DRMacIver's Notebook

Digital object permanence

Digital object permanence

Published
2025-04-07

Here’s a useful idea that I often mention in passing and people seem to find helpful but I don’t think have ever written down as its own thing: Digital objects lack object permanence. That is, they stop existing for you when you stop looking at them.

I first started noticing this with the kindle. I like having physical books partly because I can stop reading them and they don’t go away and I can pick them up later. It’s vastly easier for me to juggle multiple physical books because they’re real in a way that digital ones aren’t.This is aggravated by Kindle’s library management being terrible, but I think it would happen even without that.

I’ve also noticed this with e.g. things I’m writing. I have many half abandoned Google docs with stuff I was writing that felt very important at the time and I just forgot. In contrast, I relatively rarely forget e.g. the essay I’m currently writing on my typewriter, because it’s right there.

Conversely though, I also never really forget about this notebook, or my substack to a lesser degree. I sometimes go long periods without touching them but that’s not because they stop existing.

I think they have two major features that cause this to happen:

  1. Rather than being objects, they are places, and they are places where I put public content, so an object that goes into them doesn’t need to be permanent to me, because it exists for other people.
  2. They act as sinks for when I want to think about something in writing, so there is a natural thing that keeps me coming back to them.

Digital places that act as sources also seem to have a degree of permanence, but I find it often feels like it achieves that permanence through addiction. You’re not going to forget that Twitter exists, because you’ve got a twitchy reflex to click it. I think you probably can have digital places that act as non-addictive sources, but it doesn’t seem to be where we’ve ended up in design space. I think some of that is just incentive following, but it does feel genuinely hard.

I like to think my discord server managed to be a place that achieves its permanence through non-addictive means, but based on some people’s relationships to it I’m not sure it does that reliably.