Clean Up on Aisle Tech

How Tech Bros Cash in on Our Procrastination and Learned Helplessness

You have to be in a particular kind of mood to clean up your digital shit.  Living in Israel these days puts me in a particular kind of mood, alright. Despair comes to mind. And also the need to control something, anything.

Thus, I found myself in a sudden, slightly desperate mood to take control of the details that have wrapped around my ankles for years. Details that make themselves known when I’m trying to log into some app I barely remember signing up for, only to realize I have no idea which email address I used. This is peppered with occasional glances at my bank statement: What am I paying Google for now? "Google Play Store Google Play Store Google Play"—what is that?  

I have done this dance for YEARS.

Every so often, I'd think, "I should really clean this mess up." But then, it's boring. It's annoying. It's time-consuming. And besides, everything still works, mostly. I'll do it later. Then, the aforementioned mood struck - despair paired with a need to exert control. I just needed a reason.

I'm really excited about my new linen culottes, okay?!

I wasn’t getting notifications from Etsy about the status of my order.

Turns out these notifications were going to an email I hadn't used in five years. It wasn't even a crisis. Just… annoying. I don't know what made me do it, but I logged into the old email address. There were 18,000 unread messages. Once I was in, I couldn't unsee it. I fell down the rabbit hole. Subscriptions I don't remember. Organizations I used to volunteer with. Stray messages from people I've lost touch with. It was overwhelming. I nearly hit delete-all. But I didn't. I used the search function. I skimmed for names that mattered. I found 44 emails from a friend who died two years ago. What a treasure.

I was hooked. What else was under the hood of this chugging, huffing machine I call my online footprint?  I had four different email addresses. Tons of forgotten passwords – even though I use a password organizer thing, but also a browser password thing. And that was only the tip of the iceberg.

We've all read those articles in Wired that tell us to clean up our digital lives. They don't tell you that this will eat up hours of your life and demand no fewer than twelve browser tabs at once. It will lead you down soul-crushing rabbit holes of discovery, like realizing you've been paying Duolingo $80 a year. For five years. Reader, that's $400 to *not* learn a language. Fuuuuck.

That's just *one* example. Once I got going, I uncovered nearly $150 a year in other small, stupid charges for things I don't use or remember signing up for.

Worse than the money is the mess. Two Yahoo accounts, each with over 50,000 unread emails. Three separate Gmail accounts with three disconnected Google Drives. Photos scattered like lost socks in a laundromat. Contacts duplicated or defunct.

There's something psychic about digital clutter. It weighs on you. It lives just beneath your awareness, like junk under the couch. Doing something about it sounds as appetizing as getting a papercut and lemon juice full-body massage. And there's the fear - "If I cancel this, will everything stop working?"

The whole ecosystem is set up to be obtuse and opaque on purpose. Subscriptions are SO easy to start and equally as easy to forget. It's all very convenient… until it isn't. It's a money-making machine built on $2.99 here and $4.99 there. Not enough to make you notice. But enough to add up.

In our gig-economy, entrepreneurial age, who has time to ask ourselves if we really need that domain or that premium account on Wix? And the other two domains. Wait - did that come from GoDaddy or Hostinger? I dunno. I'm tired. Fortunes are made on this shit.

I spent a couple of hours a day for ten days, and this is what resulted:

• Deleted four unused email accounts

• Shut down an entire Google account and its corresponding Drive

• Went from three cloud storage accounts to one.

• Reclaimed about $150 in unused subscriptions

• Located and merged scattered photos and contacts

• Cancelled one Wix domain, downgraded another

• Made sure all passwords are current, strong, and stored securely

And yes, it was Stupid Annoying. Updating the contact email for my Etsy account from ten years ago. Trying to log into Ancestry dot com, I had two accounts. One has some great research, and the other has bupkis. Log in, log out. Delete account. Change password on the account, password on my browser passkey thing, and password on my Dashlane. Whoops – did I cut and paste that wrong? Yes, I did. Repeat. O.M.G.

And the whole process is also laced with a certain terror - you're asked to repeatedly confirm whether you want to delete/cancel?  Yes, I'm aware this is permanent. Yes, I know I will NEVER get my Google Health data back again. NOT EVER. I mean – calm down, Google.

The fear of digital erasure is real, but there is a corresponding gravitational pull built into the system, that if you remove one cog, your whole system will fall apart. It won't. As long as you take care of every loose thread. Which is a royal pain in the ass.

I'm sure I'm making this sound extremely fun. Who wouldn't want to spend a week buried in tiny receipts, expired passwords, and Gmail filters? But here's what I got out of it: a little bit of money back. A little less digital noise. And a huge cloud of procrastination lifted.

One thing has become abundantly clear - Google has an obscene monopoly on our digital lives; its tentacles are far-reaching. (Google Suite became Google Workspace, and I don’t know why I had or have either, and that’s just one thing.) I project that this monopoly will be broken up in the medium future, and we will all have to do a massive tech clean-up again as other services rush to fill the void.

Until then, starting now, I'll do it better. I'll change my email on sites when I stop using it. I'll check my subscriptions quarterly. I'll take thirty seconds to make sure a new password is updated everywhere it is stored. I’ll do the work needed to truly understand things like how my information is stored, where, and at what cost, and wtf Google Workspace is and whether I need it. I'll sweep under the couch regularly instead of waiting til an ungodly mess has accumulated.

Listen, the world is chaotic, okay? $150 isn’t going to kill me, but not knowing where my shit is or what I’m paying for? That feels like a tech-bro dream come true. And even if I’m just one person, I once had the massive displeasure of spending time with my buddy Elon Musk. To this day, seeing his mug—and those of his pals Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, et al—makes me determined to stop feeding the greed-and-arrogance machine, one subscription at a time.

Also, I’m really looking forward to getting my culottes.