Is it too much to ask for a cloud provider that doesn’t support an outspoken authoritarian populist? Proton is supposed to be ‘a neutral and safe haven’ for the personal data of activists, dissidents, and journalists such as myself. Imagine my surprise when Andy Yen, their co-founder and CEO, publicly endorsed the Republican Party. If the GOP really stands ‘for the little guy’, then why does a Swiss company need to suck up to the Commander-in-thief and his clique of men-children? If Proton really is ‘committed to defending your freedom’, then why is it supporting an administration that openly wants to kill the perceived enemies of a state it’s trying to destroy? Back to Apple it is.

Mind you, I’m not crazy about Tim Cook either. I’ve always been suspicious of his grandstanding. If he really believed the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr, he wouldn’t just sell colourful Apple Watch bands, but make the effort to get at least one African-American person on his leadership team. If he weren’t an immensely rich and intensely bland white guy and actually had to endure the consequences of homophobia, he wouldn’t just sell colourful Apple Watch bands, but speak out against the efforts to systematically discriminate against members of the LGBTQ communities.

But those watch bands sure are colourful, and representation matters, so I thought it was a necessary evil. Turns out, there’s no evil, just a spineless number crusher who sold his convictions for a mere million dollars. So yeah, in the end, I’ll self-host everything. At least I’m sure I’ll agree with the ethics of the guy running my digital stack. (He should trim his beard and lose a few pounds, though.) In the meantime, Apple is the least bad choice – take that for a glowing endorsement.

While I was copying my files, transferring my photos, and re-uploading my pictures for the umpteenth time in the last ten years, I had an epiphany. Why bother? I mean, I understand the impulse to stash files like squirrels stash nuts:

Physical minimalism is meeting digital maximalism, and nothing is more indicative of the overflow than our phone camera rolls. The camera roll has become a hard drive for our brains, an external device that lives life alongside us, a place for us to store away what we don’t have space for at the forefront of our minds. It also gives us the power to enact memories from the past. Let your finger hover over the grid, pick the moment you want, and drop in. And there’s no question as to which of these moments to store, because the space is essentially unlimited.

Emily Chang, “Our camera rolls, our selves”, One Thing, 20241112.

But it doesn’t work that way. Digital hoarding is still hoarding, the clutter on your phone is the clutter in your head, forgetting nothing prevents you from remembering anything.

So for the first time in more than twenty years, I wiped my computer and started from scratch. I didn’t delete a single file – everything is safely stored on my NAS, backed up in two or nine different ways, ready to be restored if the need should arise. But nothing is ready to distract me from the true task at hand, which isn’t reorganizing my files and filing old mail. There’s a method to my madness: the fewer files I store in Apple’s cloud, the easier it’ll be to get out.

And get out I will.