By now, we may even rely on our devices’ memories so completely that we’ve lost our ability to recall things without them. This compendium of self-knowledge seems only to expand, prompting our devices to expand along with it: The first iPhone’s maximum storage space was 16 gigabytes, while the newest release offers a terabyte. I could tell you with a glance at my iPhone exactly where I was on October 24, 2015, or how many hours of sleep I got last night. We are constantly turning our lives into data, much of it nonphysical: photographs and screenshots and stray notes, reams of text messages and bookmarked tabs and other digital detritus. Nearly a century later, Moses’s anxiety has become our reality. Moses was wary of how filing cabinets externalized personal memory: What would be the consequences of trying to turn every aspect of your life into “information” to be hoarded for later? “You can’t expect yourself to say, when you give your wife the first kiss, ‘File that, my dear, for future reference,’ ” he wrote in 1930. Not everyone was happy with the invention. One 1918 advertisement described the filing cabinet as “oracle-like” with a “great gigantic memory”: “It is only a bit o’ steel, yet no brain was ever made / That could wholly supersede it with the busy business man.” The filing cabinet, then, was better than a human brain - it could hold and organize the entire contents of one’s professional and domestic life, broken down into discrete bits of information and made retrievable at will. As these archives ballooned, a new technology rose in popularity: the filing cabinet, whose history the scholar Craig Robertson documents in The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information. This “paperization” eventually spilled into the home, where a rise in personal documentation meant that houses were filling up with bills, letters, tax forms, receipts, birth certificates, recipes clipped from magazines. As American businesses expanded in both number and scale in the wake of the Civil War, so did their printed material there were graphs, memos, charts, forms, and more correspondence than ever. You may have to select a menu option or click a button.The 20th century brought with it a deluge of paper. Follow the instructions for disabling the ad blocker on the site you’re viewing.You may have more than one ad-blocker installed. You’ll usually find this icon in the upper right-hand corner of your screen. Click the icon of the ad-blocker extension installed on your browser.When it turns gray, click the refresh icon that has appeared next to it or click the button below to continue.Click on the large blue power icon at the top.Click the UBlock Origin icon in the browser extension area in the upper right-hand corner.It will turn gray and the text above will go from “ON” to “ OFF”. ![]()
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