if the bookmark feature didn’t exist? Would scrolling feel different? What if, when you saw something online you wanted to remember, you had to either write it down in a notebook, share it with a friend, or else immediately try to make use of it? Would that change anything? (Really asking.) Would this immediately emphasize how seldom we plan to make real use of our saved folders? Might it confirm the idea that we go online not to discover the world but block it out? As Read put it, “You might say that ‘Twitter is not real life,’ a line intended as a kind of cutting warning, serves equally as an advertisement for the platform.”

The other day I decided, on a whim, to revisit a podcast I used to love more than 10 years ago called “Roderick on the Line.” I can’t imagine this podcast has a huge reach—it’s two eccentric gen-X guys who live on the West Coast and talk about whatever comes to mind—but it’s still kicking. As I listened, I was exhilarated to find so little overlap between their world and mine, and to feel my mind wandering down paths it hadn’t in a while. The last time I listened to this podcast was when I was an unfocused HR rep living in San Francisco with a voracious curiosity. I was worlds away from “the New York scene” and my media diet was a mishmash of stuff I wasn’t the intended audience for, but I was brimming with weird ideas.

One of the tricks of the algorithm is the narrowing it must perform to convince us of how much it has to offer. I can scroll for hours, see a thousand novel things that make me laugh, cry, or fantasize, and still never feel the sense of wonder that that dinky old podcast gave me. It’s not about the podcast, which I’m not recommending necessarily (lol), but about the feeling of discovery I experienced by stumbling upon it in the back of my own mind, not unlike how I felt finding May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude at a bookstore in 2022, or talking about music this morning with a guy outside the coffee shop. Our algorithms can only deliver this sense of wonder superficially, and the bookmark helps sell the myth, lending scrollers a collector’s air. But rather than resembling a hunt for treasure, scrolling is closer to riding a train around a theme park, hoarding whatever you can reach as you rush by.

I’m once again being mean to social media. I still get a lot out of it, mostly entertainment and exposure to “the discourse,” both of which are useful to me for different reasons. I’m just not convinced it’s the ultimate portal or treasure keeper it purports to be, at least not when we’re using it on autopilot. Part of the problem is how easily we can engage it, which can feel quite antithetical to the spirit of exploration, which requires a little friction. At their worst, overstuffed bookmark folders symbolize a kind of spiritual atrophy. As Merlin Mann, one of the Roderick on the Line cohosts, put it in his Wisdom Project, which I was spurred to look up: “‘Storage’ is the least muscular or affirmative use of space in your life. Live and active areas represent future possibility; ‘storage’ is an emotionally costly way of warehousing the past.”

According to Westenberg, when she deleted her 10,000 archived notes, she felt only relief. “In design, folks talk about subtraction as refinement,” she writes. “A sculptor chips away everything that is not the figure. A musician cuts a line that clutters the melody. But in knowledge work, we hoard. We treat accumulation as a virtue. But what if deletion is the truer discipline?” In starting over, she relocates the locus of her curiosity: the present moment, wherever it may take her. As revealing as our hundreds of bookmarks may be about our desires and self-deceptions, I suspect there’s more to be gained in actually exploring them, or else mercilessly cutting them loose.

The best article I read last week was “How I Became a Populist,” by Alvaro Bedoya (formerly of the FTC, fired by Trump) for The New Republic. A stunning (moving, devastating, hopeful) piece I wish everyone in America could read.

Last week’s 15 things also included the best neck stretching video of all time, my new pillow lifestyle, a lot of delicious Brooklyn food spots, and more.

The rec of the week was what to bake if you’re in a cozy fall mood. Baby I’m READY.

Last week’s Dear Danny is here. Don’t miss it!!

Dear Danny: My bf's addicted to junk food

Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley