Digital Archives Haunted Memories Planetary Costs

Image: Florencia Vallejos (@florvva), Carpeta Fotos, 2020, 5'20". Image courtesy of the artist.

'We're drowning in a sea of data.' These words, found on the NSA's website in the early 2010s and highlighted by Hito Steyerl in her 2017 essay of the same name, feel more like an obvious truth than a warning today. Nearly a decade later, the situation has only intensified. With digital storage infrastructure, data mining, AI training systems, and cloud technologies expanding rapidly, the amount and speed of data extraction and storage have spiraled out of control.

Steyerl's more recent book, Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat, seems to respond to this escalation. Focusing on the ecological impact of digital storage and AI image-making, Steyerl questions how we can justify the environmental consequences of such outputs in the name of creativity. Essentially, how is AI art and image generation used as an excuse to harm the planet? While Medium Hot centers on image-making, this post explores a related question: how do digital memory and storage reshape our personal lives and memories, and what are the broader ecological costs?

How Digital Storage Warps Personal Memory

One of the most pressing issues with digital storage is its transformation of human memory. What happens to our ability to remember when we have seemingly limitless photo archives accessible via the cloud? This isn't a new concern; many theorists and artists have examined the link between technology and memory. In his essay film Sans Soleil, Chris Marker lamented that the images in his film had replaced his own memories. Media theorist Friedrich Kittler, discussing Marker's concern, drily noted that 'once storage media can accommodate optical and acoustic data, human memory capacity is bound to dwindle.' In short, digital storage can make you forget.

This dynamic is powerfully illustrated in Florencia Vallejos' moving image work Carpeta Fotos (2020). Composed of digitally rendered scenes from the artist's personal archive of over a decade's worth of photos and videos, the film explores how digital storage can overwrite memory. Vallejos' narrator admits she can no longer remember events unless they are in her archive. She replays old clips, searching not just for memories but for a sense of identity. An undertone of anxiety permeates her search; midway, she asks despairingly, 'where have my files gone?' By the end, she is resigned: 'my life is an archive I can't find.' If archives promise order and preservation, Carpeta Fotos reveals their instability. It shows that we can become reduced to our archive; how we digitally document our lives becomes the foundation for our public perception, overriding our own memories and self-perception.

The Archival Illusion Forgetting by Saving

This reflects the tragedy of the archive identified by Derrida: the urge to preserve, to prevent forgetting, often causes the very loss it aims to avoid. Archiving is never neutral; it involves selection, repression, and construction. Choosing what to preserve means deciding what is excluded, erased, or made inaccessible. As Derrida puts it, 'the archive always works, and a priori, against itself.' It promises to keep our memories and histories, yet these are always incomplete, shaped by power dynamics and deliberate omissions. Archiving is an act of erasure, a haunted practice defined as much by what it includes as by what it hides. The drive to remember becomes a mechanism for forgetting.

Digital storage operates on a similar logic. It offers an illusion of permanence, while its systems are inherently volatile, subject to upgrades that make them outdated. Data formats become obsolete, servers fail, and access protocols change. Magnetically stored data decays faster than paper. It's a mistake to believe digital storage prevents forgetting or is more likely to endure. Yet, there's a duality here. Like archives, digital media has a haunted quality; it never fully disappears. As Wendy Hui Kyong Chun writes, 'information is curiously undead, constantly regenerating, and users save things, if they do, by making the ephemeral endure.' We store everything and remember nothing, even as traces of our lives (messages, photos, old profiles, metadata) circulate endlessly online.

Our Data's Ghosts Ephemeral Yet Ever Present

In Loveboard (2023), Felipe Casanova reflects on the paradoxes of digital memory—how it can be both ephemeral and 'curiously undead.' The film tells the story of a breakup through fragments of the couple's digital archive: texts, voice notes, photos, and videos shared in moments of tenderness. Unlike Carpeta Fotos, Casanova's film focuses not on an absence of digital memory, but an excess of it. When relationships end, the archive remains. Loveboard lingers on the spectral qualities of digital memory, the emotional burden we face when our undead data returns to haunt us.

Image: Felipe Casanova, Loveboard, 2023, 17". Image used with artist's permission.

Considered together, these films speculate on memory, lived experience, and relationships in the digital age, where reliance on fleeting technologies and automation seems to mirror life's precarity. The belief that the ephemeral will endure is as misguided as the algorithmic and extractive systems shaping our present. Our desperation to remember leads us to forget; our attempts to regain agency unravel the sense of self we hoped to preserve. We are always already losing our memories.

The Hidden Environmental Cost of Cloud Living

But memory isn't the only thing at stake. Behind the ghostly aesthetics of our digital lives lies a profoundly material infrastructure with catastrophic environmental consequences. Data centers, the physical sites supporting cloud storage, AI systems, and internet exchanges, are estimated to consume roughly 2-3% of the global electricity supply, not to mention the minerals, water, and heat exhaust needed to power and cool them. Often located in rural areas to satisfy their 'insatiable demand for water and power,' as Tung-Hui Hu notes, data centers remain shrouded in secrecy, their expansion largely hidden from public view. Even as awareness of the environmental costs of AI and the cloud grows, the architecture supporting them remains intentionally elusive. This opacity helps maintain the myth of digital immateriality: that our online lives exist in a weightless ether, separate from the extractive, logistical systems foundational to them.

The Politics and Profits Behind Our Data

Like archives, this infrastructure is never politically neutral. Data centers have become financialized assets, owned and operated not just by tech giants, but increasingly by private investment firms and hedge funds that turn them into tradable, fungible, and rentable assets. As Brett Christophers argues, we now live in an 'asset manager society,' where public infrastructure, from housing and water to digital memory itself, is increasingly controlled by private investors. The systems promising to preserve our memories are quietly enriching the ultra-rich at an immense planetary cost. In this light, digital storage appears less a neutral preservation tool and more a mechanism for profit, power, and control.

The extractive logic of digital memory extends far beyond finance. Scholars have described data centers as instruments of data colonialism, supporting global extractivist infrastructures that disproportionately impact the Global South. These regions are often chosen for data centers due to their proximity to rare earth minerals needed to build and power them. Simultaneously, extracting these minerals often worsens existing water injustices, contributing to geopolitical tensions and deepening the ecological precarity caused by the climate crisis. If digital storage promises preservation, it does so at an immense ecological and geopolitical cost. The more we entrust our memories to platforms and clouds, the more we participate in systems built on transnational extractivism and exploitation for financial gain.

Digital Archives A Future Foreclosed

This is precisely Hito Steyerl's focus in Medium Hot. In her latest book, she examines the infrastructures sustaining the loaded images we consume, tracing the energy, labor, and violence that power contemporary visual culture. Steyerl asks what it means to create with and for machines, questioning the legitimacy and desirability of such outputs. She is clear: images that fuel the arms trade, displace workers, and accelerate planetary collapse can no longer be seen as impartial or innocent. While AI-generated images and endless cloud archives are often framed as apolitical, 'progressive,' or forward-looking, their material outputs and supporting logistical infrastructures are anything but. Seen this way, the digital archive isn't just haunted by forgotten memories or lost data; it's haunted by the very future it puts at risk.