SUM(A1: A21)

Henry Ding
→B.ARCH 2026

A year ago, I started a spreadsheet to outsource my brain. Or, to rephrase: I attempted to outsource my brain. In this spreadsheet, I created all the categories in which my fatigued brain might’ve needed support. A tab for people I’ve met, a tab for my reading list, a tab for English vocabulary I’d rather not forget, a tab for Chinese I’ll probably never fully grasp, a tab for summer applications. Some tabs have been more successful than others; a tab for “life facts” is nearly constantly growing. Other tabs remain dormant. One originally envisioned as a sort of food bucket list remains empty. My pangs of hunger rarely coincides with a need to type and catalogue. In some ways, it’s a simple organization of chaotic elements in my life. But, recently I’ve begun to interrogate a deeper set of motivations.

The spreadsheet is the latest stage of a journey that many of us have now embarked on in the twenty-first century. For me, it was first cheap plastic-bound agendas, then internet-viral Japanese planners, and then digital agents such as Google Calendar and Notion. Nowadays, my socializing in college often necessitates a moment to G-Cal. The birthdays of the most cherished people in my life sit months in advance on my phone. Internet access is paramount. Sometimes, I wonder: when life blurs, does it all just become circuitry?

Regardless of a near-horder penitent for object collecting, I’ve always disliked physical forms of notating. You can access, augment, and add to digital notes in a hundred more ways. I’ll add to my notes app with hands reaching out from behind shower curtains, on the plane flying home, at a table in the dining hall. As long as my phone is on me, I am constantly inhabiting a nexus point between my mind, body, and the internet. It’s comforting to offer part of myself to something else. To lean on that something else.

In medieval Europe, both peasants and nobility alike had the Book of Hours: small religious books which laid out hourly prayers and psalms to recite throughout the day. Holding these books was to walk hand-in-hand with something greater, something divine. While I’m not trying to insinuate that there is some sort of cosmic generational connection between prayer and Google Calendar, I’d imagine there are similar emotions in both. The rituals we build for it. The relief in it. It is a rare joy-filled day when I manage to perfectly stick to my calendar. Scheduled notifications drop as breadcrumbs from my phone as they lead me through the world, working in tune with my steps. It’s a sublime satisfaction. Perhaps, in human history, we have always needed to feel the touch of another being guiding our lives. However, we’re now fed such relief through algorithms and code. Perhaps I search for such divinity through the mirror of my screen.

I will say, personally, though, that when I dig deeper, such apps really just become a code-based attempt to replicate my memory. But there are thousands of things that build up the core of who I am that I scarcely, if ever, have written down—forget even digitally. The stories my parents have told me of their childhoods, conversations with my friends, my favourite places to sit in Providence. They used to feel so concrete. Now, I’m not sure anymore.

Because when I think about it even further, I think I fear the weakness of my body. It’s a fear that I hold. Constantly. Constantly afraid that I’m one all nighter or Red Bull away from irreparably breaking my mind. The universal realization that we, as well as our brains, are aging. The thoughts and memories I hold dear, and even the way I choose to hold them—why does it all feel made of glass? More and more often, I truly fear that I’m losing intelligence. Maybe I’m ultimately afraid of the act of forgetting. Maybe I need my spreadsheet because I can’t do it alone.

I would want my loved ones to burn everything. Paper data centers, ethernet cables, hard drives and all.

When I was six, in a mountain village in Southern China, where cellular access remains weak and spice tolerances high, I visited my grandfather’s gravesite. At the foot of a stone tomb, aunts and uncles laid wreaths of fake paper cash, coins, and clothing in a pit. My dad set the pile ablaze with his lighter. “We’re sending them up to your grandfather. Everything he needs in heaven,” my mom whispered in my ear, pushing me forward. My hands clasped on paper bills, eyes stinging from ash. Such is the tender, maintenance-based Chinese practice of joss paper burning. It is believed that burning paper replicas of items from our world will be sent as the real things to our loved ones in the heavens. If I were my grandfather, I wonder what I would ask for. I would want my loved ones to burn everything. Paper data centers, ethernet cables, hard drives and all.

I think about this when I take photos of private moments in my life. A beautiful tree on the walk home. A selfie when I feel particularly good. Is it due to a need to memorialize the memory in real-time? For something, anything at all, to witness its life and notate its beauty? All the cherished moments we keep, in the end, what is their expiration date? 60-80 years if you’re lucky? Then it’s gone? To be remembered is a poor man’s immortality. A conduit from the future and the past. The internet has exacerbated this: this need to catalogue, this need to type, this need to remember, this need to experience, this need for everything to fuel the bricks and the scaffolding and the mortar that builds life into the monument it deserves to be. But that becomes its own demon, doesn’t it, when everything you make is intended to become an elegy.

Donna Haraway posits in her seminal essay, A Cyborg Manifesto, that in the nineteenth century, evolutionary theory blurred the boundary between human and animal. Twentieth-century machines, growing increasingly autonomous and self-reproducing, began to blur the line between natural animal-humans and the artificial. As of the late-twentieth century, machines have become increasingly microscopic and ubiquitous, mirroring the invisible power of divinity. As such, even the boundary between physical and non-physical is beginning to dissolve. Haraway argues that humans have undergone a chimeric transmogrification, blending machine and organism into the cyborg. There’s no going back, only forward. She writes that “the cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”

I’d imagine Haraway would argue that my spreadsheet is not just an invisible assistant at which I throw a deluge of tasks and labour, but rather a part of my body and mind. Google Calendar, the notes app, Instagram profiles, and Spotify playlists are all similar organs we position around ourselves on a daily basis.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to become a better creator—with whatever roles like “writer” or “artist” that includes. Over my life, in the process of trying to learn new skills and talents, I seem to have ignored honing the ability to forget. To me, making something of value also always necessitates burning away the fluff. When presenting whatever you deem most valuable to the world, you decide what thoughts are not important enough to be seen. You curate your own life, your own existence. So, on some level, doesn’t living necessitate forgetting?

And, after all, classifying everything is pretty problematic! An obsession with the identification and categorization of humankind has always been a cornerstone of the colonial project. In 1858, Sir William James Herschel began to take hand and fingerprints as identifications of local peoples in British East India. A subsequent criminal classification system was later developed, which later spread. This is the lineage of a method that is still used by police jurisdictions and governments around the world. Hoarding, collecting, and storing.

In the French philosopher Roland Barthes’ final book, Camera Lucida, he recounts a frustration with the size of his archives. He describes endlessly sifting through his mother’s photographs, after her passing, to find a photo of her. The woman he found in these photographs was not his mother. While they were close replications, they were not true encapsulations of her soul. They did not speak. But, eventually, he succeeds. Barthes locates his mother in a photograph of her as a child in a winter garden. This girl imbued with his mother’s kindness and spirit, was Barthes’ mother—inlaid with her being. To Barthes, memory is not fact, and fact is not truth. While Barthes deeply valued photography and the archive, volume was the antithesis of true memory.

Mindy Seu is the creator of the Cyberfeminism Index—the inheritor of A Cyborg Manifesto—a digital repository of peoples, places, and things that hack and work their way to bodily, sexual, and political freedom. Seu considers herself a “gatherer,” pointing to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction where Le Guin depicts the first human tool as the basket, in contrast to the spear. Thus, connecting herself with the greater history of humankind, Seu considers gathering “the tender and thoughtful collection of goods for your kin, and a moment for reunion, for celebration, and for introspection around those goods.” To Seu, gathering, when practiced with others, doesn't have to be a fervent, fear-based practice.

adrienne maree brown (who prefers an all lower-case stylization)—a writer, activist, and a collaborator with Seu—highlights the act of forgetting with community. brown describes thinking and citing by tending to human relationships. Such relationships create a web, something that “allows things to fall through, like a sieve.” brown argues that “[s]ome things are not meant to be caught” but “[t]he things that are meant to be caught and held will nourish us.”

Technology has increasingly forced us to interrogate our own loneliness. Its artificiality and sterility make our place in the world more apparent. We have both become Haraway-esque cyborgs but are also beginning to experience connection and empathy through a cyborg’s lens. The cyborg’s chrome reflects shame and ego back onto us as we attempt to carry the burden alone. Barthes, Seu, and brown instead consider meaningful connections in the modern era as ones formed on blurring the rules of perfection and authorship. We build upon and catch one another precisely because we fail. As Seu argues, “[t]o survive, we gather not only from what’s around us, but from among us.”

The earliest medieval manuscripts were meant to be read aloud by the monks who wrote them. Words moving in tandem with the tongue, hands, and throat. The body in motion with what it had once itself created months, years, or decades prior. It’s almost odd that the art of recitation has been lost outside of primary education and bookstore readings. Perhaps there’s solace to be found in reading aloud. While many lament over the lost art of communicating in person, the connectivity of the digital world, the agency, freedom, and pace of it all, is nothing short of a miracle. I think I lost some of that appreciation, as my hands grasped in fear over my mind and its memories. Perhaps that’s why I share my spreadsheet. In the hope of offering something of myself to the world.

Henry Ding is chasing the thrill of downhill bike rides.

Notes

Haraway, D. J. (2018). Cyborg manifesto. Victoria, British Columbia: Camas Books.
Barthes, R., & Howard, R. (2020). Camera lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Vintage Classics.
(N.d.). Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/science/10-archaeology-teeth-painting.html
The fish doorbell. (2025). Retrieved from https://visdeurbel.nl/en/
Fishlake National Forest - Home. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/fishlake/home/?cid=STELPRDB5393641
Nicastro, N., & Picard, F. (2016). Joan of arc: Sanctity, witchcraft or epilepsy? Epilepsy & Behavior, 57, 247–250. doi:10.1016/j.yebeh.2015.12.043
On gathering. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://issue1.shiftspace.pub/on-gathering-mindy-seu
TheScalabilityProject*. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://scalability.airgallery.org/interviews/conversation-is-not-a-masters-tool/
Waits, M. R. (2024). The history of anthropometry and fingerprinting in Colonial South Asia. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.834