4000 Laptops

I dropped my phone in between the gaps in the boards of my neighbor’s front porch. It slipped through my fingers while I was Googling how many gigabytes the human brain contains.

One website told me that there is no way to answer that question. The human brain doesn’t store or process information in the same way as a computer, so it is impossible to draw a comparison.

Another website had no problem with the difference. It told me that the human brain was equivalent to roughly 4,000 laptops with 256 gigabytes of storage each. I don’t know why that was easier than saying 1,024,000 gigabytes, but I suppose 4,000 laptops sounds more fun.

There were ten pages of results on Google. I only read these two.

I pay $1.99 every month for additional Google storage—100 gigabytes, to be exact, although I don’t even use half of it. Most of what I do use is occupied by emails that contain one-time codes: six digits that let me access another website that I probably pay $1.99/month for. I pay for something, but to use it, I need the code, and the code takes up spave, so I pay someone else for more space.

Many other emails are promotions—advertisements sent from companies that I may have bought something from years ago, or last week. They send me the emails to remind me that I don’t have enough yet.

As I am writing this, I received an email from the New Yorker. The subject line reads “How Elon Musk’s Chat Bot Turned Evil.” This is incredibly ironic, given how I have just learned that computers and brains can’t be compared to each other. How could a chat bot be evil?

I suppose all it takes to be evil is to say and do enough evil things. I think I agree.

Lately, generative artificial intelligences, like Elon’s evil chat bot, have been using Em dashes quite frequently. They use them enough that people look for Em dashes as a sign of AI, as though the lines are a signature that can only come from a computer. Humans don’t like to use Em dashes, people say, because they aren’t on the keyboard. It takes too long to type them. Only a computer would use them often.

I use Em dashes in my writing every day. I think they are beautiful—far more elegant than their alternatives. To type an Em dash, you simply have to have a number pad and a few extra key strkoes. The extra work is worth it.

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I wonder what Google will do if I ever stop paying for the extra 100 gigabytes of storage. How will they decide which things to take from me first? Will they take my spam emails, or will they take the photographs from vacations I would forget about otherwise? Or maybe they would take the pictures of my childhood dog when he was a puppy—those pictures I store two and three times, just in case someone tries to take them away.

I am not willing to risk it. I can keep paying $1.99/month, and they can keep giving me access to everything all at once, even though none of it is mine.

I buy used DVDs so I don’t have to stream movies. Most them cost less than $1.00 each. A double-layer DVD contains about 8 gigabytes, which means my brain could theoretically contain roughly 128,000 DVDs, I will never see that many movies, so I can watch as many DVDs as I want and I will never run out of brain storage.

DVDs take up space around me, though. They fill up the drawers in my bookshelf and boxes in my cabinet, right next to countless books, and paint brushes, and letters from my bank that felt too important to throw away. I may have to stuff future DVDs next to t-shirts that don’t fit but are somehow sentimental. If I throw the shit away, I might forget the person who gave it to me. I am not willing to risk it.

I don’t know how many DVDs I will buy before I will feel like I have enough. Either way, I think taking up space in my closet is better than taking up more space in my Google Drive. At least in my closet, I can pull something out and hold it. I can touch it and feel it, and no one threatens to take it away.

I lied before. At the beginning, when I said that I dropped my phone between the gaps in the boards of my neighbor’s porch: that was a lie.

My neighbor doesn’t have a front porch. Or, I suppose some of them do, but I don’t know all of my neighbors. I have too many, living in a city like this.

Maybe one day I will see one of my neighbors in a viral video. Will I even know they lived on my street? I hope the video is a funny one and not the kind I see most days. I wonder if my neighbors see the same videos as me: a funny cat, then a dead child, then an ad for a pill. I wonder if my neighbors are the ones commenting on the videos, and liking them, and sending them spiraling up through the feeds. I don’t know, though, because I don’t know all of my neighbors.

I don’t even know everyone who lives in my building. They breathe the same air as me and live inside the same bricks coated in the same drywall. They pay the same landlord that I do, giving them $1.99 eveyr month so they can access something that will never be theirs, and have a little extra room for their DVDs.

So of course I don’t know the neighbor twelve doors down in the tiny little cottage squeezed between high-rise apartment buildings. The house has a front porch—the kind with gaps between the boards, with lots of dirt underneath, and space enough for a raccoon to hide if it wanted to. The walls are mad eof pine. I bet it smells wonderful inside. I wish I knew that neighbor, so I could sit on their porch with them and watch the fireflies, and drop my phone between the gaps in the boards.

I would let it stay there, getting covered in all the dirt and mud that makes its way beneath the house. I’ll come back and drop my laptop there, too, along with 3,999 others, where they can be buried and fossilized and rediscovered in a millennium like dinosaur bones. All of my emails will be gone by then, like the brains of a triceratops leaked out of her skull.

I wonder how many gigabytes of storage her brain contained when the silt washed over her.

All of that would happen if I knew that neighbor with the front porch, but I don’t have enough storage to meet new people right now. 4,000 laptops of space, but I still can’t hold anything new.