How We Became Tenants of Our Digital Memory

About 3,800 years ago, a guy named Nanni had the shock of his life. He had bought some copper ingots from a merchant in the city of Ur, in Mesopotamia, and the copper shipment was subpar. So he went ahead and wrote a complaint. The first bad review in history was inscribed on a clay tablet, marked with a wedge while the clay was still soft, which later hardened and became like stone. That tablet still exists, and you can go see it. Nanni has been dead for almost four millennia, the empires he knew have vanished, but his anger over the bad copper remains intact.

Now let me ask you: where's your Fotolog? Your Geocities page, your ICQ, the music you uploaded to MySpace? We’ve learned that what goes online stays forever. But it’s actually the opposite. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, 38% of the pages that existed in 2013 were gone a decade later, and a quarter of everything published between 2013 and 2023 has vanished. The tablet of an angry Mesopotamian lasts longer than half of the internet.

38% of the pages that existed in 2013 were gone a decade later, and a quarter of everything published between 2013 and 2023 has vanished.

Why does clay outlast servers? We could say it’s because of physics, that everything degrades. And that’s true, we’ll get to that. But the main reason is more boring and uncomfortable: servers cost money, and at some point, someone decided that your memories weren’t worth the price of the disk where they were stored.

MySpace lost about 50 million tracks (twelve years of music from 14 million artists) in 2019 during a server migration. Entire bands that started there lost their first recordings. The company apologized and suggested, with a remarkably clay face, that next time you should back up. In 2009, Amazon remotely accessed customers' Kindles and deleted a book they had purchased and paid for. The book was, I kid you not, 1984 by Orwell. It was due to a rights issue, they refunded the money and even apologized, but the gesture is what stuck in our memory: the store can reach into your library and take away a book. And in 2012, the FBI took down Megaupload overnight. It was a cyberlocker, a place to store and share files that was widely used for piracy, but many people also used it to store their own legitimate things (like a teacher uploading classes for their students, for example) and ended up with nothing. When the platform goes down, everything goes down. Even a little piece of your life.

That’s where the phrase summarizing the era comes from: the cloud is someone else's computer. When you upload your photos to Google, your music to Spotify, your files to Drive, you haven’t bought anything. You’re renting space on someone else’s machine, and that person rents it to you as long as it suits them. The day it becomes too expensive, they go bankrupt, they get hacked, or they simply decide to change the rules, your memories depend on their whims. You end up renting your memories.

Let’s say you’re cautious. That you don’t trust the cloud, that you make your own copies. Well: just like a banana or a peach can rot, so can bits. Every physical medium has an expiration date. A CD/DVD lovingly stored can last an average of 30 years at most, but if it gets scratched, you lose it in minutes. Hard drives wear out with use and average about 6 years before they start to fail. Magnetic tapes (cassettes, diskettes) demagnetize. The sun sets for everyone; it’s just a matter of years.

The cloud is someone else's computer. When you upload your photos to Google, your music to Spotify, your files to Drive, you haven’t bought anything. You’re renting space on someone else’s machine.

There’s a guy who’s concerned about this, and he’s not just any nostalgic: he’s Vint Cerf, one of the creators of the internet. In 2015, he warned that we might be entering a "digital dark age". In his view, the problem isn’t just that bits get deleted. It’s that the machines and programs that knew how to read them are lost. A file that no one can open is as dead as a deleted one. Do you have the cassettes but no player? It’s the same as having nothing.

Check out how he named his plan to save us: digital vellum. Vellum is parchment, animal skin that has been tanned, the medium on which medieval manuscripts are written that can still be read today without difficulty. The most durable material we know for storing information is still, literally, leather. That’s where a father of the internet aims when he wants to save the digital.

Digital enclosures

So far, the diagnosis. But what’s happening to your Fotolog is just the tip of a larger logic, known in English as enclosure, which can be translated as fencing or enclosing. To enclose is to take something that was open or common (a field, a path, a piece of culture) and put up a fence, a gate, and a turnstile with a token. That same logic that turns your memories into rentals is now advancing over tools and culture. And that’s where things shift from nostalgia to politics.

The first and most important thing is that none of this can be fixed with personal backup discipline. It requires people who understand their digital rights and how the machine really works: who has the keys, who can press the delete button, what the fine print says that we accept without reading. That’s part of what we at 421 have been calling cognitive sovereignty, and it starts there, with knowing who has control. An audience that doesn’t understand the terrain they’re navigating can’t defend anything contained within it.

The second is to know and control your data. Preserving what you want to remember is one side; the other is controlling what others keep about you. Every piece of data you leave behind is raw material for building a profile of you, and a profile is used to sell you things, to manipulate you, and when the going gets tough, to pursue you. We’ve seen this with the surveillance industry that sells analysis software to governments: the machine is provided by the company, but you provide the data for free. Protecting that footprint (giving as little as possible, knowing who has it) is autonomy in the most concrete sense there is.

Every piece of data you leave behind is raw material for building a profile of you, and a profile is used to sell you things, to manipulate you, and when the going gets tough, to pursue you.

The third is the tools, and here a key concept emerges: free and open. Free and open software means that the code is visible, that anyone can look at it, run it, and modify it, and that no one can remotely take it away from you overnight. Free and open hardware is the same with devices: the design of the machine is public, you’re not dependent on a single manufacturer that has you cornered. Why does this matter right now? For many reasons, including artificial intelligence. There are open AI models: they publish their "weights" (the internal numbers that make the model work) and you can download and run them on your own computer, without asking anyone for permission, without depending on an API, which is the remote service of a company that can cut off your supply whenever they want. An open model is yours in a way that a rented service will never be.

We have a politically relevant example nearby. In February 2026, LATAM-GPT was launched, the first major open language model designed from and for the region, coordinated by CENIA in Chile, with an alliance of fifteen countries and presented from the start as a regional public good. A model trained with our data, that understands our contexts, that we can use as a foundation to build our own things instead of renting everything from Silicon Valley. It’s not a perfect effort, but it’s an example of how we can move toward a situation of less social dependency.

And here comes the underlying dispute, which is happening right now. The most powerful open models of the moment (many coming from Chinese labs) can be downloaded and run by anyone, in any country, without asking for permission. That makes the big American companies and the government that hosts them uncomfortable, because it affects their business and control. And what has been the response? Enclosure. Orders that condition access to the closed models of the United States, prohibitions on buying those of the rival, pressure on the companies that use them, all wrapped in the rhetoric of security. There’s no need to imagine a conspiracy: just look at how the interests of dominant companies align with those of the state that shelters them.

In February 2026, LATAM-GPT was launched, the first major open language model designed from and for the region.

This isn't abstract; it was evident in a specific case a few months ago. In June 2026, the U.S. Department of Commerce ordered Anthropic (the company developing the Claude assistant) to remove two of its models from global access, citing export controls that treated any foreigner, anywhere, as a potential risk. Access was restored in early July, but the message to the world was clear: a letter from a single government can take away a tool from the entire planet overnight. It’s that saying about the cloud being someone else's computer, but taken to the level of the tools with which industries, countries, and communities will work and envision the future.

Let’s return to our friend Nanni and his durable little tablet. His complaint about the bad copper survived nearly four thousand years for three very simple reasons: it was written on something that was his, in a durable format that anyone could read again, and in an object that no one could tamper with to erase it from a distance. It’s that simple and that complicated: it has to be yours, it has to be legible, and it can't just exist on someone else's computer. This applies to your photos, your tools, and the culture of an entire region. What’s strange, and what we should start questioning, is how we've gotten used to not owning almost anything we produce and remember. So you know what to do: make copies and support technologies and policies of freedom. We still have time.