Larnaca- Making use of my time between rounds of the Cypriot presidential election , I’m doing a major, vastly time consuming purge of “big tech” that clouds (pun intended) my small world. It all started with me hastily buying a GoPro in Manhattan just days before leaving the country. But there were so many moving parts to get the hell out of NYC in the dead of winter I didn’t have five minutes to give the camera a test run on the streets of Brooklyn. My van breaking down the day before my flight certainly didn’t help matters. So I figured I’d have to figure it out on the ‘go'(Pro) but so far it hasn’t worked out that well for one sort of simple reason. I left the city with my MacBook completely full storage-wise and although I brought a 1TB Lacie Rugged drive, it’s formatted to Time Machine and I can’t figure out how to put other files on it, namely the GoPro video files, even though it theoretically has a ton of room left on it.
For perhaps 15 years I’ve binged on image making around the world, culling little while trying to save every moment, every memory thus slowly choking my hardware’s memory. This had never really been an issue until I got this most recent Macbook during the pandemic. The price goes up while the data storage goes down is I guees Apple’s new business model? Who knows.
I’ve been going down proverbial rabbit hole after rabbit hole. I realised my Mac OS was nearly three years out of date. So fine that’s a quick mindless update right? Nope. The GoPro files on the desktop were using the last of the storage which was blocking the OS from updating. Migrate them to the Lacie? Nope it won’t let me drag and drop files on it? Buy another hard drive on the island? Not sure where to get one but more so can’t really afford it and frustrated the Lacie I brought is stuck in this weird time machine thing.
Next thing I know I’m going all out like purging my gmail from jobs 13 years ago and people, ex’s and friends I had falling outs with like 12 years ago. Oh and the hundreds of useless or defunct email addresses are in three different places in my gmail accountt and I keep having to google how to get to the contacts page because it’s not intuitive like so much of this stuff for a non techie.
Then I purged half my Linkedin contacts the bulk of whom I’ve never met and don’t appear to work in the same industry as they did a decade ago. The bottom line is all of my tech is wildly out of date and the pandemic froze any natural progression because I wasn’t out in the world creating anything new. Now I’m overwhelmed with trying to get up to speed. So I set up the skeleton of a Youtube channel but haven’t posted anything because I’m so bogged down with updating everything which spiraled into me thinning out my social media and contacts. My photo library has been out of control for a long, long time. Between my war photography there’s way too much of Greek island vistas and Barcelona skate clips of bails. Into the trash you go.
Then I’m purging files manually from my laptop-namely photos and music. Easy enough yeah? Nope. Some of the photos even after I permanently deleted them keep coming back having something to do with my iCloud settings. Then I’m going on Toutube to figure out how do do each step because I’m too impatient to read Apple support forums that are from like 2020 and aren’t really relevant to OS Ventura anyhow.. So I have to disable iCloud so the deleted photos I spent hours on don’t magically reappear in my photo library.
It’s kind of hard to look at all this stuff and making one micro decision after another about what to keep and what to trash forever. Seeing myself over the years is difficult because there’s this whole before and after different trauma aspect. Plus aging. Oh there I was when I was still relatively happy. Oh that’s when I had a partner back home who in hindsight probably felt neglected to some degree. On top of all of this self stuff, some people in my contacts are dead by now. There’s the Syrian rebel fighter who was killed when he tried to go back to his shop after the siege and was died by a boobytrap. The Georgian elder statesman who took me out to lunch in Tbilisi and I look him up on wikipedia and he died in 2015.His number was still in my iPhone.
So it’s not as simple as just updating things from the app store. It’s opening up a cauldron of memory that spans long extinct romances to former to war zones that extreme social media influencers can now access to get views and likes.
All because I bought a piece of camera technology I didn’t know quite how to operate. Glad to be back out here though. The tech goal posts may keep moving but I’ll get there.
The other night I happened into this bar bones cafe-bar literally on the Green Line in Nicosia and met a guy called Stavros who told he’d lived in Long Island City (Queens) for a decade before moving here back home. We get to talking and he introduces me to a city elder, Demetris, 78 years young who told what seemed like over half his life story. The conversation was so engaging I realised that this is why I need to be here. To hear other people’s stories. To get into their business.
He was telling me what it was like to grow up under British colonial rule here and how the English officers tried to ‘civilise’ the heathen villagers with their Western living standards. We began talking about the breadth of empire across millennia which led Demetris to tell I’m a time worn Irish proverb about empire, immigration and the hypocrisy of it all.
A group of Irishmen heard the streets in the north of England were paved with gold. They sold, saved and starved until they could get off the docks on the other side of the Irish Sea, hearts filled with hope and heads filled with ambition.
The Irishmen very quickly realised three things.
The streets were not in fact paved with gold.
The streets were not even paved at all.
An English gentlemen approached the bewildered immigrants telling them with a wry smile, ” oh good, Now that you’re here we’ll be needing you to pave the streets.”
