Some people don’t simply bookmark websites they find interesting. The whole page is saved. Next, the pages that are linked. Next, the links in them. They cache forums that haven’t been updated since 2009, download PDFs they’ll never read, and keep folder structures so intricate that it takes longer to locate a particular file than to start from scratch. They load up their hard drives. They purchase fresh ones. The conduct persists.
This individual isn’t entirely made up; rather, they are a composite that anyone who has spent time in the online spaces frequented by serious collectors will recognize. Beyond the apparent compulsive aspect, what makes them truly fascinating is how closely the behavior resembles what experts refer to as savant-like information processing. It’s not a random urge. It is methodical and motivated by a fear of loss, specifically the concern that information once encountered may evaporate, become unavailable, slide behind a paywall, or just disappear like websites do. Websites do disappear, too. There is a genuine basis for such worry.
More than 60 years ago, Jorge Luis Borges wrote about this in a novella titled “Funes the Memorious,” about a young man who suffers an injury that causes him to lose his memory. Every cloud formation, every stone, every word of every discussion, and even the location of his body at the time of each perception are all remembered by Funes. It seems like a superpower. It’s more like to a prison, according to Borges. Funes is immobilized and ultimately dies as a result of his incapacity to abstract, generalize, and let go of the irrelevant. In the era of terabyte hard drives and endless scroll, the story reads differently, but the main conflict remains: comprehension and complete knowledge retention are not the same.
In this context, Aaron Swartz had a different position: he was a real person instead of a fictional archetype, and he pursued complete information access as a moral endeavor rather than a self-imposed obligation. His belief that everyone should have unrestricted access to knowledge, which he demonstrated thru acts that ultimately resulted in federal prosecution, had both the clinical character of obsession and what his fans referred to as principle. It is more difficult to draw the boundary between those two items than it appears. There is no doubt that his commitment to unrestricted digital access had an encyclopedic quality; he believed that all documents, journal articles, and public records had to be openly accessible and that limiting them would be akin to stealing from humanity’s shared heritage.
Maladaptive perfectionism, which emphasizes avoiding loss rather than attaining results, has been related to obsessive online accumulation, according to NIH-connected research on digital hoarding. Individuals with high scores on that dimension typically view their saved files as insurance against the possibility that they will need something in the future. The hard disk functions as a backup memory system and an external brain. Researchers are intrigued by the fact that a significant dependence on external digital storage can actually alter how natural memory functions, decreasing the amount of work the brain must do to encode information because it feels as tho it has already been recorded. The archive expands. It’s not always the case that the recalled information follows.
