On
In these conditions of ontological precarity, forgetting becomes an adaptive strategy.
Mark Fisher • Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?
History written by the victors offers glimpses of marginalized figures, for whom we need to “fabulate” stories to “strain against the limits of the archive” and “represent lives… through the process of narration.” Building relationships between things is a form of authorship too.
Mindy Seu • On Gathering
While we still seem to be caught in the treacherous segue between stories, those cast as victims in old master narratives are writing themselves anew.
Ruha Benjamin • Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)
We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment.
M. E. Rothwell • All Hail the Cloud
It occurs to me, much later than it occurred to the archivists, that we have never possessed such a complete and damning record of our past interactions. I can tell you every college scholarship I never got. Every sale at The Gap for the past 18 years. Every flight I’ve ever taken, anywhere in the world. Most grocery lists, news alerts, heartbreaks... See more
Gmail will break your heart
... See moreWe have never been able to document our lives so thoroughly as we now can with the help of digital tools, yet we feel that time is out of joint and that we've lost the thread of both our personal and collective histories. We appear to be both obsessive documenters of our experience, yet largely indifferent to or overwhelmed by the archives we creat