2025 in Books: We the Dead
Here are some thoughts on a book I just read. Reach out to me if you have read it. I would love to discuss:
Made me want to check out next the following two books - The politics of mass digitization, The known citizen
Like meat-packing in the late 1800s, organizing information is just one symptom of our "inescapable need to service debt" as historian William Cronon in Nature's Metropolis rightly says about the corporatization of like American society
P. 15– idea of “the Data Complex” first emerges
P. 40– rich private families (Carnegie) funding the creation of public libraries after being advised by John Billings to do so. Makes me wonder Carnegie’s motivations
P. 40– data preservation and organization emerged during the era of the rise of public hygiene and standardization
P. 44– chemists attempt to settle the question of the permanence of paper is a fundamental attempt at answering the most important preservation question which remains unanswered
P. 45– industrialization demanded a higher amount of paperwork than ever before while at the same time exacerbated its deterioration. Industrialization= “Engine of the data complex…” Because paper was how businesspl could keep track of profits and losses on a grand scale, larger than one needed to track for oneself.
53– in the 1930s, USA govt did not know where all of its records were. Question: what motivated the Gov to consolidate?
56– … over time, as ppl practiced data preservation “they absorbed the beliefs reflected in them—namely, that saving more data could save the world.”
I disagree here.
P. 71– the fields of archives and then records mgmt emerged around 1920-1940s. Question: was it a result of the growth of corporations (during and?) after industrialization?
P. 75-76– author rambles on about a eugenics leader in California whose team invented a gas to fumigate books in order to make a connection between eugenic views of hygiene at the time and data sterilization for preservation. Interesting idea but should have been an endnote!
P. 79, ideology framed as preservation! This part is a little good!
P. 103, in the year 1955, records mgmt was pitched to become a” new science.”
“Operation time capsule” was a new records mgmt system against the battle of bulk of paperwork that was growing rapidly at the time resulting from US testing to discover how to survive bombs!
P. 107, the value of vital records made people synonymous with corporations (we are the corporations)
P. 110, Emmett Leary is also the inventor of the concept of “lifecycle of records," referring to information as a “body” like it is alive
P. 121 and 122, fascinating
Iron mountain is a monopoly born in the Cold War era as IMASC
the US bombed itself to see how it would survive bombing attacks, which never happened, thus ironically becoming the most nuclear-bombed nation on the planet. The haunting of fallout materialized in architecture at the time: “vaults, underground facilities, redundant power supplies at sites like IMASC”
Speculation is fascinating. Just as investor speculation led to the creation of Chicago, so too did military and corporation speculation in the midcentury form “the basis of a media revolution—digital technology and information networking…”
Generally, author interestingly suggests that the Cold War era is the beginning of networked data… connected, aggregated American records.
p. 141, “We have now repurposed this infrastructure in ways that reflect our current fears, hopes, and persistent impossible desires for permanent data …”
P. 141, preservation of DNA is interesting. Why did this become a thing in 2013?
P. 142, our irrational attachment to data is melancholy (“which is different from mourning,” the author adds…).
Prehistory of the cloud. Book to read
Interesting to think about the different generations of American information preservation. The projects of each generation’s data preservation, fears associated with such preservation projects, infrastructure developed for these projects…
P. 147, neo-categorization! digital selves are not the same as the other rest of the duplicates of data created in microform or other unstructured forms; instead digital selves are “algorithmic measurable types” that change constantly based on . See eg earlier in the page about a young woman described as an old man
“Neo identities” is interesting and sci-fi sounding. Could the issue of gender disparity be solved if we started describing ourselves by the gender of our data body?
p. 150, defunct malls turned into data centers! one example closeby is the Armory in STL potentially being turned into a chip factory or some shit
As of 2020, Amazon is in talks with Simon property group about moving to the property group’s “constellation of dead malls that stretches across the US and Canada.”
P. 166, no such thing as progress within “the data complex”
P. 168-169 ish, nanofiche method is the digital era’s version of “archiving” stuff. Tiny etchings are made onto disk in this modern version of microfilming. What anxiety does this reflect? Author says it reflects our ambivalence about investing about digital tech.
p. 169, idea that we return to analog, as for example, when backing up digital, when we talk about digital. “Even our language for describing digital is not new…”
p. 172, “bitcoin’s security schemes remind us that analog data and digital data are not opposites nor stages in a progression, but rather two elements in a backup loop of data preservation.” Analog formats like magnetic tape have become increasingly important, eg, Google once recovered lost distal data from their own backup system on magnetic tape!
P. 179, so important actually! “Every emergent data format that becomes dominant does so as it corresponds to and grows materially out of the prevailing economic mode of production….” Seems like an obvious statement but worth looking into to discover what the prevailing modes of production led to… whether it be a particular format or procedure, etc.
While it’s true, historically, that first came paper and then came digital, going ”from paper to digital“ as a practice is a myth; both paper and digital practices exist simultaneously in a sort of “backup loop” as the author suggests, possibly due to human anxiety about losing one or the other.
P. 180, further, if a new format were to enter the chat, eg, DNA, it would enter into a thickened constellation of data formats providing insurance for one another in massive feedback loops.
P. 180-181, In regard to 21st century fears of AI, author says that “the end of humanity will not occur through a loss of information (which was the 20th century fear), but from an overabundance of it…”
P. 191, companies exploring the idea of mining outer space for resources to power machines to explore and colonize outer space and beyond… (in the name of what?!?!?!)
Running out of cold on earth to preserve data and maintain power for data centers so we go seek it in outer space
P. 194, George church and DNA experiments. Weird stuff here…
P. 196, bill gates investing shit tons in DNA data storage.
Bio fabrication?
