The Jar of Paperclips: On the Unmade Decision of an Unemptied Cache

On the corner of my desk sits a small, square mason jar. It is filled, about three-quarters of the way, with paperclips. They are a varied lot: silver ones twisted from cheap wire, a few black-coated ones holding a veneer of professionalism, some brightly colored plastic ones from a long-forgotten marketing promotion, and a single, stubborn, jumbo clip that sits awkwardly atop the pile. This jar is not an archive in the traditional sense; it is a cache. And its continued existence, its unemptied state, is a quiet testament to a very particular kind of content management—the kind defined by postponement.

Every website, every document repository, has its jar of paperclips. It’s the ‘Resources’ page last updated in 2019, the ‘Team Bios’ for employees who departed years ago, the ‘Upcoming Events’ list displaying a concert from last autumn. We don’t maintain these pages out of active negligence, but out of a deferred decision. To empty the jar is to make a final call: to sort, to discard, to declare something officially obsolete. It is an act of curation that feels, in the moment, more laborious than simply letting the pile be. The clips are still there, after all. They might be useful. Someone might need a red one.

The Weight of the Might-Be-Useful

But a cache that is never cleared ceases to be a useful reserve and becomes a museum of potentialities. The colored plastic clips are brittle now; they snap if you try to use them. The silver ones are tarnished, leaving a faint grey smudge on your fingers. Their presence creates a subtle friction. To find a working clip, you must dig, sift, reject the broken and the corroded. The effort to locate a single functional item outweighs the convenience of having a stockpile at all. The page of outdated links functions the same way, imposing a cognitive tax on every visitor who must parse what is current from what is merely spectral.

There is a peculiar authority in an untouched cache, however. It speaks not of vigilance, like the archivist’s cistern, but of ambivalence. It says, “I have not yet decided what this is for, or when its purpose ends.” It holds the door open for a past version of the project, a contingency that never arose. This is the opposite of the gardener’s intentional fallow; this is the accidental scrubland, growing whatever seeds the wind blows in. The content isn’t curated—it just accumulates.

I look at the jar. Part of me wants to upend it onto the desk, to sort the shiny from the dull, the strong from the weak, to create a neat, usable collection. That would be an update. It would be a declaration: these are the clips we use now. The rest are gone. But another part of me hesitates. In that jumble is a history of small tasks, completed documents, bundled receipts. To empty it is to dissolve those tiny, physical connections. So I let it sit. The page remains, the jar remains, holding the unmade decision. And in that pause, the content isn’t fresh, but it isn’t dead either. It’s in stasis, waiting for the day the decision makes itself, or for the moment we finally admit that a cache, if never managed, is just a beautifully labeled box of dust.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: