The Collection and the Cloud
By Amelia Abreu
In the future, will platforms own our pasts?
In February 2015, computer scientist Vint Cerf, known widely for developing the TCP/IP internet protocol standard, gave a lecture at Carnegie Mellon University’s Silicon Valley branch campus in which he spoke of a coming “digital dark age.” This sound bite was subsequently picked up by the BBC and made the rounds on wire services, and was forwarded and tweeted in margin-ad-rightdigital-preservation circles. Cerf, who holds the title of “chief Internet evangelist” at Google, warned about the incipient reality of lost and incomplete digital archives. “Figuring out how to hang on to things is important,” Cerf argued earnestly. “We don’t have a standard way of hanging on to the software as well as the disks.”
As an archivist, what shook me so deeply in Cerf’s comments was his disconnect with the political economies of internet content production, or content production in history. The concept of a “dark age” implies that there is a singular body of canonical knowledge worth preserving, evoking an idea of erasure from history that’s familiar to anyone else besides a distinguished white man accustomed to historical centrality. For everyone else, erasure from history is political struggle. Even today, women, people of color, transgender and disabled people, sex workers, care workers are all struggling to have their stories told and represented fairly. Any discussion of internet archiving has to, at some point, confront this problem: How do we talk about the politics of cultural records? If we cannot preserve everything, who defines what is worth saving?
The internet and social media platforms, we are told, have changed all of this. We can share our way to an archival legacy in the form of a massive data profile compiled passively and automatically, and we can just search among everything! Sadly, this seems less and less like a solution. There is a huge difference between searching and finding.
Contemporary technologies have given us platforms that look a lot like personal archives, yet the archival functionality of platforms feels like an empty promise. In the culture of surveillance, evidence collection is never-ending, a shadow to every activity. These daily interactions with (and production of) data, however unwitting they may be, are mediated by some interface somewhere. Their codes of transmission permeate our offline lives: the hashtags, likes, swipes, physical and metaphorical embodiments of intimate data exchanges.
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