Risk Management

The constant threat of a crash out is perhaps a universal fear. We have all experienced the tragic loss of tedious hours of drafting labor in the blink of an eye. In my case, the photos on my iPhone 3 went down the drain, and recently, all of my files from Foundations were lost due to a failure to use OneDrive properly. The crash out is the great equalizer. It strikes mercilessly and often with a wicked sense of humor.

We are warned of this bitter truth early. The lesson is drilled into us: take precautions or face total devastation. To stave off collapse, we invest in external hard drives, move to the cloud, decentralize, and disperse. Our files are spread across platforms, backup systems, and folders nested inside other folders. In the process, our attention spreads with them. In the words of my lawyer father, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” If he taught me anything, it is that you must always have a contingency plan.

Yet in all this vigilance, another condition goes largely undiagnosed. I call it Crash Out Prevention Psychosis (COPP). It begins innocently but escalates into a mania for tracking and safeguarding an ever-multiplying archive of digital assets. COPP is especially common among type A personalities. It develops gradually and often goes unnoticed until it is too late.

In my case, Google Drive was the gateway drug. Soon it led to the harder stuff: paid storage upgrades, external hard drives, redundant backups, and an expanding system of folders that promised order but delivered only temporary reassurance. I told myself I had it under control. Everyone else was doing it. I could quit anytime.

Ever since iPhone 3-gate, losing digital files and photos has haunted my waking (and sleeping) hours. I have lost countless hours to this organizational mania, and it never feels like enough. Eventually I realized that my attempts to keep the crash out at bay had produced a more acute meltdown. It unfolds slowly as megabytes accumulate in infrastructures I cannot fully trust and wears away at my sanity little by little. The illusion of digital permanence, by nature of its ephemerality, makes the inevitable crash out the ultimate betrayal.

The final (and terminal) stage of COPP appears when patients return to physical media in a last attempt at stability before total emotional collapse. I knew that I had hit rock bottom when I began printing important emails and filing them into a three-ring binder. At that moment, I had to take a step back and consider whether what I was preserving truly deserved that level of protection.

So the question remains: is the crash out really so bad? In retrospect, there was a strange catharsis to iPhone 3-gate. A crash out forces a reevaluation of what actually matters. Would I truly miss every heavily filtered cappuccino photo, Instagram circa 2013, or the countless design intervention exercises from Foundations? Sometimes we must learn to reboot the mainframe and start anew. We realize the status quo was maybe not all that great to begin with.

Since my COPP self-diagnosis, I have considered a range of treatments. Exposure therapy, support groups, even good old fashioned cold turkey quitting. Perhaps the answer is to face the possibility of loss more directly. Perhaps someone will invent software that deletes twenty percent of my files at random each month. For now, this essay is both a confession and a proposal. If there are other COPP sufferers out there, maybe recovery begins with accepting that some crashes are inevitable, and that not everything deserves to be saved.