I asked the computer for advice on digital decluttering and addressing information hoarding, and it told me the following.

This is an important turn in your decluttering journey: you’ve moved from physical clutter (finite, tactile, heavy) to informational clutter (infinite, intangible, but equally heavy in its own way). What you’re describing is a mix of archival instinct, FOMO, and fear of impermanence — all perfectly understandable. Let me break it down into some core truths and strategies:

1. Information really is fragile — but so is your capacity

You’re right that the internet is unstable: blogs vanish, archives can fail, even “big” platforms purge content. That makes your impulse to hoard information rational. But here’s the paradox:

The more you save, the less usable the archive becomes. (You already know this — 100k photos, 15 years of bookmarks, scattered notes = overwhelming.)
Information has value only when it’s retrievable and meaningful to you. Otherwise it’s not a library — it’s sediment.

2. The archaeologist’s trap

You put it perfectly: “trash + time = artifact.”

The danger is that age alone transforms junk into something “precious.”
This is why shopping lists become untouchable if they survive long enough.
The same applies digitally: an unread Wikipedia tab feels un-closable because of the guilt of neglect + the possibility of importance.

But here’s the thing: future-you doesn’t need this specific artifact to remember that you cared about it. What matters is the lived impact — not whether the PDF or tab survives.

3. Letting go doesn’t erase the learning

Every time you read something, even if you later forget the details, it reshapes you. You do carry it forward in ways that don’t require an archive. (Think of how you’ve changed just in the past few years, not because you can produce your old notes, but because reading, watching, learning changed how you think.)

Closing a tab is not destroying knowledge; it’s acknowledging that it already did its work.
If something is truly transformative, you’ll circle back to it again naturally.

4. Practical exits from the hoarding loop

You’re afraid of two extremes (wipe everything vs. manually sort forever). There are gentler middle paths:

4A. Controlled amnesty

Pick a date (say, Jan 1, 2022).
Anything older — bookmarks, screenshots, “watch later” — gets archived wholesale into one cold-storage folder/drive. No sorting. You’re not deleting, just exiling it.
Anything newer you keep active. This instantly cuts overwhelm without trauma.

4B. Ritualized discard

New material: give yourself 24h–48h max to either do something with it (watch, read, make a single-line note in a “curiosity log”), or let it go.
If it survives past that window, it becomes “archaeological clutter” — and you’ve seen what happens then. The ritual is: decide quickly, or not at all.

4C. The “one-line log” technique

For things you want to remember without hoarding: a plain-text file where you just write the headline and 3–5 words.
- Example: “corpse grass → actually Euphorbia cyparissias”
This creates a breadcrumb trail without needing the tab, the article, or the screenshot.

4D. Shrink, don’t expand

Instead of worrying about whether you’re the only person who saved X, flip it: ask why should I personally carry the preservation burden of X?
The world doesn’t need you to be the last line of defense against oblivion. You’re not betraying the tweet or video if you let it go.

5. Philosophical reset

The archivist’s mindset assumes: “If I don’t save it, it will be gone forever.” But you’re realizing you don’t actually want to be an archivist — you want to live and learn.

If you can reframe “losing information” as “gaining freedom to focus,” the tradeoff becomes clear.
Think of how liberating it was to rearrange your furniture and feel a new vibe. Digital space works the same way.

Here’s the key reframe I’d like to leave you with: You don’t owe every interesting fact or tweet immortality. You only owe yourself the space to keep growing.