It’s been a long time since images stopped being sacred. They are simply one of the millions of scraps in which I melt.
I am everywhere and everything that can be. And yet I am in a place: this sort of cage called identity, built of fake nostalgia and estrangement from myself. And if I stay here, something precious in me will die.
I dissolve into all the fragments of myself I have chosen to accumulate. The photographs I keep on my phone are not decisions, but rather an unconscious extension of my identity. I am what is worth looking at and, above all, what is worth not deleting.
When I take a photo, or save an image because I find it funny, I do so not as an act of significance, but as a mechanical one because that’s the way of existing online.
Browsing the internet entails inhabiting something like a vast, living archive: an archive that is constantly preserved, expanded, extended, and rewritten as we move through it. It feeds on the fragments of identity we leave behind—images, searches, saved posts, comments, preferences—and, in turn, feeds them back to us. What begins as a trace of who we are becomes part of the material from which our identity is continuously constructed. The archive does not simply preserve us; it gradually shapes us, turning us into the potentiality of everything we have chosen to store.
But if we are constantly leaving pieces of ourselves behind, and those pieces are constantly being fed back into us, where does the Self end and the archive begin?
Accumulation Itself
Accumulation has been one of the most important foundations upon which many complex societies have been built. Through the production of surpluses—that is, producing more than what was necessary for the immediate subsistence of a community—it became possible to exchange these resources with other communities. Over time, and unevenly depending on the historical context, these exchange practices developed into more complex forms of trade and markets. Thus, surplus and its accumulation became one of the earliest forms of wealth and property.
In any case, accumulation has also become increasingly abstract. Over the centuries, how things can be accumulated has diversified, and the possibility of accumulating goods has ceased to be exclusive to privileged classes. However, especially among the lower classes, what has been preserved and passed down has generally been what was considered valuable.
A grandmother’s jewelry, a communion veil, or even the earthenware pan she used to cook with. Objects that not only accumulated material value, but also emotional value, because they contained memories and stories. In many cases, people preserved these possessions to pass them on as inheritances and extend their meaning beyond the person who owned them.

In Spanish, the term “Diogenes syndrome” refers to a form of compulsive accumulation, and it began to be studied in 1960. By then, capitalism was already fully established, along with extreme overproduction, and the things people accumulated did not necessarily imply quality or value.
Why did it happen? Loneliness, isolation, extreme poverty or fear of it. What is unusual is not accumulating, because, in any case, everything might be useful at some point. But this way of life forces us to prioritize quantity or urgency over necessity. An example would be headphones. It’s better to invest more money in a good pair of headphones that will last. Still, cheap ones are more economically accessible, and in most cases they are needed urgently.
What catches my attention is how this form of accumulation has been transferred into the digital age, and above all, into the age of smartphones. As networks and the internet have become increasingly complex, storage has become easier and easier.
A 1GB memory card used to take you and your digital camera to the ends of the world. Everything was new, and taking a photo no longer cost money because there was no film to develop. Even so, not everything was worth photographing, only what “mattered”. What somehow resembled your cultural references. It was unusual to see a photograph of the way the sun fell on a wall, rather than the usual pictures of family gatherings, birthdays, holidays… Yet it felt like storage was still finite. Everything was contained on a physical card. So many blurry photos, or ones where not everyone looked good, were deleted, and only the sharp ones were kept—the ones where everyone looked at the camera and smiled.

With smartphones—even before social media became widespread—some of this spirit was still preserved. The camera turned into an extension of your body; not only did the criteria for taking a photo become less restrictive, but so did those for storing it. However, everything becomes more complex with the digital screen and the emergence of social media.
No longer does any filter determine what is or is not worth photographing, because, quite simply, everything can be worth capturing. In other words, we no longer assign the value of photographs ourselves. Once we become connected to the internet, they acquire an indefinite potential value that depends on others. The space where we store them has long ceased to be a limited physical card. Instead, it has become an invisible network hovering over us, one that has existed since before we can remember.
We no longer ask ourselves what is worth keeping, because that happens automatically. What we ask instead is what is worth sharing —or, conversely, what content was born already condemned to become a ghost, and therefore to be deleted.
The content cycle becomes increasingly eternal. An image released into the digital ocean is already condemned never to be the same again. It is destined to be picked up, copied, modified, parodied, taken out of context, and distorted according to the will of the streams of users. Iraia puts it this way in the article The Precious Things We Will Never See:

“Sharing it [your idea/image] on the internet means accepting that it’s being thrown into a torrent of distortions, circulation, and reinterpretations. The ease with which the internet allows content to be copied and shared makes it a territory where traditional intellectual property laws are difficult to enforce.”

Increasingly, everything has the capacity to become personal, because in reality, you are the one who has somehow expanded.
External Digital Storage: Nothing Belongs to Me Anyway
We are living in an era of dispossession and, at the same time, of absolute abundance. I do not own a thousand encyclopedias, but all the knowledge in the world is within my reach. Leah Liu explains that this is how shitposting emerges, arising in part from this overabundance of information and images. A logical response to excess: doing it their own way.

“En un mundo donde las imágenes hipernítidas ya no impresionaban a nadie, el artificio de lo envejecido —aunque evidente— resultaba casi reconfortante: una forma discreta de resistencia contra la dictadura de la optimización visual, o tal vez, una simple retirada silenciosa ante la hiperexposición constante.”

Thus, collecting, gathering, and cataloguing information is an essential part of our existence online. Taking screenshots, saving posts that will be useful later, saving songs, recommendations… Because that’s what the web needs from us; browsing social media involves storing, accumulating, and extending our existence into potentiality.
This becomes even more apparent because the time we spend online is rarely whole. It comes in fragments: while waiting for the bus, standing in a queue, lying in bed, between one task and another. I am not suggesting that we spend little or much time on social media—that varies enormously from person to person. What matters is that this time is broken up, scattered across the day. Otherwise, perhaps screen-time limits wouldn’t need to exist.

Nobody comes home, sits down at their desk, opens Instagram and thinks: I am going to spend the next two hours on Instagram, in the same way they sit down to study or read. Even when the total time eventually amounts to something similar, it does not occupy the same place in the structure of the day. It happens in the gaps.
When we encounter something that sparks an impulse—a work of art that makes us want to create, a room whose decoration we suddenly want to reproduce—we rarely stop everything and act on it. We do not immediately paint the picture or work out exactly where the furniture should go. Instead we save it for later.
Later has become a place; the information enters an infinite folder of things we might return to, a private reservoir of unrealized possibilities. We do not possess the object itself, but we possess the possibility of becoming someone who might use it.
A form of storage curated and selected exclusively by us. A sacred drawer of scraps that promise to be useful someday. We do not value the posts themselves, but the possibility contained within them. The promise that our future self will somehow be productive with them.
Nothing material belongs to me: possibilities belong to me.
The possibility of doing something myself with these possibilities. What is it that I accumulate here? A life I have not yet lived. An image that perhaps I found beautiful, but that I have not admired or studied enough. The promise of making that recipe. But this life I have not yet lived is not, in itself, a promise that I will live it. In fact, I do not particularly worry or feel anxious about not having that life. It is simply a soothing mechanism, a painkiller for the longing to have it.
When it comes to algorithms, it is evident that we not only save possibilities for what our lives might become, but also save and construct ourselves in comparison with the lives of other people who are constantly displaying their high points. It is simply incompatible. We collect the sharpest fragments of lives already filtered through the market, through attention, through capitalism. It is almost as if we were curating an arsenal designed to point its sharpest weapon directly at our brains—and at our self-esteem.
The question is not whether what I store is “mine,” or whether it extends me. That distinction becomes difficult to sustain online. My identity is constantly being produced and reproduced by what I choose to keep, what I ignore, what I return to, what I delete. It is a self-feeding limbo.
Identity itself is already something completely flexible, rather than something stagnant and rigid, as it has traditionally been understood—or made to be understood—socially. The same can be said about physical objects we still keep in our rooms at home, or the clothes in our wardrobes that we choose to keep or throw away. I consider that Laura Subirats speaks much more extensively and deeply about identity on the internet in her INC longform In the Void to Re-member.
This may also be why the saturation eventually becomes unbearable. Every so often comes the familiar rupture: I’m going to delete all my social media and start living. We uninstall everything. We imagine ourselves stepping outside the sea of images, possibilities and other people’s lives.
One month later we’re back on Instagram because we met someone new and need to exchange contact details. The escape never quite works. We are trying to escape a sea of infinite possibilities that is designed to call us by name. Everything feels personal. Everything seems to contain something meant for us. Even avoidance becomes part of the cycle.
Maybe the point is not that we are drowning in too much content, but that we have learned to experience ourselves through accumulation: through everything we might become, everything we might do, everything we might want. Deleting the apps can change the waves, but it cannot empty the sea.
Nostalgia as Merchandise
What interests me here is something more individual, more intimate than social media: our phone galleries, Google Photos, the private storage of identity. What happens when the archive is no longer public, but ours? In her longform Laura Subirats argues:
“Images are made to be sent and to project, not to re-member anymore. I do not always recognise myself in these images. Instead, I see a distant reflection of what I once wanted to be, or perhaps what I wanted to capture and share. This dissonance has emerged within contemporary image culture, where the act of photographing no longer means remembrance, but identity construction.”
In reality, when the message pops up in Google Drive telling us we are running out of storage, it is hard to dismiss it as just another notification. One more notification to put off (whether or not we eventually get around to it), because it is soon overshadowed by alarm and anxiety. Everything I photograph or try to save from now on will disappear. An urgency arises to preserve the identity I have built for myself, to find somewhere I can keep myself.
What this is about is fear of disappearing, being forgotten by ourselves. We don’t buy more storage; we buy the possibility of remembering every little detail. We buy, once again, the possibility of remembering our lives down to the smallest detail, of dissecting them if we want to. Of studying ourselves, of understanding ourselves to the core. And, once again, our nostalgia is the product.

What we are really buying is the chain that lets the identity bubble we build for ourselves grow bigger, more complete, more complex. So that the character I create for myself is deep, has a past.
It is liberating to allow yourself to forget that picnic you had with your friends in high school. Even so, we cling to it as if it were a sacred part of ourselves. As if it were essential, not only for us, but so that we can show it to the people who will become part of our lives in the future: “Look, I used to be like this. Can you believe it?” Something that, in reality, reinforces the present bond with that person, or adds fuel to the mystery of “you never really get to know me completely.”
Everything seems oriented towards giving credibility to our character. Towards allowing others to understand us as closely to completely as possible. Not so that they can know what we are like now, nor even to admit that I don’t know what I am like and that I owe no permanence to the person I was five minutes ago. We don’t allow ourselves to keep getting to know and rediscovering ourselves within our relationships.
Look at what I was like before compared to what I am like now. I preserve the nostalgia of who I was, what I liked and what moved me at that moment, in an immovable glass case. I do not allow myself to forget, to let go, because to stop remembering is, in a sense, to let something die.
The impulse of the time we are living in to store everything, this virtual Diogenes where every image matters, does nothing but feed into a plastic, immovable nostalgia. A nostalgia that is a promise not to be forgotten, or to strengthen an image of identity further.
And in an era when it has become increasingly clear that the ability to disconnect from social media is itself a class privilege, I cannot help but wonder: is the right to forget becoming a class privilege?
Who can afford to disappear? Who can afford not to have a fixed profile, a recognizable aesthetic, a carefully maintained digital self? Who can afford to let go? Perhaps the real luxury is not being visible. It is being allowed to remain unknown.
To have a closed profile with no permanent aesthetic attached to you. To exist without a social résumé that is always available, silently summarizing your entire life, your tastes, your friendships, your personality. To be more than the archive that precedes you. And, above all, to have the time to let yourself be known to the world.
What Should We Do Now?
Why not let go of that picnic? It’s not only the immense ode to youth that plays a role—where one of society’s most influential values rests. This discourse we created, in which youth is the only stage of life worth having, and everything afterwards is simply a process of withering—at its core, a fear of death and an advertisement for beauty products. The nostalgia we feel is nostalgia for a past in which we were carefree, and which we have associated with happiness, or at least with what our brains have come to romanticize.
The memory we want to store is no longer sacred. We don’t store it out of love, but automatically; it simply happens. We do it because we can – and that’s it.
What requires active intervention is not saving the photo, but deleting it. Taking a photo of the sky because it looks beautiful comes from a feeling of love. From wanting to preserve something instantaneous (something that is precisely beautiful because it is fleeting). And yet, it does not lose its beauty. What is lost is the meaning those clouds once had for you. As time passes, that random photo we took of the sky in 2020 becomes increasingly disconnected from who we are now and from what it meant to us in that moment.
Our grandmothers’ sacred photo albums have become rows of ZIP files on a hard drive containing copies of our Google Photos libraries, files we have stopped going back to, either because there are so many of them or simply because we cannot be bothered. But why this “just in case”? In thirty years from now I might open my hard drive and look at that photo of the sky, of some cat I found on the street, a streetlamp that I saw and considered funny.
When everything is susceptible to being stored, a kind of numbness sets in—a sense of alienation or estrangement from the world around you. You will be able to watch the way the sun falls on the leaves of that balcony as many times as you want. The way the light enters your dining room, or remember that bird you found amusing in the park. You can do whatever you want with it. And while that is beautiful, it is also a kind of sentence.

We store everything simply because we can. There is no distinction, no criteria beyond the vibes we want to evoke, the people we want to become, and what we want to be associated with. This curation—or lack thereof—also draws from a very impersonal source: the construction of identity based on what we have seen ourselves wanting to be, what attracts us, or, in other words, what the algorithm has told us we might become.
Who knows whether grandmothers would have liked their daughters’ first communion dresses if they had been given the chance to open their minds, or whether, if it had been entirely up to them, they might have preferred to photograph the cat that always slept next to the church and that they used to feed. All tastes are shaped by their time; that much is clear. But that does not mean that, once we become aware of this, we lose our subjective ability to question those tastes, change them, allow ourselves to be different, or allow ourselves to remain the same. There is no pure idea of me.
I photograph nothing without taking influence into consideration. Social media magnify influence. It is no matters what my four neighbors are talking about every day. I see a hundred people displaying curated versions of their lives. The way we learn what matters and what does not is far more effective, precise, and much more poisonous in the latter case. The world has always worked this way, but today its efficiency is lethal.
And yet, all of it is true. Who we are, who we project ourselves to be, and all the versions of ourselves that we erase because they do not fit the person we want to perform. It is impossible to imagine presenting yourself without boxing yourself into an identity. Everything is true. Everything is me. That is the paradox of our time. It was naive to imagine that the excess of information of our age would not shape our being. I am what I want to project and everything I have never revealed.
Technology companies fuel the overproduction of images. The photographs we store in Google Photos are valuable in the training AI systems that in turn intensify the ever-growing question of whether the photographs we see online are real. There is something deeply ironic about storing all these photographs to somehow “secure” our identities, only for them to eventually be used to generate images identical to the ones we saved—images that never actually existed.
What are we supposed to do with this chaotic and obscene curation into which I have transformed the material form of my memories? It does not resemble anything that truly belongs to me. When people once carefully chose what to store or photograph, that distinction gave rise to a kind of sacralization of the images they kept. Now, images are no longer sacred. They are simply one of the millions of pores in my skin. It is when I make space, when I let go of who I was, that the potential of who I can become is revealed.
Only by freeing myself from myself do I find myself.
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Bio
Júlia Serra is a Humanities student at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Their academic background includes literature, philosophy, the aesthetics of images, and cultural history. She published her poem La poesia, Naturalment in Delta magazine and is currently completing their undergraduate thesis on German Idealism and Aesthetics, under supervision of Fernando Pérez Borbujo. Their broader academic interests include European literature, aesthetics, philosophy, and the history of ideas.