A Startling Revelation That My Phone Has Forgotten Things
Very recently, I found myself in an argument with a friend over the massive multiplayer online role playing game Guild Wars 2. Let's call this friend “Jeff” because that is his name and I'm putting him on blast.
In my recollection of the events surrounding my introduction to Guild Wars 2, my friend “Jeff” insisted that I find a way to play it with him, which I did by purchasing the game, only for him to quickly abandon it shortly after I had.
In his recollection of the events surrounding his involvement with Guild Wars 2, he played the game for maybe a week one summer with his brother and never talked to me about it at all.
What we have here are two versions of events surrounding a central focal point, Guild Wars 2, and our personal experiences that have colored our separate memories. But which version of our experiences that we can recall is the correct one? Or probably more accurately and to borrow some verbiage from standardized testing that has plagued young people's minds for decades, which version of events is the most correct?
This logo goes so hard.
To answer that question, we'd need some sort of unbiased third party, a witness so to speak, of what had happened back then. Luckily, I rarely delete any digital communications thanks to a large helping of childhood anxiety brought on from sharing an email inbox with my mother on the family computer. Her rapid want to delete all emails trained me to be a digital hoarder as I scrambled to remind myself of events I had received e-vites for only to not be able to locate them, as they had been deleted.
So let's just turn to my trusty archive of texts, Facebook messages, and other forms of communique to find the tru–what the?
The Archives Are Incomplete
In my attempt to discover the truth of an argument, I ran back the text thread message between “Jeff” and I to the very beginning. At first I was perplexed at how difficult it is to do such a thing; I couldn't find a method that wasn't just endlessly scrolling up until I came to the first moments of our budding friendship of over 15 years as documented by messages such as “Gilgsmesh has declared war on me.”
Luckily for this task, Jeff and I hadn't actually texted that much. We conversed much more on Facebook messenger for reasons lost to time, so I was able to come to the beginning of our thread as it existed in 2015 quite easily.
What I found though, was a bit frustrating. Gaps in conversations. One sided answers to things that didn't make sense. Reactions to images that were no longer present. Things that felt missing or maybe had never been there but suggested. To quote one of the movies of all time, it was as though the archives were incomplete. Perhaps.
Pictured: Art.
Now in that movie (Star Wars II - Attack of the Clones), the archives are incomplete due to sabotage and I wouldn't put it past “Jeff” to somehow hack my phone and delete incriminating evidence that he pressured me into purchasing Guild Wars 2 sometime in the summer of either 2012 or later, but somehow I doubt this is the case.
For one, “Jeff” doesn't even remember us talking about it, so how would he have remembered to hack my phone for that exact conversation? And for two, our texting started in 2015 according to my phone, as we used Facebook messaging much, much more often and Guild Wars 2 came out the summer of 2012.
For a bit of background, I have had the same phone number since I first received a cellphone in high school. Every time I have upgraded from phone to phone, I have imported my messages with me, reinforcing that digital hoarding tendency I alluded to earlier.
This has allowed me, at least I thought, to carry a digital record of a good portion of my communications with me throughout my life. Not having checked to see if these records are incomplete, I’ve been walking forward through my life with the background knowledge that I can turn to this ledger at any time and relive my past as it is represented through the exchange of lols with people I haven’t talked to in years.
Now that I’m aware of the incomplete nature of the ledger though, it’s like I lost a part of me.
The Ship of Theseus is Sinking
Here’s the deal I thought I had with the devices in my life: You get to collect all the data you want on me and sell it to advertisers without paying me for that valuable data and make millions in advertising money and I get an infallible record of who I am over time through the accumulation of texts, messages, and other activities.
That deal has apparently been altered as messages are now just starting to disappear. What this means for me is that the version of myself that I can easily access in the form of my responses and conversations with friends, family, and complete strangers isn’t as reliable. How much that version of myself reflected the real life version is suspect (I come across way more put together in text than in real life), but now that it’s been proven to be incomplete, it’s even less reflective.
I used to reread texts, messages, and the like often to see how I’ve lived my life. The memory can only do so much, so having actual empirical records of what was said, what was done, is refreshing. I don’t have to wrack my brain - it’s right there if I scroll up. From these messages, I can glean a little bit of who I was at different points of my life - my demeanor toward certain people, the type of humor I went for, the different stages and masks I donned for different social situations - and form a picture of the person I was and am.
It’s an interesting exercise and one I recommend doing sometime in short bursts as it becomes easy to become trapped in reading messages in the past. In essence, step outside of your mind and all of the knowledge of who you think you are and read texts, messages, letters, and emails and try to see who you are as a person, how you as a person carry yourself in situations with others.
For anyone who is not gifted with the fantastical powers of telepathy, how we respond is all people get to know of us. Talking is one half of the way we learn who people are (the other half is observation), so take a step outside of the knowledge of who you believe yourself to be and observe how you’ve talked to other people. See if you can piece together the type of person you are and it can be interesting to see if it matches your perception of yourself.
This is what the digital ledger of every conversation I’ve had since owning my phone with the same phone number was for, at least, when I thought and knew it to be complete.
From this ledger and my earlier eluded to conversations with “Jeff,” I learned I was overly sarcastic to the point of not making sense to anyone outside of our circle, as evident in the following exchange dated Thursday, Nov. 26, 2015:
Pictured: Sonic the Hedgehog by Sega (this will make sense in a second)
Jeff: How interested are you in Elite: Dangerous*?
Henry: How decent is the sale?
J: It’s 15 dollars. 66% off of 45.
H: How many planets can I destroy? I don’t really know much about the game other than like super realistic space flight that requires calculus.
J: All I really know is it’s a superhuge space open world game.
H: Can I romance my spaceship?
J: I doubt it. I’m getting the feeling it’s an arcade-style Eve Online**.
J: Let me know. It’s been on my radar for a while, but the more I read, the more I think I’d rather play with friends.
H: Multiplayer? I can't marry a ship, but they can do multiplayer? I thought this was 2015 in the year of our lord, not the Dark Ages.
J: The lord spake, let none touch a spaceship with thine weiner, for thus becometh them Satan.
H: Maybe that’s the kind of Sole Survivor I want to be, Bethesda***. Get off my back.
–Scene–
*Elite: Dangerous is a superhuge space sim video game that was popular at the time.
**Eve: Online is a superhuge space sim massive online video game that is [checks notes] still popular.
***This is what I was referring to and will explain now.
The line, “Maybe that’s the kind of Sole Survivor I want to be, Bethesda. Get off my back,” in the context of this conversation means absolutely nothing outside of the circle of friends I was playing games with at the time (and still play with on a weekly basis to this day). It’s not uncommon for us as a group to make reference to makers of video games who did not in fact make the video game we are playing. This is an inside joke that has been repeated for years unchecked in our circle spawning from a constant refrain of “Fix your game, Blizzard” regardless of which company actually made the game.
(To explain the line, Bethesda made Fallout 4, of which the Sole Survivor, is the protagonist.)
Now, why couldn’t I just give Jeff a yes or no answer to his very simple query? Well, because I was the kind of person who didn’t like to give definitive answers to questions back then. I was anti-authoritative (still am) and absolute answers have a ring of authority to them. I also, and this was a disease at the time from which I still suffer, would constantly try to make jokes instead of having an actual conversation with people.
This is something I’ve observed in myself throughout many conversations and often led to miscommunications or missed connections. People who obviously wanted to hang out only to be deflected by an off color comment. Invitations to meet up somewhere met with jokes about the venue name and then no follow up to commit to going there to meet up.
All of this took place somewhere around 2014-2016, a time when I was a postgraduate student struggling in a program that was asking me to be way more serious than I had ever even attempted to before and ultimately failed at. My conversations from this time are insufferable as a result, I think, of the very serious nature demanded of me from that program.
Think of this analysis as but one of the many planks of the ship that come together to create the whole of the philosophical Ship of Theseus with which you might be familiar. In this thought exercise, one is to ponder that if every board of a ship called Theseus were to be replaced, would the ship called Theseus still be the same ship?
This logo goes so hard.
I don’t know the answer, but let’s complicate things with my metaphor of experiences that make us who we are as planks and the ship is us. Throughout life, there are many moments that shape who we are, but the memory of them is fallible. It is possible to forget moments that have shaped us, and those moments are replaced with new moments that shape us in different ways. Memory for memory, plank for plank, who a person is changes throughout a life, but are they the same person? Or a different, new person with the same name?
Well, with my infallible digital ledger, I could at least keep track of the planks of wood, but now that it has been proven to be fallible, I don’t know what’s going on any more! The ship is sinking!
Okay, Not Really
I mean, I’m not going to die or anything if I don’t have an infallible record of everything I’ve ever said to anyone at any given moment. For one, I’m never going to sit down and read all of that. There’s simply not enough time to relive my entire life, after all.
And honestly, these infallible digital records are relatively new to the human experience if we zoom out enough to see all of human history (and pre-history). Phones and messages systems are like, maybe old enough to drink now? I’m not doing the math, but they’re young. And human history (and pre-history) is much, much older. Again, not doing the math.
The point is, humans have gotten by with not remembering every moment of their waking life just fine. In fact, that’s probably a good thing, actually, that they couldn’t remember everything. Memory, as a function of the human brain, is probably more of a “don’t eat this, it made you sick,” sort of biological process than a “hey, remember you like these berries and that’s kind of your whole thing, you’re the ‘berry guy,’ it’s your whole deal.”
Now that my phone has started to forget things, I’m just on the same playing field as Berry Guy. And I guess everyone else who isn’t as narcissistic as I am to reread entire conversations and analyze what I’ve said to see if I like it or not. (Most times, I do. I’m pretty funny. To myself).
So, it’s sad that my phone has Alzheimer's or whatever. Especially because now I have no evidence whatsoever as to whose version of events is true “Jeff’s” or my own. It’s one of those things that will haunt me forever, since I so clearly remember being pressured into buying it only to be abandoned, but no one else seems to recall that happening.
What I did find, however, was a time when “Jeff” invited me over to watch a soccer game that would take place early on a Saturday morning. He warned me how early it would be. He asked if I was still game for it, given the earliness. And I assured him that I was indeed still in. I told him I would set an alarm. He offered to pick me up and I waved him off. All of this was done days before the game was to take place. The result? “Jeff” messaged me the final score about an hour after the game had ended. I had missed it without even so much as a word.
An artist’s rendition of “The Jeff Incident”
So to “Jeff,” I extend an apology. I’m sorry I missed that game and did not even bother letting you know that I was going to miss it. I will try to be better.
