Two years ago, Lauren Goode, a senior writer at Wired magazine, cancelled her wedding and it was awkward. These things always are, but you get over it because the brain slowly learns how to skip over painful memories. Or it did, before social media.
Goode has made a career out of wittily stripping away the pretensions of consumer tech, and when her wedding plans blew up consumer tech had its revenge. She ended her eight-year relationship in 2019 — but the internet didn’t get the message and kept confronting her with ‘a cyborg version of me, a digital ghost, that is still getting married’.
As she wrote in Wired, at the beginning of this year her social media feed was still cluttered with wedding ads, ‘a near-daily collage of wedding paraphernalia’ from the image-sharing platform Pinterest, plus reminders of the fiasco vomited up by the wretched ‘Memories’ feature on photo apps.
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