The Photos App Reminds You

The phone buzzes on the counter while you are doing something ordinary — the dishes, the email, the small business of a Tuesday — and it is one of those cheerful little notifications the photos app sends now, a curated flourish of your own past, On This Day, Three Years Ago, Your Memories, complete sometimes with a name it has invented for the collection and a swell of gentle music if you let it play. And you tap it, half-attentive, expecting a sunset or a meal or a mild embarrassment from a party. And it is them. It is your mother, or your father, or the person you have lost, arranged by an algorithm into a tidy little slideshow, set to music, and served to you, without warning, on a Tuesday, while you were doing the dishes.

There is no bracing for it, because the whole design of the thing is to surprise you pleasantly, and it cannot tell the difference between a pleasant surprise and an ambush. The app does not know. It has no idea that this particular face, which it has helpfully gathered and sequenced and scored, belongs to someone who is dead, and that its chirpy little look back on this happy day has just opened a trapdoor under you in your own kitchen. It hands you the dead with exactly the tone it uses to hand you a nice brunch, and the mismatch between the tone and the content is a specific modern cruelty that no previous form of memory ever managed, because no previous form of memory was cheerful, or automated, or in the habit of surprising you.

The blindness

I have thought a fair amount about that blindness, because at first it seems simply cruel, and then, the longer you sit with it, it becomes something stranger and harder to name.

Because the algorithm’s not-knowing cuts both ways. Yes, it is a cruelty — the unwarned resurfacing, the dead deployed as a delight, the grief sprung on you by a machine that thinks it is being nice. But consider the other face of the same blindness: the app that does not know your mother is dead is, in its stupid mechanical way, the only thing left that is still treating her as alive. It has not updated. It has not filed her under deceased and quietly stopped including her, the way the world so quickly does. To the photos app she is simply a face that appears often in your library, a person of evident importance to you, a recurring and beloved presence — which is exactly what she was, and exactly what everything else has stopped acting like — and so it keeps making the slideshows, keeps surfacing her on the anniversaries it does not know are anniversaries, keeps her, blindly, faithfully, in circulation, as though she were still just a person you love who might turn up in the next batch of memories. The machine’s failure to learn that she is gone is indistinguishable, from a certain angle, from loyalty.

And the thing it surfaces is so often a photograph you had forgotten. That is the part that undoes people, and the part that keeps them from turning the feature off. Not the famous photos, the framed ones, the ones you have looked at until they went smooth and stopped hurting — but the incidental ones, the fourth-best shot from some ordinary afternoon, the one you never chose and never printed and had genuinely forgotten existed, in which your mother is caught mid-laugh or mid-sentence, unposed, alive, doing some small forgotten thing on some small forgotten day. The algorithm, trawling blindly through your whole library, dredges up the ones your grief had not yet worn smooth, and hands you a version of her you had lost even the memory of, and for a second she is back, completely, in a photo you didn’t know you had, and it is unbearable, and it is a gift, and the two are the same thing, delivered by a machine that does not know it has done either.

Why you don’t turn it off

You could turn it off, of course. There is a setting. You could tell the phone to stop, could exclude the person, could scrub them from the memories feature so the ambushes stop coming. And some people do, and I understand them completely, because the trapdoor in the kitchen is a real and sometimes intolerable thing, and no one should have to be reduced by an algorithm at the sink on a Tuesday if they cannot bear it.

But a lot of people don’t turn it off, and I understand them too, and I think the reason they don’t is the truest thing in this whole small modern grief. They leave it on because the ambush is also a visit. Because in the ordinary run of days the dead recede, get smoothed over, become the handful of well-worn images you can look at safely — and the photos app, blind and cheerful and relentless, is the one thing that will still, without being asked, without warning, on a random Tuesday, reach into the whole forgotten depth of your library and bring them back fresh, in a photo you’d lost, mid-laugh, alive, for one unguarded second before you remember. And that second, however much it costs, is a second you would not otherwise have had. The machine does not know it is giving it to you. It thinks it is showing you a nice memory. But it is, in its ignorant automated way, doing the one thing you most want and cannot do for yourself, which is to be surprised by them again — to have them arrive unbidden, the way the living do, instead of being summoned, the way the dead have to be.

So the notification comes, On This Day, and you know by now that it might be nothing and it might be them, and you tap it anyway, every time, because you have decided that the ambush is worth it, that you would rather be occasionally undone at the sink than protected into never being surprised by their face again. And when it is them — when the little slideshow swells its gentle music and there she is, mid-laugh, in a photo you’d forgotten, three years gone and cheerfully resurfaced by a machine that will never learn she died — you let it play, all of it, the whole blind loving accidental resurrection, and you do the thing the app can’t do and never will, which is to know exactly what you are looking at, and to be grateful, and to grieve, and to leave the feature on, so that she can ambush you again.