We the Dead

Brian Michael Murphy

Description

Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America's most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records that now accompany each of us from birth to death. This data complex backs up and protects our most vital information against decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and government institutions whose power is also preserved in its bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces.

We the Dead traces the emergence of the data complex in the early twentieth century and guides readers through its expansion in a series of moments when Americans thought they were living just before the end of the world. Depression-era eugenicists feared racial contamination and the downfall of the white American family, while contemporary technologists seek ever denser and more durable materials for storing data, from microetched metal discs to cryptocurrency keys encoded in synthetic DNA. Artfully written and packed with provocative ideas, this haunting book illuminates the dark places of the data complex and the ways it increasingly blurs the lines between human and machine, biological body and data body, life and digital afterlife.

Sujets

• Media Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Black mirror
• Hard-disk failure
• Iron Mountain
• The National Archives
• List of national archives
• Film preservation
• Long Now Foundation
• Immortality
• Civil defense
• New Media
• The Black Mirror
• Bill Gates
• Archives nationales
• Archives nationales (Royaume-Uni)
• Crypt of Civilization
• Cyborg

Informations

• Publié par: The University of North Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 16 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781469668307
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

We the Dead

We the Dead
Preserving Data at the End of the World
Brian Michael Murphy
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS CHAPEL HILL
This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.
2022 Brian Michael Murphy All rights reserved
Designed by Richard Hendel Set in Utopia and Real Text Pro by codeMantra Manufactured in the United States of America
The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Cover images: filing cabinet and skeleton iStock/CSA-Printstock; binary code Shutterstock/Tavarius; children from The Middleton Family at the New York World s Fair, Westinghouse ad, Life , April 17, 1939.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Murphy, Brian Michael, author. Title: We the dead : preserving data at the end of the world / Brian Michael Murphy. Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021058924 | ISBN 9781469668284 (cloth) | ISBN 9781469668307 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Archives-Collection management-United States-History. | Records-United States-Management-History. | Storage facilities-United States-History. | Data centers-United States-History. | Data warehousing-United States-History. | Digital preservation-United States-History. Classification: LCC CD3021 .M87 2022 | DDC 027.073-dc23/eng/20220128 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021058924
To Nadia
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
-Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: I Will Survive?
The Mummy Complex / Human Biochips in the Corporate Cyborg / Explorers of Infrastructure / Emergence of the Data Complex / Backup Loops / The Biogeochemistry of the Data Complex / Otto Bettmann s Photos of Photos
Chapter 1. Gas Chambers for Bookworms
Infected Books / Gassing Paper and People / A Surgeon in the Library / The Problem of Perishable Paper / Arthur Kimberly s Dream of Hygienic Data / Kleenex and Chlorine / Archives without Archivists / The Toxic Afterlife of Paper
Chapter 2. We the Dead
Technicolor Whiteness / The Conception of Data Bodies / The Book of Record / The Typical American Family Contest at the Fair / Thirty-Six Tons of Air / The Backup Loop to Rule Them All / Skyscrapers of Light
Chapter 3. Bombproof Cavemen
The Birth of Open Time Capsules / Typical German and Japanese Cities / The Bombsight Mirror / Operation Time Capsule / Two Hundred Suns / My Career Is in Films? / The Darlings of Doom Town / Preservation Family from the Atomic War / Something Like a Cloud
Chapter 4. The Weight of a Cloud
Fallout Forecasts / Touring the Greenbrier Resort / From Bunkers to Data Bunkers / Buried Alive / Desert Clouds / In Algorithms We Trust / Cellblocks for Data / The Constellation of Dead Malls
Chapter 5. The Satellite Graveyard
The Last Pictures / The Golden Record / An Atomic Priesthood / Digital Diamonds / The Angel of History / Rosetta Disks / Physical Bitcoin / Helium through Glass / The Data Complex Dreams of Infinity
Chapter 6. Save File as DNA
Digital Is Not Dead Yet / The Cosmic Clean Room / Mines of Ethereum in the Cloud / Asteroid Gas Stations / Clock of the Long Now / Molecular Ticker Tape / The Next Version of the Universe / Biochip Circuits, and Running from Crocodiles
Epilogue: After Life
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Corbis Film Preservation Facility office 22
Mug shots of bookworm 30
Literary Treasures Saved by Book-worm Exterminator 34
Papers in a binder to be placed in a gas chamber 46
Gas chamber at the National Archives 49
Westinghouse Time Capsule of Cupaloy replica 61
Frontispiece for The Book of Record 73
The Burdin family of Miami, Florida 78
Westinghouse air-conditioning ad 82
Microbooks in the Crypt of Civilization 85
Flag in glass capsule 89
Recordak ad, 1944 108
Operation Cue 112
Disaster Scene in Pewaukee, Wisconsin 115
2 A-Bombs Hit City 117
One Man s Preparation for Atomic War 120
Make Themselves at Home 122
Fragment of metal newsreel 156
The Last Pictures 159
Image taken by Philae lander on Comet 67P 189
Introduction: I Will Survive?
I m just here to look at some old photos. I slide my driver s license onto the silver tray below the bulletproof glass, then to a gun-hipped guard, a row of six assault rifles on the wall behind her. She keeps my ID and passes me a security badge, saying, Clip this to your shirt. Return to your car, and someone will drive out in a few minutes. Follow them in.
I walk back to my rented Mazda and sit, stare straight ahead to where the road leads directly into, and under, a small mountain. Soon enough, I see a red car emerge from the tunnel; its driver waves at me and pulls a U-turn. I follow her to the security checkpoint, and after she s allowed through it s my turn to enter the cube of chain-link fencing. The Kevlar-clad security guard gives the trunk and back seat a cursory search, asking whether I have explosives or weapons. He s quite genial, almost cheery.
You re going to Corbis, today? he asks as he pops open my glove box.
Yes, I reply.
What an interesting place, huh? It s amazing they have all those old photos down there, isn t it?
Yes, it s amazing.
Are you doing some research, errrrr ?
Yes, I m writing a book.
That s great. Well, have a great day. You re gonna love it down there.
Thanks.
He waves me through, slaps a button that raises the wall of fence in front of me and lays flat the row of yellow steel spikes on the road ahead. I then wait for a green light to raise yet another security gate protecting the entrance to Iron Mountain s National Data Center in Boyers, Pennsylvania. Formerly a limestone mine, the site was converted into a secure records and data storage facility during the Cold War. Now it consists of roughly 150 underground acres of vaults filled with ordered avalanches of paper, miles of microfilm, and digital servers forming a part of what we collectively, inaccurately, refer to as a cloud. 1 For the data we preserve around the clock doesn t live in the sky; it is a place on the ground, and underground. And at Iron Mountain, one of over 2,600 data centers in the United States alone, 2 the entrance to the cloud is what military strategists call a choke point: a stone archway wide enough for only a single vehicle to pass through, easy to barricade, difficult to penetrate, one of the reasons this place has a security rating of four. To put that in perspective, the White House and the Pentagon are rated five. 3
I have come here to do research at the Corbis Film Preservation Facility (CFF). Created by Microsoft founder Bill Gates for his image resource company, Corbis, the CFF is one of many vaults in Iron Mountain. The CFF contains a 10,000-square-foot refrigerated vault, located 220 feet underground in a limestone cavern, where Gates stores his collection of 20 million photographs. Corbis makes money by licensing images for use in commercials, greeting cards, magazine ads, documentaries, websites, book covers, and anywhere else images are deployed in the pursuit of revenue. Though journalists, or documentarians like Ken Burns or his assistants, have visited the CFF often, the facility is notoriously difficult for academics to access. I sent emails and made calls to whomever I could find on the Corbis website, over and over, for about three years. I had basically given up when I received an email from Ann Hartmann, the manager of the CFF. I m not sure how or why I got in.
But the fact that academics have a hard time accessing the CFF makes sense, because the richest man in the world built it not for research purposes, but for profit. Corbis began as Interactive Home Systems, founded by Gates in 1989. The billionaire had imagined that people in the digital age would eventually have wall screens in their homes rather than TV sets. 4 Gates thought that once we all had screens for walls, whoever held the digital rights to images-whether historical photographs or iconic pieces of art-would stand to make a fortune.
Gates began buying massive amounts of art and numerous image archives. He snapped up the digital rights to art in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London, long before most museums, artists, and lawyers even knew what digital rights were. He bought one of Leonardo da Vinci s notebooks, known as the Codex Leicester, not to mention the digital rights to all of Ansel Adams s photographs, and some of the most important photography archives in existence. Gates s acquisitions included the Bettmann Archive, which contains over 10 million photos and illustrations, the entire United Press International Archive, and iconic photos like Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue, Marilyn Monroe having trouble with her skirt on a Manhattan sidewalk, and a row of construction workers perched on a steel beam floating fifty stories above the out-of-focus metropolis. 5 The originals of these highly valuable photos are actually stored in a special deep freezer in the CFF, at negative four degrees Fahrenheit. According to Henry Wilhelm, designer of the CFF and the leading expert in the field of image permanence, the refrigerated, humidity-contro