“Yet the universal human loss was to our sense of memory. In the great void, we had time to look back and ask ourselves. What was so “precious” about all that content? Yes, we longed to see images of our loved ones, those who had died, those still alive in some place now unreachable. And pictures of the rare sparkling days when we had been deeply happy. But those were like eddies drowned in a raging river of birthday cakes, designed sneakers, heirloom thcotchkes, drunken young people downing shots, great finds on Etsy, sofas rescued from sidewalks, preferred electronic toilets, weddings of now-divorced and feuding friends, naked women with hair-de-nuded privates that made them look like children, penises of various sizes, babies babies babies, cats cats cats, dogs dogs dogs, YouTube and TikTok videos on how to dance, dress , vamp, apply makeup, clean your gutters. Why did we save those episodes of crime dramas when we already knew the endings? Those movies that could not survive a second watching, books that were mostly trash? Even those few who had saved masterpieces of film and literature found that their treasures could be revisited only so many times before the works lost their power to amaze. What had possessed us? We’d hardly had time to look at what we were accumulating while we frantically added more, a worldwide collection of human digital detritus growing into a landfill of rotting infinity. We tried to recall what in all that pile had been of value, but the memories dissolved into the acid reality of the present. “