We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World

In the late nineteenth century, the U.S. government and American corporations generated an unprecedented amount of paper records. The data complex emerged as a national network of repositories built to house all those documents. Over the next several decades, the data complex expanded from traditional archives and libraries to bombproof bunkers and securitized data banks. In the 21st century, some tech companies are working to build data centers in outer space, while others have figured out how to store backups of digital files in synthetic DNA. How did Americans become so obsessed with preserving data, and how is the data complex expanding and changing today? How is it changing us? As we increasingly think, communicate, and relate through digital technology, our nervous systems grow more entangled with fiber optics, further blurring the line between human life and the life of machines, between our everyday thoughts and the dreams of the data complex.

Brian Michael Murphy is Chair and Associate Professor of American Studies at Williams College, and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. His book, We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World, received both the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize from the New England American Studies Association. His writings appear in The Kenyon Review, Wall Street Journal, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Media-N, Lapham’s Quarterly, IGN, and elsewhere.

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