My father, who is not a sentimental man, keeps on his desk a small calculator he bought in 1987. It still works. He does not use it for anything — his phone has a calculator, his computer has a calculator, every device in his life has a calculator. The little machine sits in the same spot it has occupied since I was a child, beside a brass tray that holds paper clips and a single dried sprig of rosemary that has been there so long it is no longer rosemary so much as a small brown fact. If you asked him why he keeps it, he would say something dry about its being perfectly good. But that is not, of course, the reason.
The reason, I think, is that the calculator is part of the furniture of his interior life. It is a witness to a certain era of his work, a small monument to a phase of competence, a thing he has handled ten thousand times without thinking. To throw it out would be, in some quiet and unarguable way, to throw out a piece of himself. He is attached to it in the same way one is attached to an old coat, or a particular pen, or a coffee mug of the right weight. It is not nostalgia, exactly. It is furniture of the soul.
We are, perhaps without fully noticing, beginning to form these attachments to our newer electronics. The first iPod one really loved. The first phone with a camera that was good enough. The Kindle, still a little scratched, on which one read a novel that mattered. The mechanical keyboard, with its particular click, that made a certain kind of work feel possible. Each of these accumulates, over the years, a small weight of memory that has nothing to do with its specifications.
The Things We Keep
There is a category of object that the anthropologist Igor Kopytoff, writing about the biography of things, called singularized — pulled out of the commodity stream, given a name, a place, a history. Most of what we own remains generic. The third towel from the left in the linen closet is interchangeable with any other towel. But a few objects, in every life, become singular. They acquire what Kopytoff called a cultural biography, and we cannot quite throw them away.
Our electronics, in the abstract, are supposed to be the opposite of this. They are mass-produced, replaced every few years, deliberately made obsolete by the next version. The industry depends, in fact, on our willingness to abandon the old thing for the new one. And yet the small objects on our desks, in our bags, on our nightstands, are quietly defying that logic. They are accumulating biography faster than they are being replaced. The laptop with the dent in the corner from the café in Lisbon. The headphones that went through the wash once and came out sounding almost exactly the same. The tablet the children used to watch cartoons on Sunday mornings and which now, retired, lives in a drawer like an old family Bible.
What is striking is the emotional vocabulary we use for these objects. Faithful, we say of a device that has held up. Trusty, we say of a charger. Beloved, we sometimes say, only half-joking, of a piece of software that has been with us through several jobs. These are not the words one uses for a refrigerator.
The vocabulary, we think, is not accidental. The objects we use most intimately — the things we touch a hundred times a day, the things that wake us and put us to sleep, the things through which we read the news and write the letters and say goodnight to the people we love — have begun, slowly and without our quite noticing it, to migrate from the category of appliance to the category of companion. They are not, of course, sentient. They do not love us back. But they are present, in a way that older objects of similar utility were not, and presence, even in the absence of feeling, accumulates.
The Sentimental Economy
The industry has noticed, of course, and has tried, with mixed success, to monetize the sentiment. The unboxing ceremony, with its careful choreography of lift and reveal, is a small ritual designed to mark the moment of acquisition as a kind of memory. The leather case, the engraving, the color one was made to wait three extra weeks for — these are attempts to seed biography into an object from the very first hour. Some of it is touching. Some of it is, frankly, a little embarrassing, the way any forced nostalgia is.
What no amount of packaging can manufacture, however, is the actual biography. That has to be earned. The laptop that lasted through three jobs, two moves, and one very bad year has a value no spec sheet can price. The camera with which one learned to take pictures of one's children has a value that has nothing to do with megapixels. The cheap tablet on which one read, in a hospital waiting room, the book one needed to read at that moment — that tablet is now, irreplaceably, that afternoon.
We have started to think of this as a kind of sentimental economy, running quietly beneath the formal one. The formal market sets prices; the sentimental economy sets worth. The two occasionally overlap. More often, they do not, and the discrepancy is one of the more interesting things about being alive in a period of constant technological churn.
There is a strange kind of dignity, we have come to think, in the objects one refuses to replace simply because the latest model has come out. The old laptop is heavy; it runs warm; the battery is not what it was. But it has the keyboard one learned to touch-type on, the wallpaper one has been looking at for six years, the small sticky note still attached to the lid from the day one bought it. To replace it would be to lose all of that, and the new object, however technically superior, would not, for many months, be the same object — it would be a stranger with a similar body. The sentimental economy, in moments like this, says wait. It is usually right.
What the Attachment Reveals
To be attached to a gadget, in the end, is to be attached to a small piece of one's own past. The device is a mnemonic device, in the older sense of the word. It is a way of remembering who one was when one acquired it, what one was working on, what one was hoping for. The objects we keep are, in this sense, a kind of externalized autobiography, scattered across the surfaces of our daily life.
This is not, on the whole, a bad thing. The risk is not in the attachment but in the substitution — in allowing the device to become, by default, the place where the memory lives, so that when the device is replaced the memory goes with it. The best attachments are the ones in which the object and the person have, over time, taught each other something. The object remembers the person, and the person, in some quiet way, remembers the object.
The miniaturization of memory onto devices — the photographs that live only in the cloud, the contacts that live only in the phone, the documents that live only in the laptop — has made this dependency more fragile than it used to be. We have all known, or heard of, the small catastrophe of the lost phone, the failed hard drive, the cancelled cloud account. The sentimental economy, in those moments, suddenly becomes very real. The objects we were attached to have not, in fact, been keeping the memories; we have been keeping the memories inside them. The lesson, perhaps, is to keep a copy somewhere that does not depend on any single device — in a printed album, in a letter, in the ordinary memory of a person who was there.
We will, in the next few years, be told a great deal about the new generation of devices — the ambient ones, the wearable ones, the ones that disappear into the walls. Some of them will be genuinely useful. But we suspect that we will, in the end, keep forming these small attachments anyway. The human animal is a creature that loves its tools, and a beautiful object that one has handled ten thousand times is, in its way, a kind of company. The little calculator on my father's desk is not, in the end, a calculator. It is a friend — the kind of friend that does not require us to speak, and that has been quietly present through every version of ourselves we have lived through in its company.