A paper receipt might get trashed or lost or misfiled, out of reach of digital discovery. But it is our fate to live in the age of the indelible.

We all have to have the receipts, receipts for everything, receipts for texts and one-line emails and Facebook messages, an ageless record of the time I made a bad joke in a group thread and my friends twice-tapped *haha!* so as not to leave me hanging.

To study surveillance is to learn, over and over, that we cannot escape ourselves.

How much of the burden is in the way we watch ourselves? In the early years of the twenty-first century, everyone is amassing digital information but no one knows how to sort through it.

Closets are stacked with old computers. It would be better, of course, to go through all of one’s photos and keep only those worth keeping, but the thought of this induces paralyzing exhaustion.

This would involve decision-making, which is cognitively taxing. This would involve delving deep into our personal histories, our pasts, which may involve feelings we don’t feel like feeling.

It’s best to just take another photograph. Keep building up the database. Throw it into the cloud, whatever that is.

It’s slightly stressful to know that one’s personal database is bloated and disorganized, but you can’t see my cloud. It’s my burden to bear, my weight to carry; luckily, since I’m physically small, it’s only a cloud.