Everything not saved will be lost

In this body of work, Charlie Stein repurposes a now-iconic video game warning — Everything not saved will be lost — as both title and central omen. Originally a simple reminder to Nintendo players to save their progress, the message is here transformed into a metaphor for our precarious era: relationships fray, cultural memory fades, habitats vanish — without intentional acts of preservation, all is at risk of slipping through our fingers.

Originally phrased as “Anything (not Everything) not saved will be lost” on early Nintendo consoles, the line drifted, reshaped by meme culture into a more absolute, existential phrase. What began as a practical prompt to protect data now circulates online as a poetic threat, a digital-age proverb for forgetting.

Here, Stein takes the misquote seriously — as a symptom of how language mutates when it passes through our collective, distracted hands. If anything could be lost, everything might be. In an era of flickering feeds and endless image churn, this drift is both trivial and terrifying.