Intertwixt 16: Be Your Own Librarian

The end of the year brings feelings of haunted possibilities. Ghosts and mysteries, memories of a year passed and wonders of a year unfolding. It’s just another week, really, but the naming of a new year always puts me in a mood.

Nestled into the holidays, I’m thinking about two that still haunt me.

1.

In 2019, I reached out to William Gibson’s publicity and convinced him to come to our office for an interview, for a series that Dan Ackerman and I had called “CNET Book Club.” We interviewed Jeff VanderMeer, Neal Stephenson, Jaron Lanier. I was so excited for William Gibson to arrive at our office.

I’ve read every Gibson book, and this was when Agency was coming out, his second in “Jackpot trilogy” that’s still waiting for its third entry.

And he was so wonderful. So welcoming. He talked with us for over an hour in our studio. He visited our CNET labs. He looked at a Google Jacquard smart jacket I was testing. He was curious about how we tested televisions. His voice gentle, quiet like a bird, but incisive.

And then…due to unforeseen studio technical problems…the recording was lost. And I never made my own backup.

It seems impossible to comprehend. William Gibson’s words actually gone. I wasn’t managing the recording equipment. I don’t know how the technical problem happened. And I learned that the recording had been corrupted days after the interview happened, so my own memories weren’t even fresh anymore. I tried to remember what he told me. All gone. I’ve never been able to speak with him again, and in a sense, his lost conversation is completely William Gibsonesque. I have a couple of photos of him. That’s as much as I have as a proven record that it even happened.

For months it was a topic that was too painful and embarrassing to even discuss. Now, years and years later, on the other side of a pandemic, it’s a ghost memory.

I was so angry that no one had been able to rescue the file, or take better care. But in the end, I blame myself. I didn’t come up with a way to help, did I? I did nothing to prepare for the possibility of loss.

I am utterly paranoid about recording everything now, usually multiple times, or uploading to two places (Voice Memos and Otter). I still won’t ever forget the loss of a record of those words. It makes me think of moments with my dad I’ll never get back, conversations with the kids when I was young that I never recorded. Time moves by and then, even in a world of everything seemingly online, this moment is gone.

2.

In 2018 I was invited up to the apartment of a man I’d idolized remotely for years: Gordon Bell, a pioneer of lifelogging and research into digital memory as well as a legendary computer engineer. His book, Total Recall, was a prized possession of mine in my early days of CNET. I sent him a cold email and he responded, and in the middle of a GDC conference where I was following the wisps of Magic Leap news, I came to his San Francisco apartment building. I was invited in by his wife. I was offered a cookie. Mr. Bell sat with me and we talked, about memory technology research, about the equipment he used to assist his vision and hearing, and about the problems with social media and big tech today. He was skeptical of what Amazon, Microsoft, and others were doing to attempt to become our digital memories.

What he did, for years, was log and tag his own memory archives. And it was as painstaking as it sounds. But what he told me, the line that forever haunts my mind for now and forever, was “You have to be your own librarian.”

Those words say everything. It’s our own responsibility to keep our own records, to structure our own existence. 

I was going to work on a feature story about him. For this story, no records were lost. I have his interviews, in files on my computer. But I never wrote the story. I kept meaning to. And the project intimidated me. Daunted me. I put it off. I can’t explain it.

And Gordon Bell died last year, on May 17, 2024.

I remember the view from his apartment. His smile. His sharp look in his eye as he dismissed AI services like Alexa and Cortana that, at that time, I’d thought he would be optimistic about. He challenged my thoughts and inspired me. And why didn’t I write about any of this?

I have, in a sense. A novella I wrote a couple of years ago, loosely about my own thoughts of trying to remember my father, called Resolving Dad, references his ideas. Other work I’ve done echoes it. Journal entries I write reflect on it. I keep hearing his words. And still, I haven’t written the feature story I thought I would write. Sometimes a project seems so important that it paralyzes me. 

And I can’t stop thinking about how sorry I am that I never wrote the story about him while he was alive, like I’d planned to. I’m sorry, Gordon. I’m so sorry.

Of course, a year later, his advice to be my own librarian came back to haunt me when I lost the William Gibson interview. And as I try to keep my life recorded, scattershot, on so many emails and cloud servers and sprawling photo albums I haven’t curated, it haunts me. As I try every day to take steps forward to declutter my life, it haunts me. I’m a bad librarian. And I lean on archives run by others to serve up scattered pieces. 

It’s making me scrub through my long and unordered Apple Photos library, all the bits in time. The memories of my dad I have a hard time pulling up. Life is keeping afloat in the scatter. I’m always on the verge of losing something, until I get scared it’s gone forever, and I find it again, and it’s there with me again…for the moment.

Will any future technology truly be a surrogate for our memories? Not without us being good curators and librarians, it won’t. It’ll drift away through our fingers again.

Just a few weeks left of 2025. I’ve read nearly 21 books this year, will have flown places twelve times, have written dozens of stories, shot dozens of videos, played dozens of games and watched TV shows and movies and written a play and taken hundreds of photos and the days go by, so fast, so slow. There are always things I mean to get to and don’t. A long list of conversations, ideas, places to visit. I try to do what I can and celebrate the moments.

I’m writing this, imperfectly, quickly, just as a record. So the moment won’t be lost. At least for now. At least scatter these few ideas, to whoever reads them, to say I tried. Live your life. Do things, even if you think they’re hasty and bad. Get them done, in some way, any way. Be your own librarian.