Cloud Hoarders

by Julia Kieserman

Julia Kieserman, a doctoral student at New York University who writes about security and privacy issues, wrote this essay for the Winter 2026 issue of Liberties. In it, she reckons with the physical reality of our digital junk — accidental screenshots, duplicate documents, and so forth. By thinking about our data as incorporeal and infinite, there may be consequences beyond the energy expended for data centers to store it.

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For nearly a decade, Clean House television host Niecy Nash would start each episode standing on a stoop or in a driveway to introduce “the show that rescues families from a cluttered home.” In a series of cuts rich with delightfully harsh commentary (“how did two little ladies make such a big mess?”) her team turned barely functional spaces into livable homes. The message was clear: clutter is wrong, it is embarrassing, and it is no way to live.

Today clutter creeps beyond the home. We are constantly bombarded with digital clutter — emails, texts, and voice messages from every realm of life. And we create our own, snapping photos or jotting down notes, likely with the intention of allowing these creations to “sit” in seemingly infinite “spaces” in perpetuity, mostly out of sight and mind. When we run out of storage space, companies are more than happy to trade gigabyte-sized slices of The Cloud for dollars, and so our digital footprint swells. We may have people like Niecy Nash to save us in the physical world, but who is coming to rescue us from our digital stuff?

To classify someone as a digital hoarder is a challenging exercise. Without the physical junkyard, it is difficult to distinguish between excessive and normal twenty-first-century accumulation. An unexpected event helped me begin to see the physicality of my own digital footprint as something resembling clutter; it disappeared.

On the morning of the Great North American Eclipse in 2024, I woke up to find that all my digital files were gone, in what felt like a fitting cosmic event. After a few moments of panicked research, I learned that I had been a victim of a process known as offloading — an unintuitive term that “frees” my files from the confines of a $2,000, three-and-a-half-pound machine. The process has good intentions; laptops come with a set amount of storage space, some of which is needed in order for basic machine functionality and the rest of which stores the same files that might be sent to The Cloud, such as photos and documents. My laptop had nearly run out of storage and so, in an effort to help keep my device functioning, Apple had copied some of my data from my laptop to The Cloud and then removed my own copy, which is why I no longer saw my files.

Practically, no data was lost; it was as if a company had moved most of my stuff to a storage locker for me to free up space to dance around my home. But as I tried to understand all that I had lost, I couldn’t recall even a fraction of what I had been storing on my laptop, let alone what lived in the additional 871.72 gigabytes of data that I had spread across three accounts in The Cloud. My amnesia reminded me of conversations that Niecy Nash had with embarrassed homeowners who couldn’t recall the contents of overflowing closets. When I did start to go through my folders and files, I found items both meaningful and utterly useless. It took me as long to find old photos shared by my now-deceased grandmother as it did to stumble upon a flimsy high school resume.

How did I let my digital home get so messy, so full of meaningless items? Part of the blame surely rests on the gatekeepers of The Cloud themselves. The word “cloud,” a brilliant marketing coup cooked up by tech companies, paints a powerful image. In 1994 an advertisement for AT&T introduced The Cloud in much the same way many of us picture their namesake; peaceful and expansive, dotting clear skies, of the fluffy cumulus variety. Thanks to that word, when I try to visualize my digital self in a room that needs decluttering, I am instead transported to an idyllic, expansive view seen through the oval of an airplane window.

To cleanse my imagination of this conception, I attempted to visualize my data as approximately one hundred eighty-five standard single-layer DVDs (for those who can still visualize them), four hundred thousand photos, or nearly eight hundred thousand books of approximately five hundred pages each. This is not just a theoretical exercise — ultimately the digital is physical. Data lives on real tangible pieces of metal alloy excavated from Earth, but knowing that isn’t enough to rewrite my relationship to things I never experience in physical space.

The way I do experience digital items is likely part of the problem. It is as simple as navigating to a website in my browser (for me, Google Drive) and clicking on a document icon, the same way I might pick up a paperclip. Behind the scenes things are a little more complicated: my browser makes a network request to Google, which then performs a series of tasks like validating that I am in fact Julia, fetching the document metadata (i.e. discovering who owns the document, who has access), loading it from storage, and then streaming it back to my browser. Technically the document is never even in my possession (unless I download it or configure offline viewing) in the same way that the paperclip is; it remains in Google’s possession and any edits I make get sent to Google servers where they apply my changes.

But I need to be able to picture where my files are actually, physically, stored, to start to understand my own clutter scale. I am on the East Coast of the United States, so my first guess is (relatively) local; several Google data complexes in Virginia, South Carolina, or Ohio. To get on the grounds, in the building, and on to the server floor would require authorization through many checkpoints — what Google describes as a “6-layer deep” security model. So instead, I take myself on a Google Maps tour of just one of them, in Moncks Corner, a suburb of Charleston, South Carolina. It is home to approximately thirteen thousand people, the historic Santee Canal, a Piggly Wiggly grocery, and a sprawling Google data center campus. According to Google Maps, the campus has streets with names like The Faster Way, The Users Way, and Reboot Road. It is here, in one of possibly seven data center buildings (according to Aterio, a real estate insight company), behind an anti-climb fence and under around-the-clock security watch, that my high school resume likely spends its days. Nor is this the only copy of a document that has not been accessed in over a decade. In order to make good on its promise that data is available 24/7, Google, and other companies that offer storage in The Cloud, usually keep multiple copies in different locations around the country or world.

That is The Cloud. It is made up of hundreds of millions of square feet scattered across cities around the world in places like Changhua County, Taiwan; Fredericia, Denmark; and Quilicura, Chile. It lives in campuses with servers stacked in neat towers the height of a human, or even taller, casting perpetual green light on concrete floors (at least according to the virtual tour, which requires no authorization to visit). Perhaps it should be more fittingly named The Data Bunker: to store data in The Cloud is to store data on countless machines in locked-down facilities, likely echoing with a soft hum, communicating with others around the world on countless tasks beyond retrieving my stored documents.

Visualizing my data in The Data Bunker is a good start, but it still leaves more questions than answers; am I taking the equivalent of one, two, or three boxes in a single server rack? What number is equivalent to a minimalist apartment and what number is closer to a family home littered with relics? This matters because data centers are resource guzzlers, relying on vast amounts of electricity to keep things humming and millions of gallons of water to keep things from overheating. Understanding that the prolonged life of an old document plays even a small role in the environmental health of our planet should be enough to make me consider pressing the delete button.

But it also matters because what we choose to keep should mean something. That which we cherish enough to hold on to through time can become an extension of the self, representative of our experiences and values, and what we leave of ourselves for future generations. When we default to keeping everything, we risk hiding gems in the mass. This is easier to see in the physical world than the digital one, as it was for a woman on Clean House, whose deceased grandmother’s treasured hat collection became a significant feature of her home only after decluttering the closet that they were buried in. For anyone who knows the feeling of a thumb tired from prolonged scrolling through saturated photo albums, or who cannot easily access one of the likely small number of emails that have truly made them smile, this should be something to consider.

Changing our relationship to digital things isn’t easy, but by imagining it as a metastasizing heap of incalculable, forgotten junk and occasional treasure, we become more cognizant of the real tangible limits of what feels like infinite storage space. Tech companies make it all too easy for us to expand the space we take up without ever considering why or what we are keeping and what it means to do so. Perhaps we can rely on the guidance of organizers like Marie Kondo and her call for things to “spark joy” in order to become more intentional about our digital closets. The cost of failing to do so is both a fractured relationship to our memories and a less livable planet within which to make them. Our stuff remains our responsibility whether we can see it or not. It is our job to clean house.

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Originally published in Liberties Volume 6, Number 2. Subscribe to the quarterly journal here to receive the next four issues in print.