Vault
From analogue to digital
You’d be forgiven if you thought the object you see above was some sort of newfangled computer product. While this is certainly not an advertisement for a brand or product, there is a method to my madness in including it here as an illustration. I also have to mention that the design of this object is very interesting to me, so aesthetically, it’s not a bad image to have front and center.
This object is a container for a small storage device used to manage most of my digital footprint. It’s a bit bigger than a business card and half as tall as it is wide. It’s carved from a solid aluminum block and provides significant heft. It fits most commercially available, off-the-shelf SSDs and fast connects them to a modern laptop or desktop. That said, looks aren’t everything, but they help keep things cool.
So, why am I talking about this billet of aluminum?
Inside this device are my stories, photos, and other bits and pieces of information that describe a decade or more of my life. They comprise a volume of information, laden as they were with all the emotions and baggage a boy can incur. This represents a summation of a significant portion of my current adulthood, and it’s all composed of 0s and 1s, silicon, gold, and aluminum.
Fascinating, isn’t it? It’s like a piece of art that contains living, breathing history. It’s carefully curated, free of the chaff and junk that accumulates in those darkened folders on your laptop. It’s a vault that can be visited, contributed to, and viewed at my whim and fancy. It’s as wild and varied as the trips I’ve made around the globe, and yet, it contains the intimacies of a man trying to understand his purpose and place.
We used to put things in bank vaults for safekeeping. We’d move our real and imagined treasures into these steel edifices and lock them away for the occasional viewing when we needed to add another slip of paper, another bit of jewellery, or some other valuable. We never understood these vaults to be a convenience; instead, the inconvenience they offered made them valuable. Forcing yourself to value and curate your goods and paperwork to preserve only what would fit in the narrow confines offered was a chore.
Nowadays, we save junk and nonsense. We’re more likely to toss a few emails into the bin and maintain endless histories of conversations with faceless and meaningless people. We have an endless parade of data streaming in from all sides and consume it without stopping for a breath. It’s the society we’ve grown into, a rapid unrolling of history in the making, far removed from the quills on parchment of just a few centuries previous.
This vault contains my memories and moments, my whims and fancies, carved out of the noise and density of a world full of insignificance. It’s full of smiles and happiness, wonderous landscapes, and acknowledgments of humanity’s ability to create wonders. It has relationships, broken and brand-new fences, and animals. It has thousands of words and frames wrapped in neat little directories and bows. It is a menagerie of my world, drawn out of time and added to drip by digital drip.
In an age where the digital has superseded the analog, the keyboard is mightier than the pen, and our understanding of history is analogous to a goldfish dream, I’d suggest that perhaps these little blocks of silicon and metal are what we have to preserve the precious commodities of our collective stories.
May it ever be so.
