History Is One Second Ago, and How You Can Intervene in the Future

History is One Second Ago, and
How You Can Intervene
in the Future

Rick Prelinger
Bellingham, May 2010

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license

Monday, December 27, 2010
Thanks!

so today my angle will be radical traditionalism. what? seems like an oxymoron. does it mean
sticking our head in the ground while the rest of the world speeds past us? is it just talking the talk
rather than walking the walk, trying to have our cake and eat it too?
how do we, as artists and makers, deal with changes that might be unsettling? do we plunge into
the future? do we stick with what’s familiar? there’s a lot of pressure to decide. one thing we might
do is ask how real these questions are, whether they represent actual alternatives.

is freer culture all about working for free? are we losing our shot at the great billable event in the
sky? are the new models of production and distribution just a big steal? will emergent makers and
nonprofessionals destroy culture?

Maybe the new models aren’t really so radical or so threatening.

We might ﬁnd some answers by looking at some of the ways we think about history, and then
recalling a bit of the history of archives.

History has always been contested territory.

It’s not a warm and fuzzy place, not a place to look for consensus.

If you ask historical questions, don’t expect simple answers.

And if you ask who controls history, don’t expect a simple answer either.

And yet, there’s tremendous interest in history, and it’s become part of the cultural mainstream.
This can often lead us to ask complex and penetrating questions. Who and what inhabited this
place before us? Who were our ancestors and how did they live? What were people thinking and
doing during this or that war, this or that storm, this or that migration?

Wall separating Black and White neighborhoods, Detroit, 1951
So our natural interest in history leads many of us in the direction of historical documents. Now,
historical documents may be loaded — maybe even incendiary. They may trace complicated, even
violent histories. As a consequence, sometimes people resist evidence, sometimes they hide it,
sometimes they destroy it.

And sometimes they try to wrap history in scarcity (just like almost everything else). They imagine that it is
valuable, they try to make money from it. I guess I do that too. But there’s also history that belongs to a
community, that might be shared, that’s deﬁned as no one’s private property. That’s a traditional way of
thinking about knowledge that’s now coming back into focus.

Las Vegas, Nevada
So there’s one big question to keep in mind — should traces of history live in private hands, or should we insist
that history, heritage and even culture be common property? And what would it mean to call it common property,
anyway?

So today I’m going to begin by talking a little about history and how it’s ﬁltered through archives, and how we might
imagine different ways of collecting and different kinds of archives, practices that better serve the interests both of people
now living and those yet to be born. And then I’m going to segue into a little bit of our own history, milk it for what it
might mean, and talk about some of the new models we’ve been working with. Then I want to look at these
models and talk about what I call "historical intervention" -- how we can inject the past into the present to change the
future.

ok, so who am I to talk about all this?
I sometimes call myself a recovered archivist, but it’s hard to recover from being an archivist, maybe
I’m kind of a meta-archivist now
i sometimes think of myself as a maker (one feature-length ﬁlm)
for sure I’m an outsider librarian
and, oh yes, i sell footage for a living

why
are
archives
important?

so why are archives important?
well, obviously: historical evidence is fragile. Much has disappeared. The canonical missions of
archives are to preserve historical records — to make them accessible — to organize, describe and
contextualize them.

Sony PetaSite mass media storage
Well, so what?
We have a kind of reverence about archives. It is vague, not reality-based. People expect archives to be there when they
need them. We say, “they’re doing important work,” the same way we might praise an oil spill responder, a garbage
collector, a cop who arrests a driver that’s hit a cyclist.

But classically archives belong to larger organizations: governments, churches, universities,
corporations, even families. They’re usually not public institutions. Like many children, they were
conceived to fulﬁll the agendas of their parents. They make their own rules. Most of the time,
except in special cases (like some government agencies), they can choose whether or not their
collections will be open, and lay down conditions for access to and use of their materials.

Welcome to SFO

It might actually be revealing to think of archives as gatekeepers. They exercise practical control
over historical materials. They can arbitrate and administer peoples’ connections with their history.
They can let pass certain histories, block others.
Is this good? We might answer this in different ways, depending on which histories we agree with.

But this means that archives can be institutions of denial as much as institutions of memory.
This means they can practice strategic forgetting, tactical denial.
We know they have done this time and again.

So a quiet, dusty collection might in fact possess the potential to sustain or destroy consciousness, to control how we
understand our history, and ultimately control how we remember.

Stewart Brand was right in a way: information wants to be free. The massive secret archives of the Soviet Union
opened, to some extent, for a time in the 1990s, and we’ve recently heard about how human rights researchers
stumbled on the secret police archives in Guatemala, and are now doing conservation work and digitizing them.

But right this moment, countless archival records that we are not allowed to see are being
generated. Some of them will be destroyed, but many of them are likely to ﬁnd their way into the
public domain. It often takes more energy to repress than it does to release.

So it might take longer than we’d like, but most secrets get out eventually.
On the other hand, culture that’s not secret, but simply under copyright, may never escape the
archive.

Consequently, the archive needs help to pull the doors open. This means us.

We have a wonderful infrastructure of public, private and personal archives in the world, but we
have very little guarantee that we can see, hear, or touch what we need to, now or in the future.
Public libraries have an ethic of access and a tradition of openness. Archives don’t have that yet,
and we don’t have a strategy to move in that direction. Nor do we have a culture of risk-taking.

So using historical materials to intervene in the present and shape the future is a very old practice,
but it started to hit big in the 1970s, when media began to embrace the past, not always for the
right reasons.

1960s: Oldskool TV docs: war, disasters, movie stars

“Official” materials: newsreels, gov’t films
1970s: Key compilation features:

(Gizmo, Brother Can You Spare A Dime)

Nostalgia craze begins, heavy “retro” marketing
1980s: Media business opens up, many new distro outlets

Cable, homevideo need cheap airtime

Archives flower: Atomic Cafe, music videos, countless

commercials, corporate videos, cable docs,

MTV on-air promotion, etc.

Ephemeral films resurface
The past reemerges in color

AUDIO AND VIDEO SAMPLING
1990s: Remixing infects art world
2000s: Remixing moves from art to amateurism
We see the emergence of hitherto unseen archival material in TV and documentaries — industrial, advertising, amateur,
educational, purely evidentiary films and similar visual documents. These more populist genres edged out more "official"
materials, such as newsreels and government films, and began to increase popular consciousness of archives. “Where did all this
stuff come from?” people asked. Atomic Café, made in 1982, was an important waypoint. The efflorescence of media
distribution outlets acted like a magnet to pull images out of archives. I’d also point in passing to something that arrives later —
the emergence of sampling and remix culture, which I think has a non-trivial connection to archives.

movement from institutional to individual production

In the 1970s and 1980s, people typically needed groups and organizations to make work. But in the past twenty years
production has shifted to something people do themselves. The tools got cheaper and easier. And at the same time social
and cultural history became a mass interest. Now people are making work all by themselves. This is where the proﬁle of
the archival user starts to change. And this is where the old-school media maker might start to feel threatened.

entitlement

Many archivists are noticing that people are beginning to feel quite a sense of entitlement regarding archival collections.
They sometimes make demands that are really difﬁcult to address. On the positive side, we’ve ourselves discovered that
people develop passionate interest in unedited archival footage; they don’t care about editing, narration and background
music, they want to see the original document! And many people remix, reedit and recontextualize the collections.
Unless remixing turns out to be a fad, just an ephemeral style, we are just at the early point of what I believe will be an
enduring and robust sector of media culture.

The Bouvard and Pécuchet problem

Flaubert’s book about two uncritical collectors and seekers of knowledge offers many insights for today, and I
think it also speaks to fan culture. It tells the story of two elderly men who collected historical docs, artifacts and
trivia in the 1840s, wowed by the aura of these things and the presumed value of the information they collected.
But they could not reconcile opposing viewpoints, and the more they gathered, the less they knew.
This is key reading for archivists, people interested in fan culture, and really for anyone who thinks that the more
we collect and the more Google digitizes, the more we know.

But overall, what we are seeing is the abolition of archival privilege, a signiﬁcant growth in the ability to see, if not
to touch, archival imagery. (I’ll talk about “touch” in a bit.) Archives no longer decide, or can decide, who their
users are going to be; those that try to are ﬁghting a losing battle. There is a parallel here in the world of
mediamaking: the “red velvet curtain” that many mediamakers have historically striven for -- in the States this
would mean that your doc premieres on HBO or PBS prime-time, that it has a major theatrical release, etc. Only a
few makers have that privilege. Now a different set of factors, some impossible to predict, rule. You can’t
necessarily control who will see (and who will pay to see) your work.

And somewhere around here is where my own experience starts to kick in....

Back to 1980. I’m a college dropout and working as a typesetter. This is now pretty much an
extinct job. I move to New York hoping to work my way into working on a ﬁlm crew. This doesn’t
work and I keep on typesetting.

Now it’s 1982. Friends of mine make a documentary called Atomic Cafe. It’s a big success for a
doc, and plays all over North America. They’re given money to make another movie, which they call
Heavy Petting. It’s about sex and romance in America after World War II. I’ve always been interested
in archival ﬁlm, and their budget is low, so they hire me as research director. I get to quit working
midnight to 8 am shifts.

CBS News library,Washington, DC 2009
I start to learn about archival research -- who owns historical images and sounds, and how to pry
them loose. And I try to ﬁgure out how to show concepts; how to show events and ideas that you
can’t look up in the old card catalogs at the network TV news archives and the newsreel collections.
I realize that to show these you need to go to the ﬁlms that were made to condition and convince
people -- to make them into good citizens, good consumers, good workers, good students, good
boys and girls.

And so I was drawn to collecting educational, advertising and industrial ﬁlms, ﬁrst for the movie
and then for myself when the movie goes on the skids and rests for a few years. My collection got
really big really quickly.

Michigan Central RR terminal, Detroit
Who knows, but perhaps 500,000 ephemeral ﬁlms were made in the US. We’re a very media-rich
nation -- we throw away more media than most other nations produce. Most of this material’s in
the public domain. There were, and still are, many huge opportunities for the collector, archivist,
scholar, producer. This material was sitting all over the country, ignored. Hadn’t been targeted by
legacy archives. There was room for me to roam freely.

This was a dirty, and sometimes expensive job, but it was DIY archival practice. I traveled to many
cities in America’s rustbelt, and collected ﬁlms from colleges and university distribution libraries,
from high schools, from prod cos that had gone out of businesses, from labs, from people who
worked in the industry. Yet I was still only a collector.

Working with the Voyager Company starting in 1986 helped me realize that what I was doing both
fitted into the archival and historic contexts -- that I was doing archival work where little had been
done before, but also practicing history without a diploma. Slowly I began to figure out what I
might be doing, and began to show films around the country and in Europe...did some laserdiscs,
videotapes and ultimately CD-ROMs -- I say ultimately because this was a new and promising
medium at the time.

accidental and uncurated work,Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK
But life got really interesting for us when we started to have our own experiences with the gift
economy: experiments with models of plenty.

www.archive.org/details/prelinger
At the very end of 2000 we partnered with the Internet Archive and opened up our online collection
with about 300 archival ﬁlms, free to download. It's now over 2,100 items. For us, the online
archives marked a move from having a repository, a collection, to convening a workshop, a place
where people went to make new work and could meet others in the process. Three years later, we
opened a library.

In summer 2004, my spouse Megan and I opened our private research library to the public. We are
in downtown San Francisco, in the South of Market area, in rented space that once was an industrial
laundry. When we opened, 60 of our friends spent 8 days together shelving books. We’re
appropriation-friendly, and we encourage people to come and scan, copy, photograph the
collection. We have about 1,200 visitors per year, not counting people who visit off-site special-
event libraries we set up. We're open about two days a week -- almost every Wednesday afternoon
and evening, and usually three Sunday afternoons a month. We never know who's going to come
during open hours, so are usually surprised. We also make appointments for out-of-towners and
host a good many classes and workshops.

www.prelingerlibrary.org
It’s not a ﬁlm or video collection -- it’s about 50,000 books, periodical volumes, zines, maps, government
documents and maybe 30,000 items of print ephemera. Each Wednesday, anywhere from zero to 25 people come
to use the collection and often cross-fertilize one another. Some are regulars, some come for the ﬁrst time.
Neither of us had ever imagined a library could be such an interesting place.

Nor had we imagined that such community could build around a collection. But we’ve had over
6,000 visitors, mostly artists, writers and real librarians who are curious about what we’re doing,
and all kinds of amazing things have come to pass because of the library. It is where we do much
of our work -- we’re independent scholars -- and increasingly it’s also launched a whole bunch of
very interesting collaborations. We are doing books, installations, museum exhibits, and
residencies that are all based around the library.

The library is comprised of our combined personal book collection, and is centered on our
respective and combined research interests, which include, but are not limited to:

North American regional landscape and land use history; the interests around which we met and
ﬁrst combined our collections and collection-building sensibilities

Media history; incorporating all the print materials ancillary to the ﬁlm archive

urban and infrastructure history

histories of underreported social and political narratives

with emphasis on public domain materials, especially government documents which are so rich in
landscape history

and social history

and image-rich materials

We collect out-of-print materials and ephemeral literature -- works that were published without
being meant for posterity; works intended only to have a temporally or situationally limited lifespan.
These are some of the most powerful and compelling documents in the library -- in any library --
because they often shed light on moments and trends that would otherwise be described only by
historians.

They illuminate ideologies and cultural sensibilities that may or may not have made a lasting
impression on the official historical record.

The library doesn’t have a catalog. Rather, it’s arranged in subject clusters that reflect a homegrown
taxonomy of knowledge, specific to our library. The subjects begin with the local (San Francisco, where
our feet meet the ground, and progress through about 50 areas until we get to science and space). Most
libraries are query-based -- the first thing you see when you walk in is a computer, with a blinking cursor
inviting you to search for something. We find that reductive and limiting, and instead expose all the
materials so that people can exercise their powers of discovery and, as a writer said, “find what you’re not
looking for.” The metadata is itself the data.

We’ve also digitized just over 3,700 public domain books, pieces of print ephemera and periodical
volumes in partnership with the Internet Archive, which are freely available for download and reuse
without restrictions.

Print is dying, right? Migration to digital is irreversible, right? The “screenager” generation turns away from physical objects,
right? We’ve found that none of this is true. We have a constant stream of younger visitors who seem mesmerized by the
collection and pull out an incredibly diverse array of materials. They sometimes have to be literally ejected at closing time. We
ﬁnd that paper-based materials seem to function differently in a world that is growing digital, and that digital materials tend to
take a secondary position when the paper materials are accessible and organized in a way that fascinates. We don’t think we’re
moving toward an all-digital world, but rather a hybrid analog-digital world.

Events also happen around the library. This slide shows the Illuminated Corridor, an outdoor audio & video remix event that took place
last October, made by musicians, performative projectionists and a bunch of artists. Most of the material came from our online archives,
some from our open library, and the center image is my movie, for which Gino Robair composed a new live score. About 400 people
came. The projections are in the parking lot on the wall of our library building.

We've also brought the library to Maker Faire for the last two years, which is a gathering/
conference/skillshare/performance of almost 80,000 people who are focused on reframing
technology as something you can do with your own hands and tools and reshape toward your own
ends. Last year we had about 1,500 visitors who spent hours reading old how-to books and
magazines, and made many new friends. We're a small workshop; the Faire is a huge workshop.

enclosure plenty
These are some of our small-scale solutions to the divide between enclosure and plenty. In a moment, I’ll look at
them critically.

WONDERFUL
AND
UNPREDICTABLE
THINGS
HAPPEN
WHEN
ORDINARY
PEOPLE
GET ACCESS TO
PRIMARY MATERIALS
I show this slide every time I talk, and here it is again. It bears repetition. The model of plenty pays
off in ways that we cannot begin to imagine.

"Given material abundance,
scarcity must be a function of boundaries."
— Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, 1979-83
So we have great tools and technologies that we hope can enable almost universal access to culture. At the same
time, technology is unevenly distributed, and it can also enable an unprecedented level of enclosure. I’m
especially thinking about digital rights management, electronic locks and keys to control access to digital
materials. All of us will have to decide which tools we want to use and which we’d rather not pick up. Plenty and
scarcity aren’t inherent characteristics of culture, but attributes with which we choose to surround it. And the same
is true for openness.

When we make and distribute work that’s more open, we’re on our way towards redeﬁning how culture behaves. I believe
OPENNESS, which is a young word and still imprecise, is critical to our futures. Openness means different things in different
situations, and it can be expressed differently in different works. There’s no single formula for openness, and no one should be
forced into manipulating their work so that it conforms to someone else’s idea of what might be open. But that said, openness
may be one strategy that helps enable makers to survive in a confused cultural and media landscape. Certainly archives need to be
more open.

touch

What’s openness? Openness means not just seeing the image of a book page, but seeing the text too and being able to mix and manipulate
it. Not just watching a movie, but being free to download the shots, the EDL, the edit timeline and make your own cut. Not just the music
but the MIDI. Openness on the web means that we all have to be able to crawl, navigate and index what we ﬁnd. And since openness isn't
just the freedom to read, listen, watch, feel, smell, taste, but also the freedom to remix in all of these sensory domains – in the digital world
this means that you have to be able to touch the object itself and touch the code that makes it play, display or manifest itself. This is what I
mean by touch — the ability to engage the object in a profound and unconditional manner. We need FREEDOM OF TOUCH because we
cannot anticipate today how we will want to approach culture tomorrow. We may want to compute upon it. We may want to immerse
ourselves in it. We may want to segment it.

tweaking the model

Now, I’d like to talk a bit about modeling the commons.
what’s the commons anyway?

Wikipedia 2010-05-19
The original deﬁnition of the commons comes from land that was held in common and worked in common under English common law.
The commons goes far back, even predating the monarchy. Here’s what Wikipedia said about the commons this morning.

One rather unfortunate characteristic about the commons is that much of it is gone. Lost. Privatized or in the process of privatization.
This means we have to avoid the nostalgia trap, yearning for something that we might not even recognize if we saw it again.

Many projects to try to recover the lost commons have cropped up in the last few years. A lot of
these are internet-based, as the net gets many of us thinking about a world where there are no
billable events.

Open-source licenses
Open content initiatives
Open education resources
Creative Commons
Wikipedia & associated projects
Internet Archive
UbuWeb
p2p (some might disagree)
“Web 2.0” sites (billions working for free)

Here are just a few that came to mind one recent evening. Some seem genuine efforts, others
simulations. In other words, Ubuweb and p2p efforts represent a commons for some, a big steal for
others. So-called “Web 2.0” sites may feel like a commons to those whose lives are bound up with
the creation and exchange of information and all of the social beneﬁts that arise out of networked
creativity, but it remains true that the few are proﬁting from the labor of the many.

But some of these initiatives are great and there is a growing critique of rigid social and economic
structures that may not serve everyone’s needs. Perhaps we are starting to ask more of utopia than
we’ve done in the past.

Are we relying on post-scarcity models?

Our experiences have been wonderful, but they’ve led us to ask a few difficult questions. Are we
relying on post-scarcity models? Are we modeling the kind of commons that works best for rich
people in developed countries?

For example, if we expect to give away content and support ourselves by touring, lecturing, selling
merchandise, or value-added businesses, these are not universal alternatives. It seems to me that
Kevin Kelly’s billable attributes of free content require a highly developed economic infrastructure,
and assume a fully built-out Internet. And future economies may not support our models.

Are we creating a completely new organization of production? Are we developing new divisions of
labor, new kinds of property ownership, or are we simply renaming categories of exchange from
paid to free? Are we making structural changes, or are we calling the same things by different
names? Are we relying on quick ﬁxes?

where do gifts really come from?

Many gifts are covertly subsidized. Our online archives is subsidized by a lot of expensive ﬁlm-to-
videotape transfer and cheap digitization from the Internet Archive. We subsidize our library with
income from our stock footage business. Our income is increased by the footage we give away for
free, but secured because we are represented by the biggest stock image company in the world
(Getty Images), which gives us a market presence we would never otherwise have.

who is paying for the gift economy?

Within a capitalist system, when you see a little commons, a little corner of the gift economy, you
need to ask who is making it possible.
Many people who build pieces of great open-source projects rely on day jobs to survive. All of the
packets we send and receive ride on network infrastructure which is owned by corporations,
governments or institutions. We build cool community wireless networks, but we don’t control the
backbone that connects them to the Internet.

Many people praise us for opening up our archives, but we haven’t opened up our whole collection.
And would they still praise me if I let strangers into my house to sleep every night, in the same way
they praise me for letting strangers download unrestricted digital media ﬁles? Commons here, but
not commons there.

In other words, if I dip just one foot into the water, am I really swimming? I still have a leg to stand
on. I don’t have to trust the salt to help me ﬂoat.

new models of cultural distribution
get people thinking about
new models for distributing property
which is great

Pregnant turtle radiograph: Megan Shaw Prelinger
It is crucial to nurture and propagate commons models, but it’s also important to keep track of
what kinds of economies build out around the exploitation of free things — information, art, goods,
services, and especially utilities.

added value: color and sugar

Water might be free in many places, but fortunes are made in bottles and pipelines.
Much UGC is free, but the people who build the indexes and link content to advertising are cleaning
up bigtime.

Do commons-based models scale? What if all the other stock footage companies did what we did?
Would we lose our advantage? Would the value-added services we charge for suddenly lose all
value? In other words, would we kill the goose?

And while much information may be free, who owns the indexes? Who will own the segmentation,
which is often the key to touching content in a smart way? We don’t have a good history
maintaining free and common indexes, do we? CDDB, IMDB, Usenet, the Web. We control the
molecules, but not the compounds. I don’t want to have to pay much, if anything, to navigate
common territories. So we need to build free indexes and infect content such that indexes remain
free.

Have we ﬁgured out ways to fully employ people’s time and effort in a commons-based scheme, or
are we simply handing over a portion of our time and property to the commons, while holding onto
the rest?

The most disturbing question of all -- is free culture and the cultural commons just a fad? Will street-level
artists, entertainers and entrepreneurs, people who lead us all to the future, route around it, GET OVER IT,
move onto something else? We know remixing and sharing are deeply traditional practices, but will their
modern forms prove to be part of just another style that passes over us?

Is the commons a “hothouse” model, a self-consciously anachronistic model, destined for a short life? Or
is it simply an artisanal, minority practice? Will it be marginalized both at the high end by the
entertainment industry and at the low end by individual creators who have moved on to something else? I
hope neither of these is true. We need to build a commons that won’t be a fad, a commons that will be
more than a brand.

None of this is intended to say we should stop experimenting. Quite the opposite! When it comes
to culture, the world of plenty is already here, and to acknowledge plenty makes culture plentiful.

Outside the cultural sphere, we’re dominated by complex issues : climate change, economics, energy, community, migration, how
to make technology really useful, the chameleon-like corporation (and chameleon-like marketing) and the pervasive state.
Collaborative and peer production (such as Yochai Benkler speaks about in The Wealth of Networks), decentralized industrial and
artisanal models, and evolving gift economies may offer better ways to meet some of these challenges.
We can ﬁnd proofs of concept in the cultural space, and set useful examples without moving mountains. For me this validates
many of the small-scale experiments in which many of us are engaging.

NYC,
1952
And I think there are ways beyond some of these modeling problems.

As Galadriel says, “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.”

Amateur Movie Makers, ﬁrst issue, Dec. 1926

Movie Makers, Jan. 1934

So one way out is to look to ourselves and to embrace amateurism. Amateurism has a wonderful
streak of idealism. The remarkable libertarian quote on top, and the contrarian quote below that
trashes Hollywood and praises outsider practice, testify to the commitment of early amateur
ﬁlmmakers and the promise of the medium.
And amateurism and outsiderism can work in the contemporary world as well. It is time for a dose
of do-it-yourself.

We’re seeing a huge upsurge in DIY culture and activity. Our library is itself inspired by oldskool punk culture, which encouraged
and empowered people to take up the tools around them and just do it. There are many tendrils that lead back to a set of common
assumptions: maker culture, citizen science, hacking consumer products and technology, urban agriculture, blogging as journalism
-- you will think of others.
For archives and for makers, the ﬁeld is wide open for experimentation, and we will all gain if we are open to unconventional
ways of pushing our works out to audiences that we might not even have known existed.

regionalism and the lure of the local
In the archival world, new ideas originate at the periphery and infuse the center: trends like regional and
specialized archives, which are the birthplaces of innovative practices. Many of them are DIY and community-
based, like Home Movie Day and urban home movie recovery and revival projects. Home Movie Day wasn’t
invented at the Library of Congress or the Museum of Modern Art, but it is creating new constituencies and new
support for archives.

Garden for the Environment,
San Francisco, September 2007
The new archives don’t just live in physical and online spaces -- they take their holdings to where the people are.

As soon as it gets dark, these people will watch an archival ﬁlm about gardening, and there’ll be loud BOOS when
Pop starts spraying pesticides on the vegetables.

Herbert Bayer, 1946
Just because we live in an age when mass distribution is POSSIBLE doesn’t mean we all have to make
mass media. The criteria for what makes something go viral are contradictory and opaque.

The rewards from working within speciﬁc communities often outweigh the actual beneﬁts of mass
distribution.

points of departure (samples only)

zines & independent pubs
home movies → home videos
online videos (82.900.000 on YouTube at 10:31 am, 7 April 08)
curated collections of webpages (esp. personal proﬁles)
local seeds (let 1000 Svalbards bloom)
text messages, IMs, email
TV commercials
government radio comms
records of nature/culture interaction
Flickr
self-help books 1840-present
drugs & supplements packaging
local and community arts documentation
your own personal records

We can all be DIY archivists. There are many opportunities.
Here are a few points of departure, some directions to think about. These came to mind because
they’re bodies of cultural material that no one is doing anything, or at least enough, to collect.

Decentralization

Gift

Experiment

DIY

All of these are deeply traditional practices, and in fact they’ve been lost in the world of the modern market. What I like
about these practices is that they’re well-suited to individual and small-group practice. Each is its own answer to the
question we’re all asking, “What can I do?” And in a world where most mainstream media is owned by large
corporations, where the skins that stretch over reality change faster than we can keep track, where novel forms of media
and promising technologies are born and die every day, it’s radical to look to these kinds of traditions as means to sustain.

There are many do-or-die choices in the world today, but within culture there is near-inﬁnite room
for experiment. Even though it often feels as if we’re living in a dystopian period, this is why it’s an
exciting time to be alive.

Photo: Amy Balkin
High on the hill above the Arctic Ocean, dug hundreds of feet deep into rock, is the Svalbard Global
Seed Vault, perhaps the most important archives of our time. It opened on February 26th.

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Protected by motion sensors and polar bears, this repository stores samples of seeds from all over the planet. It
is the archives of biodiversity, the collection of last resort. It is the honored exception to the principle of universal
archival access. You don’t want to have to go in there.
This is an essential project, but it’s also been criticized for its myopic focus on ex situ storage, and for taking
away seeds from farmers who are and always have been the real breeders of plants. Biodiversity preservation
needs to happen all over the world, and farmers need to be part of it. So along with crucial projects like Svalbard,
we also need DIY and decentralized efforts.

Photo: Jose Maria “Chema” Barredo
Culture, like water, small animals and seeds in the wind, is hard to enclose. But culture is also fragile. If
we start to run into involuntary limits on our mobility, our metabolism, and our freedom to consume, it
will be interesting to see what forms of cultural activity survive.

If we’re going to keep media alive, and, more important, if we’re going to give media reasons to exist, we can’t just
follow aging models. We shouldn’t make media in a monocultural context. We need to think about how we and
our projects can be active players in the world. We need to work in a social way, to assemble public resources and
projects that have a true public presence. Our workplaces should be experimental farms, creative labs, noisy
archives, places for contemplation. We need to make lots more work, do it faster and cheaper, and strategize new
ways of putting it out.

The social contract between makers and audiences isn’t an abstract idea — it is constantly made
and remade through active engagement between people and the organizations they form. And
engagement is up to us.

Dawn, not sunset

Thank you.

rick@archive.org
http://www.prelingerlibrary.org
http://blackoystercatcher.blogspot.com


History Is One Second Ago, and How You Can Intervene in the Future

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