Finding an old browser window full of tabs

One day you find it, after swiping up on your Macbook with four fingers to see all of your open applications. It’s an old Chrome window—from how long ago? You bring it to the front and examine its tabs.

Some stack overflow pages open, a few articles from The New York Times and The Atlantic. There’s a Google search page open, looking for butter chicken recipes, an Eventbrite page to an event you decided not to go to, and the Google Maps page mapping the distance between you and The Spice Room, the Indian restaurant you did decide to go to.

An old browser window is as good as a journal entry, a snapshot in time of things you cared enough to look up on The Internet. You can now remember that day very clearly. It in the fall, but not too cold, so you were able to bike. You had had a small fight with your partner, but it was resolved very quickly. You were wearing new earrings.

It’s yet another trace of you. And as you close the window, you feel a little sad, that now you are probably going to forget that day entirely. But you can’t remember everything, right?

Remembering everything is a job for the ad bots that are also following you, that never forget, and that see almost everything you do. They don’t need you to keep your browser open. They already have the information they need.