Why we should let our digital data decay

What do you do with 64,000 photos? That's how many can fit onto the latest record-breaking microSD Card designed for smartphones, whose 200GB size can store a staggering 200 hours of video, 100 video games or 3,300 hours of music. Its slogan is "never stop shooting, saving, and sharing", and that's exactly how we live our digital lives.

The SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-I memory card isn't cheap but, elsewhere, storage is easy to come by. So cheap has it become, in fact, that none of us are deleting anything any more. The cloud has become a commodity that's often given away free in the hope that we'll upgrade; Dropbox, Google Drive and Apple's iCloud can not only sync files between devices, but act as backup locations and, yes, dumping grounds for files to sort later.

When it comes to the physical sphere, most people in Hong Kong are minimalists by necessity. A few years ago it was fashionable to experiment in "lifestyle design" by spurning physical objects and living out of a laptop, while professional travellers, businesspeople and gear freaks are constantly refining their capsule wardrobes. But what good is a minimalist approach to only some areas of your life? Even if photos, files, emails and endless social media uploads don't take up physical space, doesn't our lack of ability to delete data from the cloud suggest that something's wrong? We have all become digital hoarders.

"With the cloud we are able to store more data, much more easily and have it more readily available than ever before," says Niall McBain, CEO of in-flight entertainment creator Spafax, who was raised in Hong Kong and remains a frequent visitor. "Digital minimalism has only increased the rate at which we remove physical, analogue items in favour of their digital counterparts - why have an entire library of books when you can have more books than you will probably ever read in your life on a Kindle?" That's a good question, but here's another; what's the point in having more than a few dozen ebooks? Probably the most liberating thing a Kindle owner can do is to delete any book unread for more than a year.

But deleting digital files and wiping data goes against everything we've learned about the internet and digital life. "Currently, 'forgetting' data by deliberately deleting it routinely requires more effort than having it preserved," says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at Oxford University and author of . "This increases the 'cost' of digital forgetting, and thus tilts the default towards preservation. As a consequence, digital minimalists need to spend significant time and effort to get rid of data."