I can still picture my grandfather, although time has made much of him indistinct. I can no longer recall the exact lines of his face, only the kind and mischievous eyes beneath his shock of white hair. Suspender socks, the smell of cigars, sunlight on his spectacles ...
His voice, of course, still resonates almost as much as the words he used to speak in his patient manner, always full of mirth, never chastising.
I can still recall him sitting at the dining room table, Samsung GalaxyZ Fold4 in hand, browsing reels for hours, sometimes spending whole afternoons on TikTok, engaging with content, liking and subscribing with childish abandon, building stronger networks of behavioural biometric data than the rest of us combined, a result of his Depression-era work ethic and resolve. He was a titan in my mind, vast in knowledge and strength, a tree in whose shade we could always find respite.
Sometimes I swear I can hear him, just in the other room, calling for me to come enter my contact information and tag two friends for a chance to win free food at a small, sustainable, local business who paid a marketing firm to design their quarterly branding strategies, and my heart is full and heavy with love.
Thankfully, when I struggle to recall his face I know that somewhere in the once-sprawling but now densely-connected neural networks responsible for cross-platform data collation there is a crystal clear image of him, marked with over 289 articulable points of recognition, which will live on in a government server storage facility forever at taxpayer expense, and I smile.
He will not be forgotten.
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