Being Ephemeral, Being Scary, and Dealing With It

Everything you see is future trash. A note from 2013 on impermanence — borrowing from an anthropologist to think about data, debris, and the uncomfortable truth that we are all temporary.

From the Archive

Originally published in 2013 on talvinder.com. Lightly edited for clarity.

“Every single thing you see is future trash. Everything. So we are surrounded by ephemera, but we can’t acknowledge that, because it’s kind of scary, because I think ultimately it points to our own temporariness, to thoughts that we’re all going to die.”

— Robin Nagle, Anthropologist in Residence, NYC Dept of Transportation

I had just started her book, Picking Up. More and more I found myself using the metaphor of trash to discuss my industry’s obsession with “big data” and quant-only analysis. Using quantitative data without any kind of ethnographic, primary research supplement is like analyzing the trash in a landfill to understand the present practices of a particular community — to the exclusion of all other data. It can be done, with limits and a whole lot of caveats.

But also, I enjoy the mental picture of digital analysts swimming in piles of digital debris — click data, mommy blogger posts, and irrelevant hashtags.