The more I think of it the more I feel the “dumpster fire” analogy is an appropriate one for Twitter and Facebook. It’s not just the toxicity and the infernal fusing together of formerly discrete objects into a single, charred, repulsive blob; it’s also the sense I get that the things we put there — all the thoughts, memories, photos, fragments of our lives — are just going to evaporate.

Just imagine asking a normal person to locate, say, the first Facebook post they wrote after the 2012 presidential election. I doubt they’d be able to find it. It kind of saddens me to think of how much information we’ve surrendered to these platforms. At least with one’s own site there’s a feeling that you know where things are, that your memories aren’t buried under those of millions of others.