Relief in a box of floppy disks
This article is about flea markets and the loud silence of our archives.
A few years ago, I bought a box of old 3.5" floppy disks on eBay.
They were already obsolete then: sold off in bulk for a few euros, as if they were nothing but dead weight. I don’t exactly remember why I bought them. Maybe for a project that never happened. Maybe out of nostalgia.
This weekend, I was standing behind a stall at a local flea market, selling off books and clothes, talking to buyers and sellers and just-lookers and generally having a good time.
I had brought the box along, ready to sell it off.
But when I picked up the floppies, felt their weight in my hand, I decided not to part with them after all.
Each disk holds 1.44 megabytes. At the time, that seemed enough to hold entire worlds. Today, it’s smaller than a single high-resolution photo. Smaller than the blank space between two streaming songs.
But unlike files in the cloud, these disks are objects. They snap when you press their corners. They rattle if you shake them. You can slide the little metal cover back and forth.
Data once had heft.
Labels without content
I can’t even read the disks. I don’t own a floppy drive anymore, or any device that could be connected to a floppy drive (I think).
The media is intact, I guess, but the tools are gone. All I have is the outside: the sticky labels. Some are blank, some carry pencilled words that time and smudging have made mostly illegible.
That’s all the meaning I can access. Just the suggestion of what might be inside: Accounting files? Business correspondence? Printer drivers from back when plug and play was science fiction? A thesis or school essay, someone’s favorite pirated game, a love letter?
It struck me that flea markets are full of this kind of ghostly media. There are always boxes of old postcards and orphaned photographs of weddings or holidays, sold off in stacks. And people buy them, I guess - otherwise they wouldn’t be on sale.
Why? Maybe because the image or the handwriting is still legible, even if the story behind it is lost. Maybe because the fragments leave enough blank space for us to project our own stories.
Floppy disks are more private and more silent. Their surfaces reveal little. A postcard can be read by anyone - a floppy can’t.
The floppy’s actual contents are locked away, invisible and unreachable. If they still exist: most likely the contents of the floppy disks in my box have already succumbed to bit rot, the process in which the magnetic integrity of the floppy disk degrades and data gets lost.
Memory as infrastructure
Holding one of the floppy disks, I realize: memory is an ecosystem. It doesn’t reside only in the file. It depends on hardware, software, connectors, standards, instructions. Take away any part of the chain and the record turns into an artifact rather than a message.
Unreadable media is what happens when the infrastructure of memory corrodes. The data may still be there, perfectly intact, but without the tools it’s gone. Like a letter in a language no one speaks anymore.
And that’s not limited to technology, because we too - humans - outgrow our formats. A diary entry, a voice message, a photo from ten years ago: even if the medium is perfectly readable, the person who once understood it may no longer exist in the same way.
We lose the key to our own archives.
The metaphor of unreadability
Maybe that’s why the box of floppies feels so uncanny. They are memory carriers that refuse to yield memory.
And that, in a way, mirrors our own digital lives. We hoard terabytes of photos and texts and messages, believing permanence equals meaning. But looking back years later, we often find them unreadable in a different sense. Not because the file has vanished, but because we have changed. The person who wrote that email, took that photo, who found that screenshot important enough to save it: they’re gone, and we’re left trying to decode their traces.
Unreadable media reminds us that remembering is not storage. Remembering is translation, a living act of reactivation.
Without it, all archives collapse into silence.
Why I didn’t sell them
So the box of floppies stays with me. Not as a functional archive, but as a reminder.
A reminder that memory, whether digital or human, is fragile - that infrastructures need maintenance, formats age, some stories vanish into static.
And also a reminder that not everything needs to be read. Like the postcards in flea market boxes, like the fragments of someone else’s life: there is a dignity in opacity. Some traces exist not to be accessed, but simply to be.
The disks are seeds I can’t plant, words in a script I can’t decipher. But they still matter. They show me that even in a world of endless storage, forgetting - obsolescence or the breakdown of the memory infrastructure or simply bit rot - is part of the deal.
In a world in which memory, storage, the capturing of every moment is relentless, forgetting offers relief, like a spot of shade under the midday sun.
A beautiful, thought-provoking observation. I still have my floppy disks and even the old 5.5-inch diskettes, along with the computers and drives that went with them, in a box in the attic. Sometimes I imagine what archaeologists would feel if they unearthed my collections. They are materialized bridges to the networks of my past lives.
Recently, I've been busy disposing of over 10,000 slides from the life of an 85-year-old Capuchin friar. Almost all of them have lost their color, but they are the last links to his travels to Jerusalem, Rome, and the mission territories of the last century. They were also the basis for hundreds of lectures he gave.
He is just as much a collector of memories and a keeper of the past as I am. Perhaps I should secretly bury them in the monastery garden at night and hope for enthusiastic archaeologists of the future. After all, their final resting place could be a museum.