The Time Machine

I recently did a long and very tedious job of backing up and archiving the contents of my old email inboxes.

While scrolling through the messages, many of which date back to the beginning of the century, I came across threads and comments from when I was young and attended a cultural association, old and corny messages with my current partner, exchanges from when WhatsApp was just an idea, some jokes with old clients who later became friends and shares with young colleagues who were learning to do things that they would become good at a few years later.

It was a blast from the past; a romantic, exciting and passionate walk in my life for almost twenty years now. It was possible because for almost twenty years, for better or for worse, I have used Gmail as a service (and as a client) for my email. Without it, it probably wouldn’t have been imaginable.

I thought about it after reading that today, April 1st, Gmail turns twenty.

When you have enough storage space that you never have to delete anything, you can keep an infinite record of your life. Packages, receipts, past travel itineraries, messages from loved ones, photos, appointments, documents – you can simply label them, archive them and search for them later.

Many of these are detritus, but there are special moments mixed within them. Email was how I stayed in touch with my parents when I moved abroad in my twenties. Now that they’re gone, I’m grateful to have a reminder of that love in my Gmail. When I look for those emails, I feel like I’m stepping back in time. I saw old college internship applications and grimaced at my old resume. There were silly e-cards from my high school friends. The most embarrassing breakup email from my first real heartbreak. An entire battle plan with friends to defeat Ticketmaster for Hamilton tickets. Little things that teleported me to a different place in my life.

I abandoned Gmail and many other Google services a few months ago, arriving on the safer and equally functional shores of Fastmail, but I cannot help but be grateful to Google for what it has offered me in terms of service (and, today, memories) for over fifteen years.

I paid for these memories by giving up portions of my privacy and making Google the billion-dollar company it is today, and that’s why I then decided to focus elsewhere. But what was given back to me, so many years after my first recording, was amazing in terms of memory and suggestions.

Today my personal email is no longer so central in my life: messaging applications have taken over and in any case, in them, I have set periodic deletion limits which transform the contents into much more ephemeral material than what it was and what I considered in the past. Even the quantity of words and media exchanged, compared to ten years ago, has definitely increased tenfold: keeping them for a long time is no longer worth it, especially given that the quality has decreased on average.

In fifteen or twenty years I will have lost a bit of my history. I will have few conversations left and mostly with those who frequent this blog and decided to write me a few lines. And it’s a paradox that I will lose all the conversations of the people I love most because, even if I didn’t want to delete anything, I can’t imagine what will become of WhatsApp, Telegram or Discord in twenty years.

Maybe we should go back to giving emails the centrality they deserve in our present.