1Introduction

People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized. . . . What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self? What is inside them?

Not politics. There are no politics outside of people.

Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake

I have wrestled with the words that novelist Rachel Kushner gives to her thirty-four-year-old protagonist Sadie Smith, who is sent to infiltrate a purportedly radical commune in France. As a hired operative, Smith can and must fly somewhere above politics to do her work. Yet, notwithstanding what she says, it stands to reason that four a.m. might actually be the most telling hour in our political life. When a Taliban knock comes to a mother’s door in Kabul at four a.m., the cries of babies are especially piercing. The thrumming of a Shahed drone in Kyiv is unmistakably political just before twilight, as is the shrill note of the emergency alert calling for a resident of California to evacuate before advancing wildfire, or the sound of floodwater trickling under the door of a Spanish house. As negotiations to join the EU were scuttled, four a.m. was no respecter of authorities or persons when protestors converged in Tbilisi, Georgia, to sound the alarm.

What is inside of people, classically, is a set of desires that naturally inclines toward love of security and peace in the small hours. Forces that threaten these goods are indeed sometimes outside of people (e.g., natural disasters) and often owe a great deal to collective forces outside of individual control in the first place (e.g., economic perturbations and religious or political ideologies that descend like a plague). As the world warms from climate change, nighttime and, yes, four a.m. temperatures are staying disproportionately higher, posing historic anomalies. Climate change is the droning note of our existential peril, over which other voices are played, often cacophonously.

In this stark and solitary realization, we might take stock of how people have often labored to shore up fragments against ruin. We might also take stock of the part of the archive in both recording four a.m. black swan events and perhaps—just perhaps—warding them off. The study of history is, in part, a series of lessons in the limits of prognostication before black swan events—of being asleep at four a.m.—so it is worth taking stock of the fact that climate change consistently dwells at the center of global threatcasting. Although the coinage is newish, it does not propose to simply offer a new crystal ball. Rather, it invites us to consider what scenarios will develop, where interdisciplinary cognitive gaps lie, and what evidence-based insights are actionable.

What should we be concerned about? Relying on a global web of expert consensus, the last World Economic Forum report recognizes that disinformation and climate change–related challenges are the leading threats to global stability.¹ If you look at the report and its projection of future years, the two issues jockey for first place. Within ten years, the top four spots are taken up by extreme weather events, critical changes to Earth systems, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, and natural resource shortages.

This is not an accident. It is important to remember that these are interrelated issues, and both climate change and disinformation pose major national security concerns around the globe. As the U.S. Department of Defense has repeatedly recognized, climate change is a threat multiplier, and NATO understands that “hostile information activities” and related surges in information disorder are a threat to liberal democratic regimes and the alliances that strengthen them. The polycrises are deeply entwined with the high likelihood of a sixth great extinction. Climate scientist and communicator Katharine Hayhoe spoke with Mexican ecologist Dr. Gerardo Ceballos, who reports that “over the past century, the extinction rate for vertebrate species has soared to 100 times the natural background rate.”² He attributes the main accelerators of extinction to “human population growth, unsustainable consumption, and inefficient technologies.”³

Let us consider the hydra-headed elements of our predicament in terms of climate change, information disorder, and the technological treadmill. My brief here focuses mainly on archive as a verb, as the editors of Record, Document, Archive: Constructing the South Out of Region define it, an act of making/curating and the attendant considerations of access and reference to records and documents. But those other terms of art—records and documents—are no less important. The authors imagine and recenter record as the act of making an account, including nonanthropogenic accounts, bearing in mind Hayden White’s insistence that form imparts meaning. And to document is implicitly to imagine future consumers of those accounts, a practice fraught with the perils of projection that come from the inescapable fact of our own presentism. Our logics, indeed the syntax that we use to share and impart them in our moment, carry no guarantees of future legibility.

That said, to archive is not just to create an account but to leave the trace of the form of the account and, more generally, signs of the values that are rendered visible with bright clarity when lightning strikes, black swans descend, and old logics are rendered nonsensical. So the modern archive generally excels at telling the story of the culture that gave rise to the polycrisis of our moment. Indeed, I would suggest that it might be part of the problem, insofar as it is largely heedless to its captivity to the autophagous system it documents. That self-consuming nature might be understood as the plantation that repeats itself, reflecting the ultimate stamp of settler-colonial narratives that can lull us into believing our cultural and economic systems are a closed loop resistant to every imaginative effort toward transformation. It can seem a bit hopeless. We might have a subliminal aspiration to guide future civilizations based on our archives—but only if they survive us and learn to read PDFs. The current archival process is akin to determinedly organizing a sock drawer while the house is on fire. And to that extent, the chapters that comprise Record, Document, Archive offer a striking, important, and absolutely necessary political interruption.

Fittingly, the themes of this volume are geared toward new ways of thinking about recording, documentary, and archival practice with respect to the future. In its scheme, to record “prioritizes the lived experience of those under record, who have recorded.”⁴ The phrasing is delicate for its careful suggestion of both top-down and bottom-up forces contending for a place within the record, sometimes leaving signs that might not have been intended for a future Other to access. The volume anticipates nonanthropogenic agents and accounts—a way to think outside of the archive as the record of a self-replicating template for empire hurtling toward oblivion. Similarly, to document, is “distinguishe[d] from record in that a future other is always already implicated.”⁵ If we conceive of future users in our own image, pursuing god-like control of nature (anthropologist Christopher Witmore terms our present time the hypanthropic age, in which people have become not just primary earth shapers, but monstrously empowered in dominion over other living things), then the archive is merely a transmission line for monstrous forms of knowledge that speeds the extinction of vertebrates at one hundred times the natural rate—decidedly not a site for creating better futures. A future Other who examines our documents is likely to see the unremitting horror of its presumptively teleological ontology heedless of natural constraints in the same way that modern interpreters recoil from the matter-of-fact accounts of chattel slavery in the recent past, such as those Lisa Hinrichsen recounts in her introduction to the Record section.⁶ Harder to see is chattel-ry of the present and the thingification that results from the enterprise of recording, documenting, archiving. This inescapable fact points to the truism that the plantation repeats itself, as Antonio Benítez-Rojo said memorably in The Repeating Island (1992). The plantation machinery blots out its visibly unpleasant manifestations beyond the prophylactic wholeness of our enclosure within one South; the fish rarely thinks about the aquarium until he is out of it. This is how to hide an empire in plain sight. It might help to explain why the North American South is the contributors’ primary frame of reference, even though the Global South contains a global majority that is somehow still minoritized in the act of archiving, gesturing silently to a Hemispheric South based more on solidarity and similarity than difference. Here lies the South where the aberrations of division, perpetual poverty, and state violence can be seen as the grotesque expectations of colonial norms. Like most who came before, we struggle, quite understandably, to see from outside of the sectored nature of our section.

Looking ahead, there is also a sharp edge to this reconceptualization in the monstrous scaling of the Hemispheric South in the Hypanthropic Age. For here the worst impacts of human-caused climate change are likely to be felt, and here the pattern of globalization has done little to inhibit the plantation’s template for civilization, whether in the form of petrochemical spoilage in Nigeria, or in the new indenture of disposable gig workers toiling under the yoke of Silicon Valley, or the servitude of those who are building the civilizational hallucinations of Dubai. As Stephanie Rountree points out, in each case we see “the conceptual subordination of human frameworks to [the] more-than-human structure of life and place.”⁷ Those preconceived visions and systems of valuation make it difficult to imagine better futures.

Czech dissident and novelist Milan Kundera once observed, “People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it.”⁸ To echo Kushner’s Sadie Smith, I am not so certain about this. If we think about how to bring the archive back to life, we might hold in our minds Kundera’s view alongside Derrida’s Archive Fever (1996), which points to the slipperiness of the archive’s position between past and future.⁹ Among the attendant paradoxes he observes there is that the archive seeks to preserve origins but in the very process it transforms them, creating something new. Contrary to expectation, in Derrida’s view, the temporal orientation of the archive is toward the future—just as the editors of Record, Document, Archive note—because the act of archiving presupposes future engagement (and of course future existence). In this sense, the archive is always directed toward what is to come, even as it claims to preserve what has been, a point that Gina Caison drives home in the introduction to the Document section.¹⁰ An attendant paradox, much like the mystery of life itself, is that destruction and preservation are coexistent and reinforcing phenomena, and indeed codependent. The act of archiving involves a simultaneous creation and erasure, the past exerting pressure on the future in a Zeno’s paradox that thwarts the arrow of time. Indeed, Derrida’s concept of “archive fever” highlights the tension between the desire to preserve the past and the simultaneous impulse to reinterpret or even destroy it, as Kundera would have it.

Some of the (counterintuitive) erasures of archiving arise from the way that selection involves exclusion, transformation produces loss (thingification being one unintended consequence of archival process), and recording generates a sanctioned forgetting (consider the ancient complaint that the pen destroyed human memory). Remarkably, the first-known use of thingification, which can imply both reification and objectification (turning a person into a commodity, for instance), dates to a 1935 Columbia Law Review article traceable to this sentence: “The circularity of legal reasoning in the whole field of unfair competition is veiled by the ‘thingification’ of property.”¹¹ This holds up very well indeed, as systems of archival value, informed by academic and empire-building prerogatives, are often heedless of community value and the nonfungible aspects of both artifact and form. Many more paradoxes arise in turn: Digitization can speed transformation loss by flattening physical reality and drowning us in uncurated or unverified content, resulting in censorship-by-inclusion when materials are diminished in scale or context, and censorship-by-noise as the digital zone is flooded.

We observe these paradoxes at work every day in the digital age as it becomes more and more difficult to obtain curated and reliable information, and to discern signal within noise (and for that matter, the garbage of artificially generated information and disinformation). Is there any way around these paradoxes? Or, more to the point, could we design an archive with them in mind? Suppose the purpose of the archive was toward a devolved vision of the future involving a sharp departure from our current trajectory? To do so might require us to invert Kundera and to call the past (not the future!) an apathetic void, hollowed out by Derrida’s paradoxes in much the way that Godel’s incompleteness theorems punctured mathematics. The past as reflected in the archive might merely beckon us to our doom by calling us away from the complexity of information preserved in living systems (a point to which I will return), and toward overmastering the environments that we are busy destroying by recording. Or rather, recording in mistaken ways, based on the assumption that our present methods are sustainable.

This might be contrasted with the new narrative of descent framed in novelist Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend, as discussed by Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright in their contribution to Record, Document, Archive: “See, the earth said. All our lives been an offering, and this seeing is what’s been given back.” Imagine an archive that follows the Seventh Generation Principle, such that preservation decisions we make today must offer resilience and sustainability to seven generations into the future. At our best, our archival practice has leaned into what Dr. Lyla June Johnston (who performs as Lyla June) sings in “Time Traveler”:

We are here

to give all our love

to the ones unborn.

June, “an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages,” reminds us in her lyrics,

We’re not in charge.

Nature’s in charge.

Look to the stars

remember who you are.

Stay humble or fall.

We don’t know it all.

And we are not exempt from

natural law.

Live selfishly

and the structure will fall.

But if we live for those unborn

then the song will go on.¹²

Given our convergent ecological, social, and technological crises, it is past time to call for a new living archive. The living archive reimagines our enterprise as an interdependent, dynamic system expressly designed to foster resilience, justice, and sustainability—properties that tell us who we are at four a.m. (or ninety seconds until midnight, as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists would have it). Rooted in antifragility, earth law/the rights of nature, positive rights, deliberative democracy, and information resilience, the living archive calls for us to reject the traditional conception of the archive as a passive repository.¹³ It becomes a space of regeneration and collective stewardship, embracing with humility the complexities and uncertainties of human and nonhuman histories.

Thinking in a living archive framework requires that we acknowledge that both atomization and centralization can create fragility, while interdependence, diversity, and distributed systems can help foster resilience. Thus, the new living archive seeks to document and protect the shared histories of communities and ecosystems. In offering this model, I am building on the groundwork of earlier theoretical scaffolding I offered in “Archivo Disobediente/The Disobedient Archive,” “More than Words: Respectful Stewardship and the Balance of Community Archives,” and “Concerning Our Dirty Little Imperium, the Archive, and Southern Deeps.”¹⁴ Moreover, to sharpen understanding of the tension between destructive and regenerative archival practices, I turn to the powerful insights of the contributors to Record, Document, Archive, who help envision a future where archives act not only as records of the past but as tools for shaping sustainable and equitable futures.

2Rules for New Tools

In my afterword to Record, Document, Archive, I outline seven principles of the new living archive. These principles are developed from my 2022 article “The Disobedient Archive,” wherein I proposed a thought experiment based on Wendell Berry’s simple rules for new tools: could rules for a living archive be similarly reducible? Toward a new ethos, here is a first effort to recapitulate a value set for the new living archive. The living archive adheres to the following values:

1. Interdependence

2. Multiplicity

3. Simplicity

4. Durability

5. Accessibility

6. Ethical Stewardship

7. Regeneration

I develop each of these principles at length in the collection, but even in this abridged list, it may occur to you that many challenging ground-level practicalities must surely follow these theoretical flights of fancy. Fortunately, the essays of Record, Document, Archive furnish many practical examples of the application of these principles. And they help to prepare us for a larger reckoning with the realities of our moment. For example, we might have to considerably enlarge our conception of archival scope to include things like biodata collection, longitudinal monitoring, and seed collections, seeing them not as specialized “scientific” archives, but as part of our core enterprise. We should perhaps rethink cultural “records” to include, broadly, narratives and artifacts of narratives that reflect human relationships with specific ecosystems. I have long been a proponent of small-scale distributed archives, including community archives, and these same notions extend to the necessity of decentralizing storage to protect against localized disasters, prompting consideration of multiple small repositories across a region. Part of archival leadership might be drawing up plans to make such facilities attainable and to instantiate the seven principles above.

3Conclusion

Archival innovations that would retreat from the Anthropocene, if not the Hypanthropic, could entail living ecosystems archives that blend natural systems into archival spaces (if this possibility terrifies you, it says much about cultural inheritances that would box out and devalue the natural world, and the tenuous complexity of what we deem civilized and worth preserving). I am not talking about squirrels in the stacks, although it might be pointed out that the moth is an enduring symbol of the vanity of human wishes. To the informed eye, tardigrades might be a more interesting form of information in space than our satellites and their train of space junk.¹⁵ While we consider how to archive seeds, it is humbling to consider that squirrels are out there just doing it—without a single workshop.

In this reimagining, an archive could feature community-driven projects in which reforestation efforts are paired with species-history documentation that might include more conventional exhibit material on natural history (e.g., every archive’s favorite set of tattered Audubon prints). An archive could feature archival spaces that double as experimental labs for sustainable living practices, from low-tech energy solutions to circular economies, the better to fuel human imagination with reference to both the past and the future. Imagine a lending library of “appropriate technologies” where community members could test and adapt tools to local conditions, or accessible community seed banks could be paired with written guides for their use and maintenance. Positioning the archive as a steward of cultural alternatives need not be a great shift, since most archives already have documentation of low-impact technologies and some capacity to highlight traditional knowledge. And suddenly it becomes possible to affix imagination on better futures outside of the current frame.

It is not a tautology to say that we have no imagination for better futures until we have it. In that respect, the purpose of the archive is to facilitate imagination, to share the pleasure of curiosity and discovery around the many ways that we have faced difficult challenges with inventive grace. A valuation problem that dogs our species is that we overvalue what we have and cannot be convinced to give it up, like a raccoon that remains trapped because it refuses to unball its fist from a cheap bauble in a trap. Taught that the car is a symbol of our ease, who is prepared to give it up without first discovering the pleasures of the bicycle? First there must be an inviting space opened to imagination for the reintegration of biodiversity into culture, grounded in pleasure.

Similarly, it is difficult to confront problems that are more slow-moving and subtle than the pace of our daily hurry, so visualizing these dilemmas might be part of the archival charter; evidence of these problems in deep human time abounds on our shelves, but often without reference to the present. Imagine, if only for a moment, an archive that features dynamic earth-memory systems, where visitors are greeted not by natural history papers and embalmed specimens, but by sensors that archive real-time data on the health of ecosystems, inviting users to a bank of living records that adapt and evolve as environmental conditions and threats change. In terms of threatcasting, that data serves as the equivalent of the vital signs of the archive and its prospects for endurance. More tangibly, picture materials that track and render tangible rewilded landscapes, gradually recording ecological succession and biodiversity recovery over time. In other words, an archive that does more than record our descent into a climate-changed inferno but beckons us to better futures.

That is an archive I would like to visit, one that is geared as much to the imagination of what comes next as demonstrating our impermanence in loving service to all who come after.