Originally published in INSPO: Thought Leader’s Digest, 9 November 2026

The Afterlife of Digital Accumulation

How Things Hold Up

On a shelf in my Toronto studio sits a pocket edition of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s Rimas y Leyendas, printed in 1909. It belonged to my grandfather, passed to my mother, and eventually came to me. Three generations, several Atlantic crossings. It lives rent-free in my heart, and at a comfortable distance from my bank account. No password, payment, or software update required.

A few feet away, ten bright-orange hard drives in protective rubber cases contain much of my adult life. Project archives, recordings, photographs, manuscripts, and the remains of a multimedia software system that I built when the digital world was still called New Media. The files are perfectly intact, yet the system’s operating environment from the turn of the century is dreadfully obsolete.

I’m well aware that I have produced a significant quantity of material during my life while producing relatively few material things.

For the past thirty years, I’ve regarded this as a tremendous freedom. And much of it still is. I make records without a record company, design apps and learning environments for people I will never meet, and publish my thoughts independently. The distance between an idea and its realisation continues to shrink astonishingly. I have built a career and much of my creative life inside that promise.

But something is wearing thin, and I am beginning to wonder whether I’ve mistaken granted access for possession, and my own convenience for independence.

We speak of saving things as though the act itself ensures their survival. Yet digital work often requires continuous attention merely to remain accessible. Updating software licences. Replacing computer hardware. The cloud once felt like an almost poetic image of abundance, while concealing an immense, earthbound system of data centres driven by commercial dependencies. Their tentacles have spread into ordinary life on a monthly basis, a few dollars at a time. Music, films, software, storage.

We scarcely notice any one subscription, but their accumulation and the UX-designed inconvenience of refusing them show no shame. I doubt anyone managing this elaborate infrastructure is particularly concerned about the provenance of my summer 2005 playlist. The same indifference seems to extend to our growing dependence on always-connected smart devices.

Earlier this year, writing in The Creative Synthesist, I described AI as a possible studio partner. I believed that, and still use these tools, albeit selectively and within strict parameters of engagement, particularly where my personal autonomy and digital sovereignty are concerned. The conversation has changed, and so has my thinking. There is a growing unease about how readily we are being invited to surrender our judgement to indifferent and, frankly, untrustworthy systems and organisations.

In my work with education and certification systems, I often ask what qualifies as evidence of understanding. A correct answer is not always knowledge. Now a machine can produce sophisticated evidence of accomplishment without the person requesting it having undergone the experience that accomplishment once implied.

Something similar is happening in the arts. We can generate an image before learning to see, music before learning to listen, a voice before finding our own, and a paragraph before discovering what we wish to say. These shortcuts are intoxicatingly liberating, yet they can remove the struggle through which an original thought emerges, revealed with equal parts vulnerability and confidence.

I am not suggesting that this struggle is intrinsically noble. Much labour is tedious, even wasteful. But there is productive friction in making things. The passage from intention to expression is not simply an inconvenience to be engineered away. Sometimes it is the very process that reveals the meaning of a work.

Perhaps the growing scepticism is a sign that people are beginning to ask better questions about what progress is for.

Of course, there is vanity in deciding that one’s work deserves to survive outside of digital environments. A future reader might prefer the discarded draft to a published novel, or wonder why we spent so much ingenuity building systems that no longer exist. They might care about none of it. And I think I’m fine with that. The decision need not be mine.

Nor does this require a romantic retreat into the analogue life of vinyl collectors, scrapbooks, and used book stores. Paper deteriorates, records warp, and carefully maintained digital copies can outlive almost anything. The distinction is between a work having one means of survival and several independent ones. Between being able to leave a platform and discovering that the platform has become the custodian of your memory.

At fifty-five, I suspect I am asking different questions of technology than I did at twenty-five. How much can it do? has slowly given way to What does it ask of us? And perhaps, more importantly, what remains ours when we choose to walk away?

The little Bécquer volume has no opinion about any of this. It was carried by people whose lives it quietly outlasted. I open it and encounter a mind from another century.

We’d be wise to hope that some of what we create has that chance too.