We really are all connected – even our photos now live in the same building

In a beautiful and emotively shocking presentation on the Gold Coast this past Sunday by a South East Queenslander now London based, Liam Young, the image of Facebook’s storage facilities was shown.

This place of black and blue and machines and very carefully controlled temperature in a shed in a remote place in Oregon houses the photo’s of our lives. All the photos. All the colours and adventures. The heartaches. The beauty and the spoiled. All. Here.

This place is our memories.

Here I sit on the train to Brisbane, connected to the interwebs, surrounded by strangers, and somewhere in Oregon, my photos and my fellow passengers photos, all live under the same roof. My photo’s and all the strangers around the world..our loved memories live under the roof of this same building.

This strange thought of collective and machine-like isolation reminds me that in my body at the atomic level lives the cells of Leonardo DaVinci, Hitler, and Genghis Khan. And all the people on the train with me. All my ancestors. All people.

That the young man in front of me…. his girlfriends head resting on his shoulder while scanning the interwebs on a hand-held device…..this man and I share precious photo storage and atomic biology.

There is something both deeply disturbing and quite beautiful about the thought of my life now catalogued in some unseen building a very long way from where I sit. That these grey buildings around the world have become the new currency, the new power.

The image haunts me.