by Brooks Riley
RIP Pocket (aka Read It Later) 2007-July 8, 2025
The recent announcement of Mozilla’s shutdown of the Pocket app caught me by surprise. It felt as if the rug was being pulled out from under me—the rug being a motley weave of all the online articles and stories I’ve ever wanted to read later but never did. What would happen to all those pieces saved on impulse for a rainy day?
For those who don’t use it or even know of it, Pocket was a bookmarking service for links you wanted to save and come back to at a later time. Pocket saved it all for you with an easy click, in a pleasant layout and a user-friendly reading format that didn’t require returning to the original site.
Before Pocket, I bookmarked everything on the browser, hoarding unwieldy lists of links that turned the browser into a digital dumpster. Pocket came along to eliminate the constant need to manage browser bookmarks.
Using Pocket, I amassed thousands of saves, going back years—a bottomless bucket of ‘wanna reads’, most of which have remained wanna reads. Early on, I noticed that I rarely opened a Pocket save unless it had to do with whatever subject I was researching at that moment—leaving all the rest unread. Why? I always found an excuse to postpone a visit to my candy store of saves, and fought an eerie sense of guilt by always promising myself to take the time to do so—someday. The truth is, I was no longer interested in many of those stories. Some were too dated. Others simply lost their appeal.
Now, the thought of losing them feels like losing a part of oneself that had once existed.
As it turns out, there are alternatives to Pocket out there, and the saves can be downloaded and recycled. There’s even a rumor that Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian wants to buy and revive Pocket.
The saga may have a happy end, but it raises fundamental questions about our digital existence and how we exploit our curiosity in unexpected ways.
I’ve been using Pocket for so long that there’s a rich trove of abandoned worthies buried in my history—subjects I became intrigued with for a moment, or a week or two, and then forgot about.
I see all those saves as digital shards, or the relics essential to an archaeology of self. Who I was one year ago and who I am today bear little resemblance to one another. That’s how fast the internet is changing our lives and our interests. The two versions of me are connected by a fast-moving stream of words, data and images that put our very consciousness in flux.
A chronological collection of saved articles and stories—read or not read—tells us something about ourselves at a certain point in time. It gives us a story line, a progression, a way to follow how we got here from there. It’s those crumbs we’ve dropped that bear witness—like a journal or a diary—to the things that once moved or inspired us, even if they don’t do that anymore. These links might gather dust, like the old photo album in a drawer—but they can show us who we once were, like an old photograph of our younger self.
Everything else seems to be in flux now—our democracy, our politics, our species, our planet, our weather, our science, and our knowledge systems. This means we are deeply affected by the rapid changes that are coming at us.
We need to be reminded of all that went before—in order to keep track of who we are. This really is a grave new world where people now in power and even those in technology will try to convince us of things we know are fake. Our health, our sanity, our very existence is at stake as we maneuver our way around the immense obstacles to our well-being that are being placed everywhere.
Technology wants to know who we are so that it can control us. AI wants to know who we are so that it can copy us. Algorithms want to know who we are so they can sell us stuff. They learn about us by paying attention to our clicks. But it’s what we save that matters, not the random click. What we save on an app like Pocket suggests more than a passing interest in something. Does the algorithm know that?
Apps like Pocket have a serious downside: They are almost too convenient. Knowing we can save what we’re reading for later means that we often read only parts of essays before hitting save to Pocket in order to move on to something else—never to return. The cumulative side effect of this behavior is a state of perpetual distraction, and an unwillingness to commit real time to anything of length.
I notice it in myself. I surf at tremendous speed so that I can find as many new interesting stories as possible. I become impatient with videos that take too long to explain something. Podcasts drive me mad with their endless intros. There’s an excess of genuinely interesting material available online, but we don’t always know how to find our way around all the trivia vying for our attention.
A societal form of ADHD is overtaking our species as we are offered endless bite-sized ways to fill every passing moment. This is why the reading of books is in jeopardy. On platforms like Substack, books are read, cherished and talked about. But the reading of novels is a diminishing pastime, or at best one that gets divided into tiny portions rather than relished as a whole over a long lazy weekend.
Maybe the end of Pocket is a wake-up call, even as I continue my old ways on a replacement app. The end of Pocket has forced me to think about how digital life has changed me, not necessarily for the better. It has made me hopeful of cultivating a more reasonable tempo and savoring essays as they appear, not always shunting them off to a digital waiting room.
Let’s see how that goes. 
the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.