My Screenshots

I don’t. I scroll forward again, half decades compressing under my fingertip. Text from me, 2023: isn’t it funny we say big and little spoon . . . when stacked spoons are the same size. It’s a curious feeling, this sensation of stroking through the years: oddly tender, vaguely anxious, self-amusing, searching, soothing. “Why are you like this?” a friend asked recently, when, as a light roast, I showed her a screenshot of a text she’d sent me a year earlier. She was joking, but the question stuck with me. Data storage is not free, and my total number of screenshots has grown to—well, let us primly say that everyone who’s guessed has been wrong by at least two digits. Most people under the age of forty-five take screenshots, for their own bespoke reasons. What are mine? What keeps me coming back to my archive, scanning through miles of the pixelated past?

The baseboard heaters are hissing around me when I find, in the oldest, mustiest parts of the scroll, Facebook messages I sent years earlier to a fifty-year-old man from Indiana who’d started talking to me online: i’m sorry if i made you feel bad in any way / i didn’t realize you didn’t know my age / take care. I was sixteen at the time. There is nothing so unusual, of course, about older men trying to solicit teenagers on the internet. It is my fawning tone, my abject politeness, that takes me aback.

On the couch in the dark, I feel a bit pained on behalf of much younger me, that sweet little dope. i’m sorry if I made you feel bad in any way. I didn’t take a screenshot of this exchange until years after it happened, when a certain recognition set in: the version of me from the past was not as distant as I might have hoped. I could still detect, in the present, a residue of that naïveté, that misapprehension of my own vulnerability, that reflexive protectiveness toward people who might not need protection after all.

The screenshots, I think, were a warning: Remember who you were, who you could be again.

what is a screenshot, anyway? These days, its social functions are many. It can be sent as a message—as reference or gossip—or saved as a memorial. It can be confession, accusation, joke, flex. It can be a kernel of pure hilarity. But originally it was something simpler. In the 1980s computers were equipped with a PrtScrn key, used to turn the contents of a text-only screen or graphic display terminal into a printable text file. That was called a “screen dump,” and the point, as the media scholar Jacob Gaboury notes, was the “offloading of information from one object to another.” The tool eventually became a standard feature on all our devices—Apple added it to iPhones in 2008, Google to Androids in 2011—and screen dumps gave way to screenshots.

On my phone, simultaneously pressing the volume-up and power buttons produces the metallic whir of a shutter; on my laptop, Shift+Command+4 transforms the cursor into crosshairs, perfectly mimicking those I’ve used at shooting ranges or in archery practice. The skeuomorphic ancestors of the screenshot: the camera and the gun.

In recent years, screenshots have come to function, in the parlance of our time, as “receipts.” Publicly sharing them can be a way to set the record straight, to call someone out, to burnish one’s brand, to signal that one has funny or cool friends—or friends at all. A screenshot is evidence. In the world we’ve been building through volunteer work for tech oligarchs, these images—like the taped phone call or the filmed altercation—can feel realer than the real, time-stamped pixels that expose inarguable truths. You think you know someone and then you glimpse them anew: saying something mean about a mutual friend, liking posts from neoreactionaries, messaging a lonely teenager thirty-five years younger than them.

I’m not a big receipts person myself. As a respecter of privacy—including, most of the time, my own—I can’t quite imagine using my own little reliquary to publicly expose or condemn someone I know, not at my big age. I think it’s quaint, the idea that the recorded screen can capture truth in contested interpersonal territory. You can lie with a screenshot as easily as with a statistic.

My collected screenshots testify to the prismatic nature of truth. Its intoxicating allure, its inherent instability. My archive reminds me, again and again, that the narratives I’ve constructed about my life are more complicated, more compromised, than I usually let myself believe. I thought I didn’t love that person? Well, here we are, in blue and white bubbles, saying to each other that we did.

i plug my phone into its charger, glance down one last time. My little squares of frozen interface conjure up not only past images and words but the desire that pulsed around them: to savor, to laugh again, to hold something fast in a molting world. The screenshot archive, at least for the real freaks among us, can serve as prosthetic memory, a bulwark against time and loss. Perhaps every image is a nanoscopic prayer: Let us keep something of the present in the future.

The screenshot seems to give us a way to possess a moment, and yet that quest for possession is haunted by its impossibility. The images in my archive are supposedly static, and yet what they reveal above all is change. Not because the pixels move but because we do. The relic freezes; my interpretation does not. My phone contains a museum of my shifting meanings, proof that I am not one person, not one self, and never have been.

My screenshots allow me to try certain acts of reconstitution; they renew my knowledge of who and what I love. Platforms expire, accounts get deleted, but my archive is compressible, consultable, portable. How else can I preserve all the funniest tweets; a friend’s shatteringly lovely email to me; my young self’s unhinged twelve-hundred-word message of gratitude to Frank Ocean, in which I offer to buy him a drink if he’s ever in town? I fear I sent it, the only true fan letter I’ve written, to his personal Facebook account, which is how I can tell that it was received. Seen: 3:12 a.m. The time stamp is a winking coda to this archive dive, the last thing I read before I finally head to sleep.

Ask me why I’m like this. Go on, ask. If we know each other like that, I might tell you one final story, no glowing screen to back it up. I’m sixteen again, back in Oman, where I grew up. I’m being told that our family is moving across the world, starting anew. I will get one suitcase. Whatever doesn’t fit—the books, the handwritten letters, the ardent little diaries, the almirah full of my painstakingly sourced Gulf-kid clothes—will be thrown away. There is no room for them on the journey, no place for them in the life to come.

If we knew each other like that, I’d tell you calmly that we are, most of us, preparing helplessly for the wrong future. That many of us end up OK anyhow. Stay with me here, in long time, lost time. Here, in my late teens, right before my family’s migration, the great volta of my small life. It’s two nights before I get on the plane to go west. I’ve come home from saying goodbye to the girl I will think of, for so many years after, as the only person who really knew me. Tearless and stony, I climb into the closet, shut the door against the light. The clothes inside will be given away in the morning. I lie down in the dark, my old life surrounding me right before I exit it. I stroke the soft edge of folded shirts with a fingertip, trying to command uncommandable memory, then entreat her: Encode, capture, hold.