Digital Molting is a form of self-curation wherein one “sheds” old centers of digital identity by deleting or archiving old accounts and artifacts. But what of the material sheddings of our digital selves? As apparently abstract as an avatar may be, the primary tools we use to craft our virtual selves are solidly physical: Our devices come from somewhere. We build relationships to each other and make sense of the world through interactions mediated by them. We are changed. When the time comes, we shed them as waste. Is a discarded device “consumed”? Is a dead laptop just a husk of aluminum, palladium, and copper?
Lots of people put stickers on their laptops. In my experience this behavior doesn’t seem to only be about beautifying the object; or if it is the aesthetics are often confusing or intentionally chaotic. Unlike a home or our bodies, the object is only with us for a relatively short time. It seems to be more about broadcasting a particular set of messages, perhaps communicating an identity in formation or re-configuration.
Figure 1. Trichoptera larva with case, 1980-2000. Photographer: Frédéric Delpech.
I’m reminded of caddishfly larvae, which (in a natural environment) construct cocoons around their bodies by gluing twigs and rocks together with their saliva. The artist Hubert Duprat1,2 “collaborated” with these tiny creatures by immersing them in a tank filled with flecks of gold, pearls and precious stones from which they happily built their transformative tubes.
Like the gilded caddishfly, so too do we carefully collect, curate and glue stickers around the primary hosts of our digital selves. I wonder, then, what will my aluminum shell prove to be: A vessel of cybernetic transmutation or an information cocoon3?
Figure 2: Me, meticulously deciding where to put a silly little sticker on my silly little laptop
Regardless, this exercise in personalization makes me miss a laptop when I shed it. This sentimentality in no way justifies the extractive supply-chain that led to the device’s creation; nor can I justify adding yet another artifact to our species’ collective electronic waste pile when I discard it. Perhaps it’s just tech commodity fetishism. Still, I miss my stickers.
Below, I’m keeping a running photo journal of the cocoons of my digital selves
May 20, 2024
October 8, 2020
