Book Reviews

Brian Michael Murphy. We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. 316 p. Hardcover $32.95 (ISBN: 9781469668284); ebook $23.99 (ISBN: 9781469668307). LCCN: 2021-058924.

Librarians tend to look askance at commentators on their work and profession from outside the guild. Henry Petroski, an engineer, wrote Book on the Bookshelf (1999), looking at the practical construction principles of bookshelves through history, and was never taken seriously by librarians—perhaps also in light of his (joking?) recommendations to arrange books on bookshelves by the author’s first name, or by the first letter of the second-to-last word of the title. Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose (1981) was nothing if not a roman à clef about the perfidy of librarians hoarding secrets—which of course we know we never do. A final example, the pharaonic undertaking by two other outsiders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, to create a universal digital library, was, as Deanna Marcum and Roger C. Schonfeld argue in Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization, brought down largely through the opposition of major library organizations, ALA, ARL, and ACRL.

So now we have a book with “preserving data” in the subtitle that is decidedly not by a librarian, not even a digital librarian, but by a self-described “media archaeologist” (87). The author is also a poet and an essayist, not to mention dean of the college at Bennington. Like the other outsiders mentioned, Brian Michael Murphy makes disturbing, heretical observations, among them that “[t]he practice of data preservation is itself inherently toxic” (33); or that librarians “preserve through annihilation” (63). He even relates the will to preserve—which in our field is axiomatic—to what he (following André Bazin) calls the “Mummy Complex” (7), updated to today’s world as the “data complex”: a vast, extrasomatic matrix that aspires to a kind of immortality independent of the human beings—us—who have given rise to it. In the data complex, humans do still play a role, though only as “human biochips… embedded in the cyborg of the data complex” (180). The entire history of preservation is in fact dubious. Murphy suggests that racism and eugenics were behind the preservation-minded time capsules of the earlier twentieth century, and that “surveillance capitalism” and atomic war fatalism provided the impetus to develop microfilm. Most disturbing of all is that the author makes a pretty good case for all these claims.

As for the job title media archaeologist, “archaeology” in this context should be understood both in the literal sense—physically excavating or exhuming an otherwise lost past—and in the Foucauldian sense: digging (figuratively) to unearth the pre-logical, often pre-rational assumptions that drive our social, “surface” movements and beliefs.

In the literal sense of the word, “archaeological” well describes the—absolutely fascinating—journeys the author undertakes (and minutely describes) at numerous mega-archival sites across the United States: Iron Mountain in Boyers, Pennsylvania; the National Archives at College Park, Maryland (“Archives II”); the subterranean Greenbrier Bunker at White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia; Mount Pony in Colorado; and others. Some but by no means all these sites (especially Iron Mountain) are known to librarians and archivists as the ultimate “permanent” repositories for sensitive physical materials, among them photographic negatives, original recordings of classic songs, microfilm masters, and of course uncountable paper originals. These “data bunkers” also increasingly house servers storing petabytes (exabytes?) of born-digital government and corporate (e.g., banking) data. The incursions he describes, through blastproof doors and past heavily armed guards, do indeed recall the adventures of actual archaeologists, like Howard Carter opening the tomb of Tutankhamun or, more popularly, Indiana Jones defeating snakes and deadly booby traps to reach the extraordinary riches deep inside ancient tombs. (Mummy Complex indeed!) Once inside these repositories, astonishing riches of another kind await. For example, the eleven million original photographs of the Bettmann Archive are deep inside Iron Mountain. Of these eleven million, only 2.7 percent (300,000) have ever been digitized. (128) The Bettmann Archive was bought in 1995 by Bill Gates for an undisclosed amount, making him the owner of thousands of iconic images that are reproduced, for a fee, worldwide. Gates is a member of the class Murphy calls “vectoralists:” the “rulers of rulers” who control the originals of information, and who, by aggregating and manipulating huge troves of artifacts and data, have become the most powerful and wealthiest individuals on the planet. But as masters of the “data complex,” they are actually only priests who serve what they appear to own, since the data complex has evolved from “a thing that we have to a thing that has us.” To maintain their lofty status and wealth, the vectoralists must preserve their data, “obeying the call of the data complex to constantly seek more space for aggregating, preserving, and analyzing data” (13).

Somewhere in the middle of the last paragraph, we left the domain of “archaeology” in the traditional meaning of the word and entered into a largely abstract “archaeology” where the rules were formulated decades ago by French historian and cultural archaeologist Michel Foucault, a world in which (to use Murphy’s terminology) our “biobodies” are accompanied non-physically by their respective, largely invisible “data bodies,” which in turn often have greater value than people do to corporations and governments. The sum total of these data bodies comprise the “data complex,” which ultimately is “in service to itself” and aspires to “a kind of data-based immortality” (11). This, then, is the origin of the “will to preserve.”

But let’s return to Archaeology 1.0, which is probably of most interest to librarians. Murphy is not hopeful about the prospects to permanently preserve archival objects, neither physical nor digital. Keeping physical artifacts permanently requires either hugely invasive chemical treatments or very expensive artificial environments of temperature or gas which are unlikely to be sustained over time. Data (artifacts included) “is subject to both foreseeable and unforeseeable disasters; the ultimate futility of all our attempts to preserve data permanently and fully securitize it against flood, fire, terrorism, hacking, sabotage, and the threat of its own chemical makeup. Even if the negatives [stored beneath the World Trade Center] hadn’t been destroyed on 9/11, they would have naturally decayed within a century or so” (124).

So, the reality of “preservation” is often far removed from the value we attach to it and the vocabulary we choose to describe it. Case in point: One of the greatest misnomers of our digital world today is “the cloud,” where we—including we individuals—send all our most valued data for safekeeping. This very cloud “does not exist immaterially in the air above our heads,” but in servers buried deep in the interiors of remote mountains, or just very deep underground. All of this storage, especially when called a “cloud,” allows us to harbor the illusion that our data bodies and our world will live on forever if we only… trust. With “preservation” in our minds, individually and collectively, we are torn “between oblivion and a fossilized eternity” (143).

This thought-provoking, often revelatory book is highly recommended for college and university libraries as well as for supplemental reading lists for graduate students in information science—and cultural studies, specifically cultural anthropology. It provides a context for the work of librarians that lends depth and—sometimes frightening—context to their work. — Jeffrey Garrett, Northwestern University