Deep Extinctionism

Library Stack is the virtual emulation of a certain set of programs and protocols for the warehousing and circulating of digital publications. These protocols used to be termed a library, although this word has evolved and mutated under the technical and legal pressures of 21st century digital culture. Since 2016, Library Stack’s broad collection of digital projects from the art, design and architecture fields has become integrated with academic researchers and public readers.

On the front end, it is a typical web database and searchable file repository of material from across the visual arts: pamphlets, journals, podcasts, eBooks, fonts and software projects, all by artists, exhibition spaces, design firms and small publishers. On the back end, Library Stack inputs metadata about all these projects to the heritage databases used by institutional libraries around the world (such as WorldCat, or the commercial discovery systems run by Ex Libris or EBSCO), creating a legibility bridge between the regulated taxonomies of library science and the unregulated modes of digital publication now common to the art and design fields. We might be classed as a sort of “post-custodial” archive, caring for a consciously assembled collection of digital objects for which we have neither ownership nor custody of some set of ‘originals’. In some cases, there may no longer be an original. Our file archive is natively online, and replicated across multiple regions of commercial cloud storage. But planning and projecting our work into the future has forced us to contend with the technical horizons, ecological impact and chronopolitical stakes of long-term data storage. This essay summarizes our findings, and points to some technical, social and ecological aporias beyond our current horizon.

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Initially drawn to durable, offline approaches for the storage of ephemeral, online materials, we began by working with the data storage company Stamper Technologies, which works out of a small laboratory in a nondescript office park in Rochester, New York.¹  Founded locally by a former Kodak engineer, Stamper offers a precision laser process for etching nanometer-sized pixels onto discs of pure nickel or gold. Any kind of digital image, graphic, document or data set can be shrunk down to microscopic scale, converted to a high-resolution pixel-based format, and burned onto the metal for long term archiving. It’s like a durable version of microfiche, but with greatly expanded data density. The discs cannot technologically obsolesce because they don’t require computation to be decoded, only magnification and light. Stamper’s approach shares characteristics with other long-term data storage methods, many of which have evolved similar microprinting or photolithographic etching processes using specially prepared ceramic plates, pure metals or other material substrates. It’s a growing market: Microsoft has developed an industrial-scale system where visual data, in the form of three-dimensional voxels, can be laser-etched onto quartz glass; and numerous biotech firms are transcoding binary code into base pairs for storage within synthetic DNA, or even living organisms.  

We also worked with a firm named Piql, based in Oslo, Norway, which has developed its own digital-analog hybrid that stores binary code as a graphic pattern of black and white squares on reels of polyester-based cinema film. These reels of stored data look like transparent QR codes, thousands of feet long.²  Piql runs its own permanent storage facility deep in a former coal mine in Svalbard, a demilitarized island in northern Norway; it’s called the Arctic World Archive. Cinema film has a known storage history, and there’s good data to suggest that if kept in this cold darkness, the films can last for centuries. Of course, the AWA is just walking distance from the much more famous Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is already coping with the surrounding permafrost’s unexpectedly rapid melt. Though their technical methods for storage and retrieval are thoughtfully engineered and technically precise, Piql’s film reels are now in the awkward position of being likely to outlast the building that houses them. 

The current digital storage landscape seems to cleave along a central axis. Processes that use material substrates like metals, synthetic DNA, quartz glass or polyester films have tremendous durability, but data retrieval can require complex or proprietary decoding techniques; the physical media need specific storage conditions, and they cannot easily be versioned, updated or distributed. Durability and accessibility run almost entirely counter to each other; these offline approaches are meaningfully permanent, but at the expense of utility in the present. Aimed at corporate data, banking, health and insurance records, and some aspects of cultural heritage preservation, these are most realistically thought of as a safety backstop for an unknown future. They support the warehousing function of archives, not the accessibility and circulation functions of libraries. Online storage methods like commercial clouds or blockchain platforms, do maintain data in immediately accessible formats, but rely on an unregulated global computing stack that demands enormous quantities of energy. They generally define permanent as a few decades, maybe a century, essentially just the ‘lifetime’ of the user, so their likeliest use cases are in important personal information: legal contracts, real estate deeds, identity documents or cultural assets like NFTs. Two paradigmatic blockchain services, Arweave and Filecoin, marketize the idea of permanence through tokenomic incentives, but each locates the value of their system within a different speculative future. Filecoin, a marketplace connecting data to be stored with server space for lease, premises its token’s value on the scarcity of available storage space. Arweave is a more closed-network approach, where user fees are paid into an endowment that helps underwrite the ongoing storage cost. The priced-in supposition is that data quantities will continue to go up, but the cost to store data will always go down, and the Arweave token’s valuation comes from balancing that data abundance with the fluctuating energy cost of its storage.³  Online and offline methods all imply some horizon of futurity, but it’s often either too far away or not far enough. 

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All long-term data storage companies seem to share a centralized Public Relations department. Backup Humanity. Preserving Knowledge, Forever. Permanent, Decentralized, Open. Storage for an Ultra Long Time. This optimistic framing—where the technological sublime enables unlimited human preservation and durability—thinly disguises the profitable marketing fiction of societal collapse and its latent catastrophilia. We all know a crisis is coming, they seem to say. What kind will it be? When will it arrive? For whom are you saving your data? How much is that future legibility worth? Of course, it is indeed true that every new computer, data center and networked object pulls more raw minerals into a long production cycle, with exploitative labor practices and environmental damage. We all know this is unsustainable, and bringing the planet nearer to collapse. Against such a grim psychic backdrop, you could be forgiven for mistaking the data storage field for a complex futures market in human extinctions. Do you need to store data for the long pre-collapse present, or the far post-collapse future? Any of these commercial storage services are made profitable by our collective existential anxiety and its reactionary desire for digital permanence, which of course only results in more computing technologies—obscuring the cognitive dissonance on which all the notional permanence rests. We are storing our information against a theoretical catastrophe that the storage effort itself helps to ensure will happen.  

The gaming company Untamed Planet has proposed “conservation 3.0”, where a suite of multiform metaverse sites hosting Web 3 gaming and online culture experiences will generate revenue for real-world land protection. They recently raised $24.3 million in venture capital to develop a play to protect gaming model, and claim they will commit 50% of its net cryptocurrency profits “to Nature as an equal shareholder”.⁴  At the COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh, Tuvaluan Communication Minister Simon Kofe delivered his address from a metaverse replica of the island, the camera pulling out to reveal the CGI background, glitchy from being texture-mapped on the fly.⁵  “As our land disappears,” he said, “we have no choice but to become the world’s first digital nation. Our land, our ocean, our culture are the most precious assets of our people… and no matter what happens in the physical world, we’ll move them to the cloud.” We realize the self-awareness and spectacle value of Minister Kofe’s proposal, and the traumatic circumstances that prompted it. (Who doesn’t ache for Tuvalu, dissolving into the ocean?) But it demonstrates the basic marketing fiction underlying both networked data storage and metaverse-based conservation: that the catastrophe can be forestalled—perhaps even averted—by the acceleration of the very technological infrastructure used by these firms. Computational resource draw is seen here as both crisis and solution, such that the cannibalization of the biosphere and the impulse to preserve a living culture become accidentally cross-perceived as parts of the same engineering project. Permanence is a design fiction. Dematerialization into the metaverse provides an illusion of permanence very similar to materialization into metals, ceramics, engineered glass or DNA.

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We drove to Rochester to visit the Stamper Technologies laboratory in October of 2022. Their methodology engaged our preoccupations with geology, computation and the history of photographic imaging, and we wanted to test the viability of this method on our idiosyncratic library of digital materials. We had sent them a core sample of our collection—books, journals, maps and typefaces by artists and designers from around the world, many of them friends or peers—and went to observe the process. Our data took up eight micro-printed discs, each arrayed in a ring on a single nickel sheet. Rainbows bounced off its mirrored surface, gridded with what seemed like thousands of tiny photographic holograms. Each small circular field was 100,000 pixels across, and examining them under the lab’s microscope showed us new configurations of scale, compression and resolution. Stamper claims the disc is resistant to corrosion, humidity, heat and electromagnetic radiation; their commercial clients include lunar probes and other private space technologies, many of which include Sagan-esque tokens in their payloads. Spectacular claims of durability imply inhuman timescales, and when our disc was finished, we felt haunted by a profound sense of mistranslation. Pixels so recently born were now embedded in eternal metals that would never die, stranded together and bereft of context. We felt the sudden revulsion of a new uncanny valley: the chronological dislocation of seeing one’s own present as if from someone else’s future.

Library Stack Archive Film
Polyester-based film roll using Piql technology
Video courtesy of Library Stack

Library Stack Archiving Disc
Nanometer-size pixels etched onto nickel disc via Stamper Technologies laser technology
Video courtesy of Library Stack

We were reminded that in the late-2000s, researchers at the George Eastman House, the Rochester museum built from the collection of Kodak’s founder, discovered that many of their daguerreotypes weren’t decaying, but in fact were covered in a nanoscale fungus. Long presumed biologically inert and even innately antimicrobial, these metallic image-plates were in fact hosting fungal colonies that were metabolizing the silver and gold nanoparticles comprising each image. What appeared to the eye as tarnish in the shadows and edges was revealed by scanning electron microscopy to be a fibrous biometallic fungal residue, sprawling across the surface in a dense web. Daguerreotypes were the earliest widespread form of photography, in use from around 1845 to 1865, and in less than two centuries many of them have visibly degraded due to these unexpected, microscopic ecosystems. Conservators now house many daguerreotypes in casings sealed with argon gas, halting the damage by depriving oxygen from the bio-reactive surface.⁶ Unlike an archive, repository, or time capsule, a library is oxygenated by patterns of human use. Without a living layer of social protocol, our sample group of electronic projects had all deadened upon contact with nickel. They were rendered exquisitely in high definition — but anaerobic, as if behind thick glass.

1. https://vimeo.com/824845206 

2. https://vimeo.com/824845422 

3. Arweave sees its own useful life, at best, at about one thousand years, after which they expect to be subsumed into future archiving systems. The reasoning is sober and thoughtful, but premised on optimistic extrapolations about data storage technologies, and their continued availability. It’s also worth parsing the immutability of the blockchain’s record (historically secured by the incalculably high computation cost it would require to alter it) from the permanence of the network that’s actually storing the referenced data. As the designer Chris Lee notes, immutability is an ancient political fiction, and the intrinsic weakness of any immutability claim is (definitionally) impossible to discern until the socio-technical framework that had initially naturalized it collapses or evolves. Online digital storage, no matter how cryptographically secure, rests on the contingencies of global computing, with its archipelago of fossil-based energy grids and privately held infrastructure. It is difficult to ascribe permanence to a system so vulnerable to the whims of investors and the knock-on self-destruction effect of its own operation. (See Chris Lee’s Immutable: Designing History: https://www.librarystack.org/immutable-designing-history/) 

4. https://www.untamedplanet.earth/ 

5. https://vimeo.com/824845563 

6. The material resilience of any archival medium is a function of its storage conditions. Humidity, temperature or atmospheric elements can warp a sensitive medium; ultraviolet light can alter colors or pigments; and organic matter can degrade almost any substrate. Fungal colonies have been found to attack the gelatin base of silver halide films, the surfaces of recordable compact discs, the binding polymers of magnetic tape and, of course, the pure metals in antique photographs. For more, see: Palermo, A.M., Gentile, A. & Pellegrino, G. Documentary heritage: fungal deterioration in Compact Discs. Heritage Science 9, 133 (2021). [https://doi.org/10.1186/s40494-021-00609-x]; Nick R. Konkol, Brenda Bernier, Elena Bulat & Ralph Mitchell, Characterization of Filamentous Accretions On Daguerreotype Surfaces, Pages 149-159 | Published online: 18 July 2013. [https://doi.org/10.1179/019713611804480944]; and Wiegandt, Ralph et al. “A Summary of the National Science Foundation (SCIART) Supported Research of the Daguerreotype: George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, and the University of Rochester.” (2017). [https://resources.culturalheritage.org/pmgtopics/2013-volume-fifteen/28-T15_Wiegandt_Bigelow.pdf] 

Main image
Library Stack Archiving Disc
Nanometer-size pixels etched onto nickel disc via Stamper Technologies laser technology
Image courtesy of Library Stack

Image description
A photo of a hand holding a golden reflective disc. Engraved onto the disc’s surface there are eight equally sized circles, arranged one next to the other forming a larger circle, like petals of a flower. Each of the circles contains a series of very small marks or squares arranged in lines, forming different patterns.