 Now we're recording. A media archeologist, essayist, and poet, the Dean of the College at Bennington College. He holds a PhD in comparative studies from the Ohio State University and has received numerous awards and fellowships including from full rights, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vermont Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council. He is, of course, the author of the brand new book, Need a Dead, Reserving Data at the End of the World, which has just come out from the University of North Carolina Cross in which he will give us a taste today, of course. But to me, most importantly, you're a fellow grimoire. And full of hot tits about where to get the Vermont State food, the maple creamy. It's a maple sauce for Christian Khan. Probably the best food in existence. Sorry, no offense to the box lunches. Those of you in the room are eating. But come up to Brian afterward if you're gonna be in Southern Vermont and wanna eat something truly delicious. So with no further ado, I'm gonna pass it over to you, Brian. And thank you so much for being here. Can't wait to hear more about this amazing book. Thank you. All right, so can people in the back hear me pretty clearly if I speak at this level? Okay, thanks everyone for coming. I'm going to read from the intro of the book and take you on a little journey with me that I took when I was doing research. And then I will give an overview of some of the other chapters. You can see some of the other places that I went and the cases that I did get to. So this is from the introduction, which is called 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 rental car 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. It's driver waves at me, pulls a U-turn. And even though they just came out of this facility, they have to have their car searched again before they go back in. Follow her to the security checkpoint and after she's allowed through, it's my turn to let the cube of chain link fencing drop around my car. The Kevlar Cloud Security Guard gives the trunk in the back seat a curse research, asking me whether I have explosives or weapons. He's quite genial, almost cheery. You're going to Corpus today, huh? He asks that we 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 or? Yeah, I'm writing a book. That's great, that's just great. Have a wonderful day, you'll 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 Boyer's, 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 and inaccurately refer to as a cloud. For the data we preserve around the clock just a little bit of the sky, it is a place on the ground and underground. It had Iron Mountain, one of nearly 2,700 data centers in the United States alone. The entrance to the cloud is what military strategists call a choke point. 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 such a high security rating at four. Let's put that in perspective, the White House and the Pentagon are five. I've come here to do research at the Corvus Film Preservation Facility. Anybody heard of Corvus? You know Corvus, it was like an image licensing company. Yeah, it was created by Microsoft founder Bill Gates for his image resource company Corvus. This, I'm gonna call this Corvus Film Preservation Facility, the CFF for short, so I don't have to say it a little bit. Now it's only one of many vaults in Iron Mountain. Bill Gates built this to house his photography collection. He built a 10,000 square foot refrigerated vault located 220 feet underground in a limestone powder. He had tens of millions of photographs down. So Corvus makes money by licensing images for use in commercials, reading cards, magazine ads, documentaries, websites, book covers, and anywhere else images are deployed to pursue the 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 phone calls to basically everyone I could find on the Corvus website for about three years. And suddenly somebody got in touch with me from the archive. I had no idea why or how it just happened. But the fact that academics have a hard time accessing the CFF makes sense because the richest man in the world at the time built it not for research purposes, but for profit. Corvus 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. Like if you ever read Fahrenheit 451 where they all have the wall screens and they thought, okay, so if there are wall screens everywhere people are gonna want to decorate their walls with art and iconic photos. So if I own all the art and iconic photos or the rights, the digital rights to the art and iconic photos, I'm gonna be the richest man in the world all over again. Now as we know, Spring's got smaller, not really bigger, so he kind of missed there. But anyway, that was his idea. So back in the 80s, he began buying massive amounts of art in numerous image archives. He snapped up the digital rights to art in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery in London long before most museums, artists, or lawyers even knew what digital rights were. He bought one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks not to mention the digital rights to all the Ansel Adams photographs and some of the most important photography archives in existence. His acquisitions included the Betman archive which contains over 10 million photos and illustrations including the entire United Press International Archive and iconic photos like Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue, or Marilyn Monroe having trouble with her skirt on a Manhattan sidewalk in a row of construction workers searched on a steel beam quoting 50 stories above the out-of-purpose atropolis. If you haven't heard of the Betman archive anymore, the Betman, if you've never seen it on the photo predator or something here and there. So the originals of these highly valuable photos are actually stored in a special deep freezer at negative four degrees Fahrenheit. According to Henry Wilhelm, the designer of the CFF and the leading expert in the field that I really love called Image Permanence. The refrigerated humidity controlled vault will effectively preserve the photos until in it for 15,000 years. Without such measures, photographic negatives will decay within a century or so. All right. So finally, I passed through the choke point. Now excitement is building because I'm like, I'm finally going to get to go to this place. Okay. But you have to drive excruciatingly slow when you're at Iron Mountain, right? Because it's fully securitized. So I'm moving like 10 miles an hour and I cannot wait to get there. And there are all these people on golf carts like zooming around me. There are fire extinguishers everywhere and you have a fire 200 feet underground. It's kind of a really big problem. It's actually a fire in Pennsylvania that's underground. It's burning through coal like all the time, forever. So anyway, I'm here, I am. I'm driving. I'm all worked up and really ready to get there. I parked my car just outside the CFF and there's an Iron Mountain representative there named Debbie. And she greets me. She's very nice. She offers me a guided tour of the larger facility and I'm like, oh, almost in. Okay, I'll do the tour. We hop on our golf cart. We take off and she begins to list some of the features of Iron Mountain. Underground city of Alton offices has its own fire department. We pass by four bright red fire engines. In addition to in-house emergency services, Iron Mountain has the backup supplies of any respectable doomsday bunker. The 2000 people who work underground at Iron Mountain to survive for months under a total lockdown without any contact or reinforcements from the world above. We ride past the set up doors for the Warner Brothers logo beside them. That's where the studio stores original masters of its classic films, Debbie says, ET, Back to the Future, Jaws. They're all inside. Just around the corner is an unmarked vault. There are a bunch of unmarked ones and I'm shouting because we're on a golf cart and it's a cave. So it's really weird. You have to kind of shout at people. There are a bunch of unmarked ones and most of them not allowed to tell you what's in there. But in that one, she points to a set of black doors, are all of the original reels of Steven Spielberg's interviews with Holocaust survivors. He's one of our private clients. I learned that all of the original records of the US patent office are somewhere down here, as well as the black box from the United Airlines Flight 93 and numerous other artifacts and rooms without signs over the doors. They're contents classified. As I ride the golf cart with Debbie, I flash back to being five years old, watching the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark on Betamax. If you know what Betamax is, they're not people. Now I'm speeding on a golf cart through a real-life version of that warehouse where they rolled the Ark of the Covenant into, as the credits came on. The fictional warehouse, like this one, is an almost boundless archive of materials, some of them secret, that we painstakingly preserve or protect. Materials that exist in the kind of necessary oblivion just below the surface of everyday life. And like the Ark of the Covenant, we attribute to these materials a kind of supernatural power and treat them with reverence. Only a select few can approach them or touch them on pain of death. We ride past an office where herds of workers are returning from their lunch break. The facade of the cubicle space is plain, with a sign that reads, rather than ivory, U.S. Office of Personnel Management. This office is one of the main reasons for the Doomsday security measures of the facility, as it houses all of the records from security clearance proceedings. We check out another ball. This one tidy and endless and just as cold. We open up a box of microfilm backups of nationwide insurance policies. Are these old? I ask, why are they on microfilm? She smiles, replying, no, they're not old. These boxes just arrived. Microfilm is still the archival standard for permanent records. Digital files aren't considered permanent. So a lot of corporations and government agencies still keep backups on microfilm for certain kinds of records you have to by law. As if to drive home the point, Debbie takes me down the road to a media lab where old paper files are being digitized. But in the other half of the lab, technicians in white coats are creating microfilm copies of PDFs. It's the blatant reverse of what popular culture and digital technology tells us, namely that we make progress by shifting to new data formats. But in that moment, in the digitization and microfilm lab, I realized that media history is like all of history, a cycle, a whirlwind of human successes and failures, much more disparate and haywire than any story we tend to tell about it. She drops me off at a music and media production studio. The rooms of the studio have the same cave walls as the other vaults, but they have been painted a shimmering silver, like something out of a 1960s sci-fi flex set in the 1990s. At some point, some dude at Iron Mountain was like, yeah, let's paint all the cave walls silver and it will like reflect the light and heat. And then somebody realized like that's not how light feet work. So they just stopped. And that's the result. And in this silvery cave, there's every type of surviving media playback machine in the world. You have an old Edison wax cylinder you want to hear, a two inch quadriplex videotape, real news footage from the 60s and you digitize a nitrate film documentary from the 30s. The studio technicians can pull up the sound or the images for you. That is if they can be pulled up. There are horror stories of master recordings being unplayable due to decay or malfunction. And these stories are not all or even mostly about the older recordings, but about the newer digital ones. According to Garrett, my tour guide in the studio, our drive failures can shut down an entire project and render any future projects evolving at least for possible. I remember we were supposed to remaster a Kanye West recording, which could have been more than about 10 years old. We pulled the hard drive out of the vault, popped it in, and it just wouldn't spin. So that material is pretty much lost. Beyond the work of contemporary artists, Iron Mountain houses some of the most valuable recordings of history, including master tapes of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. As Garrett tells stories of coaxing sound out of fragile artifacts, studio engineer who looks like Dana Carvey's garth from Wayne's World interrupts to inform me that I am standing in the same room with the original recording of Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive. He is running the tracks into the sound editing software Pro Tools for a disco version of Guitar Hero. I bet you never noticed this super funky guitar underneath everything else. Super funky guitar underneath everything else. He says to me as he presses a couple of buttons and suddenly all the tracks drop out except the guitar. He's right, I hadn't noticed the guitar before. And it is indeed super funky. Only later when I noticed how strange and haunting it was, the recorded voice of Gaynor was shouting the phrase I Will Survive, even as it underwent preservation. Like a protest against the decay and inevitable entry into oblivion that ultimately awaits even the most guarded of human artifacts. The pleading in the voice is both adamant and vulnerable, reminding us that one can desperately see survival, but survival can never be guaranteed. Then into the photo editing room we go, where a worker customizes Corvus images for licensing clients. She removes dust and hairs from the digital scan as well as other noise. She also manipulates the image. Not just wrinkles or cracks in the emulsion, but also pieces of furniture for people can be removed from an image. At this moment, she's erasing a podium from a photograph of Elmar Roosevelt to make the photo unbalanced. It's a standard procedure for every digitized image they license, and it reflects a tricky truth. Preservation may promise to keep everything the same, but it always changes that which it preserves. Outside, Debbie is waiting on the golf cart. How'd it go? She shouts over the sound of air compressors and jack cameras. Very interesting. I reply at the top of my voice. There are actually workers across the way on these scaffolds, because they're like hollowing out more limestone caverns for more data, vaults, or photo vaults, or paper and microphone vaults. Let's get you over to Corvus, she says, and start heading that way. Corvus, I'm here to see as many images as I can from the Batman archive, and I'll just summarize this part. Basically, when Bill Gates was buying all this stuff, it was still the 90s when everybody thought they were going to digitize everything, because I'll buy it. There are about 11 million photos. I'll digitize all of them, and everyone will have access to this great archive. Well, they got about 200,000 photos in, and they did the math, and they digitized by the time they digitized all 11 million photos, half of them would have decayed beyond recognition. So they're like, let's not do that. So they digitized about 250,000, and prior to him buying it, the photos were in this really hot and humid office in New York, so they were just like succumbing to what's called the vinegar syndrome, which is when photographic negatives decay, they have at least an acid that smells like vinegar. So actually being in the facility, you can still smell that. There's a smell of decayed images. So what he had to do was he digitized 250,000, and then he built this 10,000-square-foot freezer, because he's like, if we're going to digitize these at any point in the future, we have to stop the decay. And then they have a smaller freezer outside of the big vault, and that's at negative four degrees, like super cold, and that's where they store the very important photographs, get it? The VIP, yeah. So like Mary Ellen Monroe and Albert Einstein and all of them, they're in a special vault. And when you pull photos out of that vault, because it's negative four, it actually takes hours, because you have to progressively move them to warmer temperatures that you don't get condensation on the images. So it's quite a process, right? So eventually I go into the big vault, and I'm looking down these long rows of filing cabinets, filled with tens of millions of photographs. And I really begin to wonder and destroy the question that this book is about. How did Americans become so obsessed with trying to save photos, paper documents, sound recordings, looting images, and digital files? And how did we become obsessed with saving them forever? So I was in grad school when I started exploring this. And so I, you know, I did what you do. And I looked at books and documentaries and all this stuff. And I kept running into like some version of like a really bad history channel documentary, or like a really bad like high school research paper, like since the beginning of time, NAN has always preserved the ancient Egyptians. I was like, this cannot be the only excuse for why the Iron Mountain National Data Center existed. But then I took a class where I ran to a very important essay. In his essay, The Ontology of the Photographic Image, the pioneering French film critic, Andre Bazin, offered the most compelling universal theory on what motivates humans to preserve. Bazin died at the untimely age of 40. And his theory of preservation is not only that, it is also a meditation on mortality and the fleetingness of life. He penned this theory in 1945, in the wake of the unprecedented death toll of World War II, a war captured in photography and moving images in vivid detail. According to Bazin, humans attempt to ward off time and death by preserving images of themselves that will outlive their physical bodies. At the center of all this human creativity is a mummy complex decline. Universal and trans-historical practice in all cultures and at all times, this psychic structure finds expression in all the plastic arts from painting to sculpture from death masks and taxidermy to photography and cinema. Not to mention, of course, ancient Egyptians' mummification of the dead. Yet Bazin can never really explain why preservation practices are so intensive in some cultures and not in others. Nor did he have an answer for why the scale and technological sophistication of preservation increases at one moment in history as opposed to another. According to him, when we preserve, we manifest our mummy complex and tell ourselves that whatever happens in this uncertain world, that no matter who is left alive when a war or economic meltdown includes, the trace of us will remain. This is the technological afterlife we seek, not unlike the Egyptians who preserved the heart, liver, lungs of the dead and earthen jars so they could be used in the afterlife. But unlike the ancient Egyptians, we have made such extensive preservation necessary, not only for our afterlife, but also for our earthly life. As our financial lives, social lives, love lives, and all major economic and governmental institutions in our country rely on digital infrastructure to record, preserve, and redistribute the data that underwrites our everyday life. The Egyptians did not do this, so why didn't we? We the dead makes the case that the mummy complex is mutated. We have perceived success in our preservation efforts so often that we have made a way of life out of it. We Americans, we the dead, now have a new condition, the data complex. The data complex is both material out there in our libraries, archives, data centers, bomb group bunkers, and it's psychological. It's a complex inside us in our minds where we fear the progression, time, decay, and data loss. Emerging in the early 20th century and developing over a series of crises, the data complex preserved more and more data about us than it promised us security in a kind of database immortality long desired by the mummy complex. But now, the data complex has become so vast, so automated by algorithms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence that has moved beyond preserving data about and for its human creators. The data complex now exists ultimately to preserve data for its own sake. The data complex's main purpose is to preserve itself. There are a couple of key concepts in the book. I'm going to do a little overview, and then I want to make sure we have enough time for questions. The one key concept is I make a distinction between our biological bodies, our bio body, and our data bodies. So all of us have a body of records that accompanies us. It really starts off before we're born with medical records if your parents are in ultrasound, et cetera, and accompanies you through your life and all the ways that you are tracked and traced and things that you create and then even after you die and that body of records is all advancing, no pun intended, with holograms and all the postmortem chat bots and all the stuff that's happening, which I get into later in the book. So we all have a bio body and a data body. And another key concept is the concept of the cyborg. And cyborg comes from a form of cybernetic organism and the essay in which that term was coined in 1960 is actually called cyborgs and cyborgs and space. And so drawing on a couple of different writers, they argue that so the version of cyborg we're most familiar with, which is a human with machine implants, that's sort of like the sci-fi, antithesis version. Actual cyborgs and closer to the original meaning of the term is actually a system that humans are plugged into. It's a homeostatic system. So the way they narrativize this is like imagine someone in deep space exploration. They can't be bothered with constantly maintaining the machine because then they would be like a slave to the machine and it would be like free to think about what was the next galaxy they wanted to travel to. So the idea with the cyborg was to actually integrate the humans built in autonomic systems with those of the machine. And so the entire cybernetic circuit contains itself automatically. So I talk about the data complex as a cyborg in that classic sense of the term. But let me do a little overview of the book and then we can dive into whatever you want to dive into. I'm going to share my screen. So that's just the cover of the book. This is the choke point at Iron Mountain that I described before. There's a traffic light that tells you when you can go and when you can come out because imagine you're driving your rental car in and 20 ton truck comes out full of hard drives and microphones. You're not going to win that battle. This is inside the Corvus vault. So there's all kinds of stuff down there like rag paper, newspapers from the 1850s and pretty amazing stuff. This is one of the media vaults. I went into one that had all of HBO's, Masters and everything that ever produced. This isn't a Getty Images image of a Corvus vault, is it? This is a Getty Images image of another vault. There's a whole other story where like in 2016 Bill Gates sold Corvus to a Chinese investment group and now Getty Images manages it in North America. I have to explain that later in the book because that hadn't happened yet when I went there. And I had to use some Getty Images because I wasn't allowed to take photos anywhere else but inside the Corvus office because of security measures. And also if I had to go to the bathroom, somebody walked me there and waited for me outside and then walked me back. So this is inside the media lab where I met the dude from Wayne's World. I'm reincarnated. And this is the actual office. I wish I had time to talk about those card catalogs that you see because it was Otto Detman, the founder of the Detman archive, his completely customized idiosyncratic system, which had nothing to do with like do decimals or anything. He actually had like little thumbnails, like literal analog thumbnails that he had like rubber cemented onto these little index cards. It's happening. That thing is as incredible as the photos themselves. And also nobody knows how to use it because the guy that knew how to use it, they laid off. And so it's just kind of there and you can look through it, but it's completely useless in separate fascination. This is the underground lake down there that they use for cooling the server room. So they pump water from one end of the lake and then they pipe the rugs of the ceiling and absorbs heat from all the servers. And then they pipe the heated water back to the other side of the lake and cools it down again. So let me just talk a little bit about what's in each chapter and then I'll be quiet and take some questions. You got time for that? Or should we jump right into the questions? This is so fascinating. We'll take five minutes. So I'm sure you've all read the early issues of vital statistics, special reports. But in the first chapter of the book, I looked at some work that was done at the Bureau of Standards, which is usually associated with weights and measures, but they were funded by the Carnegie Corporation. So you carry out the first scientific studies of what causes deterioration in paper and microphone records. Because in the late 19th century as the US industrialized and railroads spread out across the country, the corporate form really stretched out. So you had all these corporate headquarters, you had all these different sites within the business, and you could no longer just walk onto the factory floor and see how things were going. You had to use these paper records, but the paper records were printed on the wood pulp, which by the early 20th century was shown to have some problems of durability. So now we have the government and corporations are most important institutions that are supposed to be the most durable and they're literally held together by these fragile deteriorating records. So there was a lot at stake to figure out how we could create permanent records. So this is just one of the reports that the lead chemist Parker Kimberly published. But I dig into that history and I also look at the use of gas chambers to sterilize and mitigate volumes because bookworms are a real thing. There's an actual insect that tunnels through books. These are real. It's not just a car jam thing. And they were destroying a lot of records and a lot of priceless books. So they started using poison gas on books and Huntington Library, Arthur Kimberly, who you just saw as a report, he picked it up, went on to work the National Archives, and then it became pretty standardized practice. So everything that came into the National Archives was gas and gas chamber. I look at the first quote unquote permanent time capsules created in the 1930s. There were some fellows very much influenced by the eugenics movement who were really scared that all of these African-Americans and immigrants were going to contaminate American culture as we knew it and destroy the typical American family and I'm just quoting them, right? Like the degeneration of the cause of degeneration of the light rays. So they created capsules like this one where they took basically mankind's accumulated knowledge up to that point, put it on microfilm, put it inside of a glass capsule, put that inside of a metal capsule, sealed it with asbestos and then buried it like 100 feet underground. And this was supposed to be opened by people 5,000 years from now. So the year 69-39. If you're interested and you read the book, you'll see like the chairman of Western House talking about how they'll be like supermen and superwomen and there will be no abnormal people in that time. Very much influenced by the giant. This is the typical American family because the Western House time capsules deposited at the World's Fair in 1939 and 1939 World's Fair also had the typical American family contest. This is one of the families that won. You can see they're very typical. This is Thoromel Jacobs who also really created an even more ambitious project at the same time. Western House sort of stole his idea actually. He created the Crypt of Civilization and it was modeled after the Egyptian too. It's outside of Atlanta, Georgia on the old Thorpe University campus. And that's actually where I drew the title because he gave an address at the closing of the crypt where he talked to the people of the 81-13 who would open it and he said, so we knew the dead out of a distant past salute you in the sunny hours of the future. And we wonder if you have the same hope of immortality as we do. His archivist, this really idiosyncratic guy in TK Peters who was an inventor of pre-Kinsey sex researcher, a filmmaker. He was like the historical consultant on the birth of the nation. But he also was the archivist for the crypt. He also was an avid yoga practitioner and I've been to all of his papers everywhere, UCLA, Library of Congress, et cetera. And he said that he was going to be there in 81-13 because they believed in reincarnation and he was going to make that happen. I don't know if that's how reincarnation works, I'm not an expert. I don't think it is. But he said he'd be there in 81-13 to explain the crypt to everyone in the future. So this is actually one of his inventions. It's a fragment of metal film that I found at the Library of Congress because with any new medium that comes along, any new data format like microfilm, we're really excited. This is better than paper, it's great. And then you're like, but it's also new and we really don't know if it's going to last. Let's back it up with something ancient. So they have these metal film reels. You can see it's FDR. So it was invented by TK Peters and invented a special projector that would bounce light off of it. So it worked by reflection around the shiny light through. So the image gets etched into nickel. That's a bunch of that stuff in the crypt. Oh, this is him doing yoga. By the time you get to chapter three, I'm looking at things like atomic bomb tests, which we know like the mannequins getting blown up and Operation Q, but they were also doing things like dropping atomic bombs on filing cabinets and saves where documents will be stored to make sure that our data was bomb proof. And then I dig into a lot of photos right into that. I go to the bunker at Greenbrier. This is a luxury resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, under which was a secret fallout shelter for Congress, which was never used. There was no atomic bomb dropped in the United States, but you can tour it now. And it's also a data center or what's known as a data bunker. That's the 27 ton. Later in the book, we go to outer space. I didn't go there literally, but I thought about projects like Trevor Kagan's last pictures, the boys are going to record and sort of look simultaneously at these frontiers, if you will, right? Because digital isn't a materially unsustainable format because it requires all of these minerals and metals. And it's also a data bunker. That's the 27 ton door. Later in the book, we go to outer space. I didn't go there literally, but I'm going to look at all of these minerals and metals that the earth has in finite supply. But now Goldman Sachs is saying, we just invest in asteroid mining. We'll have an infinite supply of platinum gold and all the things that we need. So the end of the book gets into the question of outer space exploration, how the tech world is trying to take us there. And also continuing efforts to expand the data complex here for things like DNA data storage. So I'll stop there and we can go anywhere in that itinerary to go deeper. So thank you. That was amazing. And it really kind of spreads to moments of my professional life because before I ever went to Los Angeles, I did my MFA at Poetry and of course, every professional event there starts with someone like reading what they wrote. And I really loved and appreciated going back to that time and appreciate this book as a literary work in addition to that research. Thank you. I was thinking about the kind of like, there's the Cold War era where we're worried about preserving corporations, right? The corporate person. And then by the end of the book, you're talking about this like the preservation of our like data bodies in the present moment, right? Where we're not preserving the like corporate person, we're preserving like the actual person and maybe turning them into a like after like AI chatbot. So if first the data complex, we're worried about making corporations and all. Now it's worried about making Beyonce immortal, which is like fully data fried in every aspect of her life. What's it after next? Oh, that's a great, great, great, great question. Well, I think, I think what's happening is there's a blurring that goes on between life and digital after life between individual and corporation where the data points of the corporation now needs to survive in this model of digital capitalism, surveillance capitalism, platform capitalism, choose your name is also what we need to survive, right? So we're sort of tied in together to the circuit. I'll give you an example from the book about what some people think is next. So the Bureau of Standards, the name of the Bureau of Standards is now the National Institute for Standards and Technology. And so if you have a facial recognition system you need to test, they have with the scoring system that you can submit there. But they're also working with people on outer space exploration. So there's a plan that they're hatching with a guy named Chris Mason who's a meta-genomicist. And he is trying to sort of adapt, use biotechnology to adapt the human body to be equipped for outer, so rather than like terraforming Mars, let's genetically modify some kind of microorganism that we can smear on her skin to actually absorb all of the radiation in space that would otherwise burn us. So ideas like that. And what he thinks, he doesn't tend to talk about this. He thinks that as we explore deeply into space, we need to interrupt the inevitable heat depth of the universe. Like he literally says this in a said in that talk, we need to use our ingenuity to make sure that the universe does not destroy itself and eat that and interrupt that cycle. The scientists now believe that like it's going to expand, it's going to collapse again, it's going to dig down again. So what's beyond that is something that's sort of beyond profit. It's beyond immortality in a sort of individualistic way. It's about the endless life of the human species as a whole. In his view, that's another thing that struck me about the book. And I think very natural, like we're both Americans. It sort of, it spans kind of 20th to 21st century American history. It's very centered here. An example of a very centered here. But of course, I mean, part of verification is that we live in a really globalized world. And as I was thinking about the kind of data complex, it strikes me that one of the significant things about it is that it's the global North, right? That's generating a lot of the data, like recording ourselves and all our like, whatever, selfie reels. And of course, using up the energy that it takes to maintain that data and building technology often on top of that data, which then gets either just pushed on to the majority world as solutions that are not built for their benefits, but are nonetheless exposed on them. Or worse, perhaps they're like included, but in a predatory way. We'll go build some data by conducting our medical research abroad. So I'm wondering, like, what your thoughts are about the global dimensions of the data complex? Like, do you think that it's sort of equally present in all societies? How do you think about kind of global equity in the data complex? And the, you know, I guess my, the bigger version of this question is, is the data complex as something that evolved in a structurally unequal society, kind of inherently bound to reproduce those inequalities or could it ever be an engine of positive change? Well, the second possibility is more hopeful than I tend to be. That's not to say it can't happen. I think that, I think that there are, well, I guess that's a question. I think that it is uneven. I think that it's particularly intense in the United States for reasons that I get into in the book, and there are some numbers to back that up in terms of, you know, the United States has, you know, as a country has more data centers than the rest of the top five, you know, so the country, the corporations that are based here, even the organizational systems for information. But as far as it being used for something, something more liberatory or more positive, I guess that's possible. What would have to happen though is, I think we would have to somehow disrupt the idea that it's infinite expansion is a fundamental good. Right. We'd have to somehow, and I think we'd have to somehow figure out how to fuel it with energy sources more sustainable. I think until those things happen, it's a pretty destructive force, and I think we have to, there's a possibility that if DNA data storage can scale, that it could be a much more sustainable data storage format. You will still need computers to read it, but perhaps you can scale back the digital technology abuse in scale of the amount of DNA data storage that goes on. So that could reduce the carbon footprint. It could make it more efficient. It could make it, it could reduce the requirements for cold because now they're one of the data centers to market circle, but as you know, cold is going away. So that's one possibility. Now, I'm sure everyone who's here is extremely good looking. They're also probably smarter and better read than me. So I didn't know about DNA data storage until I got to the last chapter. So I'm going to give you a short overview of what's going on there and then do we have a mic runner to do a question for the audience? Okay, so after this we'll turn to a couple of audience. So digital tends to be a binary code, at least in a way that we tend to use it now. And so you can actually assign, you can assign that binary code to the fundamental parts of DNA. And so scientists roughly about 10 years ago, Microsoft University of Washington, Harvard as well, there's what's going on, figured out how to store digital files in DNA, how to retrieve them. Synthetic DNA, but also George Church here at Harvard, since that's been stored in a living DNA of E. Coli. It was a video that was then stored there and then retrieved several generations later, if I'm not correctly. So why that's appealing is DNA is super dense. So as of a few years ago, a stat came out that said you could store all of the information on the data in a shoebox worth of DNA. So it's appealing in that sense. It promises being the most dense data format ever. And if you freeze it or dehydrate it, you can basically create a fossil that lasts for billions of years. It's very expensive, of course. So there are many startups and people like Bill Gates are investing in it. We're trying to figure out how to make a scale so that it can be cheaper. It's not wild. All right. Questions. Yeah, I see Nick there. This is really interesting. Thank you. My question is, you know, when we think about these artifacts or this data, a lot of times it requires a way of interpreting it. So the Einstein picture is just a picture of an old guy with his tongue out if you don't know what Einstein is. In your view, then does the data complex require sort of freezing cultures so that people can understand and appreciate what the meaning of these things that are being preserved are or will we see a way of things over time through this process? That's a great question. So I think this is something that all these preservationists have struggled with at every step. You have to preserve the metadata. You have to preserve some element of the context in order for these things to make sense. So this is as important as preserving the, as you said, the Albert Einstein photo itself. In some ways, all the photos are seen as reinforcing each other's historical archive and you can sort of put it together. But still there's a deep anxiety about this and each of them went about it a bit of a different way. So the way I've answered your question is to give a couple of examples. In the Crypto Civilization, they created a sort of Nickelodeon style flip book like to teach people of 8113 how to read English. The Westinghouse Corporation, they created the book of record and they also had a lot of research on the stories around the world, libraries, archives, Smithsonian, Tibetan, monasteries, and the Malaeas, those tribes. And they also had in that book of record, John Harrington, who was an ethnologist, he produced this guide to English. Again, to teach people English and to write the book of record, so they were like, well, we need to make a great, a very nice place to dig it up. But then they were like, there's no way to create a semiotic system that is natural. One of the people said we need to create an atomic priesthood and you just pass down the knowledge from one generation to the next. Which was actually sort of create stainless steel tickets to the opening of the crypt in 8113 and we'll have fathers pass them down to sons for all the intervening generations. So, and then there's reincarnation thing which is like I'll just explain it to you. I'll just come back and explain that. So, yeah this is another thing that sort of drives us anxiety about whether any of these projects are going to work and when the data complex that anxiety serves to make us preserve more in more formats and back it up again and make it redundant and disperse it closer. We never really get the sense of comfort that we're looking for. We just end up doing more in the same. Standing by energy with all three ice caps that flood our data center. All right, another question. Yeah there's one in the back. Thank you so much. Hey Brian, it's great to see you. Congratulations on this book. I have a question about verticality and the way that your work I imagine stretched you and forced you to think about what the vertical plane does environmentally in terms of the practicality of preservation, but also why outer space, right? So I'm sure you've had to put a lot of thought into the subterranean and association with that, the legal architecture that may or may not carry forward the happening on the surface of the earth to spaces below and above ground and if that's not interesting maybe you could talk to us about your Wall Street Journal piece as well and how you presented your work in this kind of educational way to people in corporations today. Yes, thank you Megan, thank you for coming too. The outer space question is very interesting so what I noticed is that as we're growing further and further into the ground to store this data, tend to be doing more and more safely in other products beyond storing data, we're also looking to outer space and outer space as long been a sort of dreamy place. It's a place of fantasy, it's a place that is imagined to be pure of all of these sort of contaminating elements that we find on earth, whether racial, chemical or otherwise. So it's very much, it's very much an old sort of colonialist and peerless dream about going to the stars and only the people that we take with us will be there and we can create that kind of utopia. There's a dream that the resources there are infinite, the mineral resources there are infinite, but what I saw was that you have, if you take like Jeff Bezos for example, he helped fund and design the 10,000 year clock, the clock of the long now, which is supposed to run for 10,000 years in a cave in Van Horn, Texas on the track of land that he owns. But then at the same time he's investing in outer space as places. So it's kind of like a dual movement. We don't, we don't really like say we're going to go to space and like leave earth behind. We kind of do both at once. We're going to go further into the subterranean data complex and go further into outer space. I think the other thing that keeps us feeling about space is that it's imagined to be this kind of like, what I call in the book like an intergalactic clean room, because earth is dusty and dirty and if you want any digital stuff, you have to create these environments that are free of dust. So there's this idea that you can just expand forever. There's this idea that you can in the Goldman Sachs perspective that I used to have my students read in my digital materiality course. They say that there's actually water in asteroids, which you can convert into rocket fuels. So you can turn asteroid, you can create asteroid gas stations. And that would actually support this deep space travel. So I'm sorry, that's kind of rambling. I don't have to answer your question. But again, I see movements almost always in each case in both directions up and down at the same time if you want to believe the other. How would we have a plan for one more question? I mean, I couldn't help but think as you were answering that, like how childlike in some way this desire for infinite resources, right? Like if we can't have it here, like where is the place where we can go be irresponsible? Can we go to outer space? Can we take a cave and do it down there? No, it's left. Yeah, question in the back. Great talk. There's a kind of implicit assumption that future generations will benefit from access to this data. Is there much discussion about the possibility of hard to play it? Yeah, can you speak to that a little bit? Yes. So one of the things that I talk about in the book is how often preservation practices are toxic because decay is that decay we associate with death, but decay is actually full of life, right? Decay is often microorganisms that are like really happy because they're eating a corpse or they're eating a leather book or they're eating these other things that they like to eat. So in order to say, if you look at the art of taxidermy, for instance, you want to preserve a scan in the 1800s, what they would do is they've covered in arsenic, right, until they found things that weren't as lethal to humans, but still pretty toxic. The gassed books for the National Archives and Huntington Library and all those other places, they are carcinogenic, right? They gassed them with carboxide, which off gasses and leaves a toxic residue. So there's a, I think the data itself, as a meteorologist, I would say that the material is the data itself. And so there is an intoxication that happens and they can be harmful. Just to put it in the minds of some of these preservationists, they were constantly thinking about, again, how these things would be received. And even if they're not harmful, like you look at something like the Westinghouse time capsule, which I had up there, this long sort of thing, my friend Nick Javelin, who's written the best book on time capsules, he was like, they might actually not open this thing because it looks like an unexploded bomb. So that's a little bit to the side of your question, but I think that that whole sphere of concern about, will this harm them or how do we keep them from being harmed? Or how do we even communicate that this is something that we think would be good for them? And then the other anxiety in there I think is not so much harm, but one of the abiding things is that, especially these guys in the 20s and 30s were like, we're going to do this amazing technological feat that's going to prove that we modern are superior to all these ancients. But then as soon as they do that, if we succeed, it's the year of 6939. And they're looking back at us as these primitives. So they're constantly like, we are modern. Oh wait, we are modern. Oh wait. And it was just, again, it just fuels the cycle of anxiety that leads them to do more and try to do better. I think that's a great place to end. I wish I could say that we had had the foresight to record this talk on some sort of permanent, but yeah, unfortunately, not micro-peach, not going to Iron Mountain, just going into the cloud where it will dissipate and help fully decay. So please join me in thanking Brian for coming and for sharing this really terrific.