The Summer Cicada: On Digital Dormancy and Unexpected Returns
There’s a particular hum to a summer evening, a resonant thrumming that seems to emanate from the very trees. It’s the sound of cicadas, insects that spend years—sometimes more than a decade—living unseen beneath the soil, only to emerge for a brief, loud, and singular purpose before vanishing again. As I listen to their chorus, my mind drifts from the biological to the digital, to the vast archives of data we’ve consigned to a similar state of dormancy.
We are, by nature, hoarders of the digital. We capture tweets, snapshot websites, and back up hard drives with a kind of dutiful optimism, believing that what we save today will be meaningful tomorrow. But so much of this effort is an act of burial. We store terabytes of information on cold servers, in forgotten cloud accounts, on external drives that sit in desk drawers for years. This data enters a state of digital torpor, a sleep from which we assume it can always be awoken.
But like the cicada’s long subterranean development, this dormancy is not passive. It is a period of latent potential, of silent change. File formats ossify. The software required to read them becomes abandonware. The context needed to understand a folder of poorly named JPEGs evaporates with the passing years. The data is there, physically present on a platter or a chip, but it is effectively entombed, waiting for a key we may have already lost.
The cicada’s return is a spectacular, noisy event. Our data’s re-emergence is often far more quiet and fraught. It happens when a researcher stumbles upon a forgotten dataset from the 1990s, or when a family finally cracks the password on a deceased relative’s laptop. The return is not always graceful. Corrupted sectors, missing codecs, and broken hyperlinks are the brittle exoskeletons these digital creatures leave behind. Their re-introduction to the world is often a fragile, archaeological process.
This seasonal emergence asks a difficult question of us as custodians: are we merely burying time capsules, or are we tending a garden? The difference is profound. One is a hope that the future will understand; the other is an active effort to make understanding possible. It means periodically exhuming our own personal archives to check their vitality, to convert a file, to add a note of context. It is the tedious but necessary work of keeping data not just stored, but alive.
So as the cicadas sing their ephemeral song, I am reminded that preservation is not a one-time act of saving. It is a cycle of care, a commitment to periodically listen for the quiet hum of what we’ve stored away and ensure it can still find its voice when the season is right.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: