Visitors to a small palace in the sixteenth century got the standard tour. First the gardens, then the chapel, and then, if their host was feeling generous, the room he was proudest of: the cabinet of curiosities. It was dim and crammed from floor to ceiling with branches of coral beside carved ivory, a clock that seemed to run by itself, and, almost certainly, a crocodile hanging overhead. Everything had its place, sorted into Naturalia for things found in nature, Artificialia for things people made, and Scientifica for instruments and clever machines. And the host, a prince whose entire realm could be crossed before lunch, saved the best for last: a genuine unicorn horn. (It was a narwhal tusk. Nobody told the prince.)
You have a collection like this, too. You’ve been building it for years, one screenshot at a time. But unlike the prince’s, no one has ever seen it. Probably not even you.
The Collection, Catalogued
Your cabinet deserves the same tour the prince’s visitors got. To an outsider, it might look like chaos, but to the collector, all of it makes sense, even if they can’t remember why. Look closer, his system is still there.
The Naturalia are right where you’d expect them: a photo of a dog caught mid-heist with an entire baguette, or maybe a goose blocking a doorway. The Scientifica are nearby: keyboard shortcuts or instructions for saying things like “question mark” or “smiley face” out loud so your phone will type one. (These are all in mint, unused condition.)
Then the collection gets more modern. Eventualia holds the concert announcements and workshop reminders for events you meant to attend, most of them now safely in the past. Optimistica holds recipes and gift ideas, saved by a version of you with far more free time. Bureaucratica, with its boarding passes, Wi-Fi passwords, and parking levels, is the only section anyone has ever actually used, though nothing in it has ever been deleted. Forensica holds receipts and group chats, kept as evidence in arguments long since forgotten. And Accidentalia holds at least 27 images of your home screen, captured while you were only trying to turn the volume up.
Finally, every cabinet has a section of Inexplicabilia. Mine includes a fire hydrant wearing a coat.
A Portrait of the Collector
In the sixteenth century, the real exhibit was the prince himself. A cabinet of curiosities existed to show visitors how worldly, learned, and well-connected its owner was, or at least how much he wanted them to think so. Even the fakes said something true about him, mostly that he could afford to be fooled.
Your cabinet is a portrait, too, but nobody arranged it for visitors, which makes it more honest and a good deal less flattering. It’s also one that’s unlikely to be studied, least of all by its owner. In fact, the only people who might ever go through it item by item are the ones who’d be paid to. If you went missing tomorrow, investigators would comb through every screenshot for clues to your whereabouts. They’d learn very little about where you are, and a great deal about who you are.
In my case, they’d find a person with remarkably full plans and a detailed record of everywhere she didn’t go, who meant to cook more and give better gifts, who was right about something once and kept the proof, who has never fully mastered the buttons on her own phone, and who cares deeply about the welfare of one fire hydrant in winter. The portrait they’d build would be ridiculous, but it wouldn’t be wrong.
The Last Known Specimen
His Highness’s cabinet wasn’t invitation-only forever. Collections like his were the ancestors of the modern museum. (Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum started with one.) Yours may be headed the same way.
After all, a museum’s job is to keep what would otherwise be lost, and your folder has been doing that for years. Screenshots never wear out, but the originals vanish all the time. Posts get deleted, accounts disappear, websites quietly go offline. Without meaning to, you’ve become the accidental curator of things that no longer exist anywhere else.
Nobody knows how much internet culture survives only as screenshots, and given the sheer number of poop emojis, nobody knows whether it should. But the tools built to preserve the early web, like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, still struggle to capture social media feeds, or anything that only appears when you scroll, click, or log in. Someday, a screenshot may be all the museums of the future have to go on. (The exhibition on take-out menus will be very full.)
…………………
A responsible curator would go through all 244 items in my folder, catalog the important pieces, and quietly deaccession the rest. I’d like to say I’ll do that. I won’t. Instead, I’ll keep adding to the collection: a restaurant recommended in a city I’m not visiting, a post that will make me laugh today and baffle me by spring, and maybe, if I’m lucky, a fence wearing a knitted scarf.
