Cultural Insights of Our Own: Lessons From a Newly Decoded Digital Archive
Interplanetary Journal of Cultural Studies
Volume 16, Issue 3, Pages 322-340
Abstract
The recently decoded Internet Archive includes the digital artifact called “Archive of Our Own” (AO3) from early third millennium Earth. AO3 is unusually well backed up and therefore is presumed to contain some of the most significant -- perhaps even sacred -- texts of the time. In this paper we present our preliminary analysis of AO3 metadata, including new insights about the literature, gender and sexuality, religion, and scientific understanding of this historical era:
I. LITERATURE. We describe the cultural centrality of figures such as the Winchesters and Reader. We explore how they featured heavily in every dominant literature genre of the era, including Fluff, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, and Oral Sex.
II. GENDER AND SEXUALITY. We review the overwhelming evidence that male-male relationships were the most culturally significant sexual and romantic relationships, but we also show that it was a culture with an unusually broad set of sexual and gender roles. In particular, we highlight the unusual tripartite conceptualization of gender as including alpha, beta, and omega roles; we note the apparent prejudice against betas, illustrated in the prevalence of “no beta we die like men” and similar protest slogans.
III. RELIGION. We describe a newly discovered religious taboo: doves were a common sacrificial animal of the time, but they were forbidden from being eaten.
IV. SCIENCE. Finally, we present new insight about alternate universes. While previous scholars hypothesized that the scientists of Earth may have developed a correct early theory of the multiverse by the late second millennium, our analysis of AO3 presents evidence to the contrary. As late as the early third millennium, prevailing theories postulated highly specific universes, such as a universe in which everyone is in high school, or a universe contained within a coffee shop.
Taken together, these historical insights show that further investigation is warranted into the valuable documents stored within AO3, perhaps even going beyond the metadata to examine the full texts.
This is now available on AO3, complete with academic paper styling and an extra chapter of footnotes explaining the jokes/sprinkling in a few fandom stats. :)
