We Americans, we the dead, now have a new condition: the data complex. The data complex is both material, out there — in our libraries, archives, data centers, bombproof bunkers — and psychological, inside us — in our minds where we fear the progressions of time and decay, and place our faith in the bulwarks and technological magic of the cloud.
Brian Michael Murphy is a poet and a “media archeologist” (oh, and a Fulbright Scholar and the Dean of the College and Director of the MFA in Public Action at Bennington College with a PhD in Comparative Studies from Ohio State University, where he was a Presidential Fellow) and his latest book (based on research from his doctoral dissertation), We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World, is one of the most philosophically interesting things I’ve read in a long time. I thought this was going to be a book about the Singularity — which it’s not, until it sort of is — but it’s even more out there than that: Tracing the history of America’s information collection and storage systems (what Murphy calls “the data complex”), We the Dead lifts the veil on some dark history, a shadowy present, and an uncertain future; it’s the kind of read that makes you wonder, “How are people not talking about this stuff all the time?” I was interested in absolutely everything here — from the broad historical context that Murphy provides to his personal anecdotes of visits to public libraries and military-guarded deep-mountain storage bunkers — but if I had a caution it’s that Murphy writes from a definite point-of view: this is not a dispassionate academic work, and it solely focuses on the American experience, but as an accessibly-written exposé of that experience, it often blew my mind. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Over and over again, the data complex expanded in those moments when many Americans felt they were quite possibly living just prior to the end of the world, from the Depression and the hottest moments of the early Cold War, to this moment of human-induced climate change and ecological disaster. Americans now preserve more data — from paper documents to microfilm reels to digital files — than any other civilization in history. This book retraces our steps to show how we arrived here, from the first “permanent” time capsules, created during the Depression to preserve American culture for 5,000-plus years, to subterranean vaults in abandoned mines that now house artifacts of every information medium: etchings, rag paper magazines, magnetic tape, microfilm reels, wax cylinders, and digital hard drives.
Data collection first became important in the US after the Civil War (with increased urbanisation and a need to distribute pensions to veterans), but it really ramped up during the Depression, with corporate America realising that data preservation was essential to the protection of Capitalism and liberal democracy and vital to the needs of the federal government rolling out its social programs. This period also saw eugenicists burying bomb-shaped time capsules for the future (elegaic messages from a time of threatened racial purity, apparently) and archivists attempting to kill bookworms with gas chambers filled with Zyklon B: the instability of the times leading up to WWII seemed to have conflated the needs to kill and preserve. And Murphy makes the point that this is what happens every time Americans feel they are in a time of heightened crisis: The Cold War saw the frantic building of bomb shelters (many of which eventually became underground bunkers for data storage) and suburbanisation (with white people and their artifacts dispersing, leaving POC in the bullseyes of city centers); to the aftermath of 9/11 (which saw the further dispersal of physical and digital artifacts and an astronomical rise in clandestine data collection, now backed up on multiple systems in bomb-proof cold storage); to the climate crisis of today — Norway has been selling itself as natural and permanent cold storage, but when even the “permafrost” at the site of the Svaldbad Global Seed Vault has started melting, where to put all that data when it needs to be kept cold to prevent disintegration and industrial refrigeration further contributes to the warming of the planet? Space is cold. But DNA is the most efficient storage system we know. Wonder what the billionaires are betting on.
(Parenthetically: In one of the recurring themes throughout We the Dead, I found it interesting that American billionaires seem to have always understood that data storage was where it’s at. Dale Carnegie funded all those libraries. Herman “the Mushroom King '' Knaust turned defunct icehouses along the Hudson River into mushroom farms and then into data storage facilities; the abandoned mine he bought eventually becoming the iconic Iron Mountain National Data Center. Bill Gates once thought that photo licensing would be a winning investment and he bought up all the rights he could [since sold off to a Chinese company, which now owns the rights to Marilyn Monroe struggling with her skirt and Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue] — and today Gates is a major investor in data storage on DNA.)
The so-called cloud does not exist immaterially in the air above our heads but resides very materially in these remote, reinforced, transcendent underground spaces within a vast data preservation infrastructure that grew out of hauntings of destruction, and fears of radioactive and racial contamination. We have now repurposed this infrastructure in ways that reflect our current fears, hopes, and persistent impossible desires for permanent data invulnerable to the forces of (cyber) terrorism, natural disasters, and the indomitable force of decay that inheres in all media artifacts.
In a case of “I guess I knew that and never really thought about it”, Murphy repeatedly makes the point that “the cloud” isn’t some invisible haze of permanent, ephemeral information that will outlast us: it is the physical storage of vast amounts of data (he uses terms like exabytes and yottabytes that mean nothing to me, but they sound like a lot) and it’s held on discs and microchips and film, using processors that become obsolete every five years or so, and the more that physical items (film, paper, books) are archived, the fewer of them that are digitised or indexed or ever again made available for human interaction. The more data we collect, the more we decide this stuff is important and attempt to back it up to the cloud, the more we risk it becoming less permanent. On the other hand, the entire internet could fit into a shoebox-sized amount of DNA; everything that could be known about you could be very easily written into your own DNA and constantly updated. How’s that for immortality?
Ultimately, this is a pretty dark story: governments and corporations attempt to ensure their own survival through ever-growing data collection and storage — a process we participate in with our smartphones and internet use — and not only are there dangers inherent in hackers “scraping” or “mining” our data to use against us, but the more we rely on this data being stored somewhere safely and permanently, the more risk there is for it to degrade or disappear entirely. As for the Singularity, Murphy writes that we have already become cyborgs “as human biochips are now embedded in the cyborganism of the data complex”:
If life were an early Cold War B movie where extraterrestrial marauders are scanning Earth for life and treasure, which organism would appear to reign supreme on this lush planet ? Certainly not the humans. For the humans are working feverishly to pull minerals from the ground and refine them, to build data centers and lash them together with fiber-optic cables laid across oceans and deserts, to connect all these machines through invisible tethers of light attached to satellites ringing the globe, and to spend most of their waking hours every day staring at screens and feeding data to the cyborganism that is the data complex. Even when these strange little creatures are not clicking and scrolling, they are carrying devices that perpetually transmit data about their location, the number of steps they take, and their resting heart rate to be recorded in the several million silicon bellies of the supreme beast. Even while they sleep, the data complex grips humans’ wrists through smartwatches and counts their heartbeats.
Not what I was expecting, but incredibly interesting and well-written. I hope this will be widely read.
