At the beginning of January, Google emailed me notifying me that I had used up 76% of the free storage in my account — 15 gigabytes shared across Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive. I was dimly aware that a memory limit did in fact exist and that one day I might reach it, but the message still caught me off guard. Living with the illusion of Google’s limitless possibilities for a decade and a half, I can hardly imagine a world where I would have to curtail my cloud usage and subconsciously think that day would come. never come.
If I fail to take action and go over my limit, email alerts me, a series of life-threatening inconveniences begin: I can’t send or receive emails, upload files Drive, create a Google Doc, or back up any new photos. I started noticing the always-present progress bar in the bottom corner of the Gmail window, gradually accumulating towards 100 percent of my limit (and adding a new layer of anxiety to an interface that has already created many things). ).
Of course, in the same email, Google offered me an easy way out, encouraging me to simply pay for the Google One storage plan — just $1.99 per month for 100 gigabytes or $2.99. dollars for 200. But reaching the personal free storage ceiling and Paying more, however inexpensive it is, marks a perceptual shift, an acknowledgment that the “cloud” is another finite resource distributed on physical servers, not an immaterial ether that can absorb exponentially growing amounts of information at no cost. And if Google ends up charging more for storage, we’ll almost certainly continue paying without thinking twice. Chances are, we won’t have many options.
When Google launched Gmail in 2004, each offering an unprecedented gigabyte of free storage, more than 100 times what Yahoo and Hotmail offered at the time. The following year, that capacity doubled to 2 gigabytes in response to users who had reached their storage limits, prompting Georges Harik, then Gmail’s director of product management, suggest that Google should “continue to give people more space forever.” Google will expand personal storage to 10 gigabytes in 2012 (with the launch of Google Drive) and then 15 gigabytes a year later, when Google consolidates its various stores of personal data in one single cell with a single storage limit. In 2015, Google Photos split from the complete Google+ social network, launching with unlimited cloud storage for “high-quality” photos.
Then the growing trend of Google memory finally reversed. Near the end of 2020, the company announced that it will start counting “high quality” images into the 15 gigabyte limit. The announcement estimates that 80% of users will be able to store about three years’ worth of data before exceeding their free storage (Google’s personalized tracker currently estimate that I have 10 months left).
By fostering Realizing that our store of personal information was endless, Google turned us all into information hoarders. By the time Google Photos announced it in late 2020, the service contained more than 4 trillion photos, with 28 billion new photos and videos being uploaded every week. Overcoming the physical scarcity of film, we now capture anything that appears to be from afar potentially of interest in the future, from holiday photos to screenshots, delay tight reviews more closely on value that we may never reach.
Many of the photos and videos we amassed were never even viewed again after they were taken — we simply threw them all in the big Google bin, knowing we would be able to find what we were looking for. I need it later. We approach email in a similar way, archiving everything because the marginal cost of doing so is really zero and there’s been little reason to delete anything so far. Worried that we might delete something we’ll need later, we err on the side of caution by saving them all. The prospect of having to downsize or even just organize one’s own archive of photos, emails, or files — a pile of data that gradually grows into a digital signature of one’s life — is daunting. Many of us won’t know how to decide which photos are worth keeping and which ones to delete, always assuming we can just keep them all.
These are not mere habits. They are fundamental manifestations of our growing relationship with information. Google’s first and most revolutionary product, search, allows us to process our data in a normal, even messy way. We can only mindlessly amass such vast amounts of information in our personal accounts because we have powerful enough search capabilities to help us navigate that data, just like how we navigate the public Internet. Due in large part to Google, search has replaced sorting in personal information management; Instead of organizing our data using a system that’s easy to read or know where everything is, it can all become a seemingly messy pile. Therefore, it is not surprising that for a younger generation to be raised on looking“The concept of file and directory directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is meaningless.”
