labyrinthine in Thylstrup 2019
ving, sociologist Mike Featherstone asked
whether “the expansion of culture available at our fingertips” could be
“subjected to a meaningful ordering,” or whether the very “desire to remedy
fragmentation” should be “seen as clinging to a form of humanism with its
emphasis upon cultivation of the persona and unity which are now regarded as
merely nostalgic.”24 Featherstone raised the question in response to the
popularization of the Internet at the turn of the millennium. Yet, as the
previous section has shown, his question is probably as old as the collecting
practices themselves. Such questions have become no less significant with mass
digitization. How are organizational practices conceived of as meaningful
today? As we shall see, this question not only relates to technical
characteristics but is also informed by a strong spatial imaginary that often
takes the shape of labyrinthine infrastructures and often orients itself
toward the figure of the user. Indeed, the role of the organizer of knowledge,
and therefore the accompanying responsibility of making sense of collections,
has been conferred from knowledge professionals to individuals.
Today, as seen in all the examples of mass digitization we have explored in
the previous chapters, cultural memory institutions face a different paradigm
than that of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century disciplining cultural
memory institution. In an age that encourages individualism, democratic
ideals, and cultural participation, the orientations of the cultural memory
institutions have shifted in discourse, practice, or both, toward an emphasis
on the importance of the subjective experience and active participation of the
individual visitor. As part of this shift, and as a result of the increasing
integration of the digital
42
Lastly, the classic figure of the flaneur also assumes a body with no
disabilities. As Marian Ryan notes in an essay in the _New York Times_ , “The
art of flânerie entails blending into the crowd. The disabled flaneur can’t
achieve that kind of invisibility.”43 What might we take from these critical
interventions into the uncomplicated discourse of the flaneur? Importantly,
they counterbalance the dominant seductive image of the empowered user, and
remind us of the colonial male gaze inherent in any invocation of the metaphor
of the flaneur, which for the majority of users is a subject position that is
simply not available (nor perhaps desirable).
The limitations of the figure of the flaneur raise questions not only about
the metaphor itself, but also about the topography of knowledge production it
invokes. As already noted, Walter Benjamin placed the flaneur within a larger
labyrinthine topology of knowledge production, where the flaneur could read
the spectacle in front of him without being read himself. Walter Benjamin
himself put the flaneur to rest with an analysis of an Edgar Allen Poe story,
where he analyzed the demise of the flaneur in an increasingly capitalist
topography, noting in melancholy terms that, “The bazaar is the last hangout
of the flaneur. If in the beginning the street had become an interieur for
him, now this interieur turned into a street, and he roamed through the
labyrinth of merchandise as he had once roamed through the labyrinth of the
city. It is a magnificent touch in Poe’s story that it includes along with the
earliest description of the flaneur the figuration of his end.”44 In 2012,
Evgeny Morozov in similar terms declared the death of the cyberflaneur.
Linking the commodification of urban spaces in nineteenth-century Paris to the
frapolitics of the spatial imaginaries of mass
digitization, not only in relation to questions of globalization and late
sovereignty, but also to cultural imaginaries of knowledge infrastructures.
Indeed, these two dimensions are far from mutually exclusive, but rather
belong to the same overarching tale of the politics of mass digitization.
Thus, while the material spatial infrastructures of mass digitization projects
may help us appreciate certain important political dynamics of Europeana,
Google Books, and shadow libraries (such as their territorializing features or
copyright contestations in relation to knowledge production), only an
inclusion of the infrastructural imaginaries of knowledge production will help
us understand the complex politics of mass digitization as it metamorphoses
from analog buildings, shelves, and cabinets to the circulatory networks of
digital platforms.
## Labyrinthine Imaginaries: Infrastructural Perspectives of Power and
Knowledge Production
If the flaneur is a central early figure in the cultural imaginary of the
observer of cultural texts, the labyrinth has long served as a cultural
imaginary of the library, and, in larger terms, the spatialized
infrastructural conditions of knowledge and power. Thus, literature is rife
with works that draw on libraries and labyrinths to convey stories about
knowledge production and the power struggles hereof. Think only of the elderly
monk-librarian in Umberto Eco’s classic, _The Name of the Rose,_ who notes
that: “the library is a great labyrinth, sign of the labyrinth of the world.
You enter and you do not know whether you will come out” 46; or consider the
haunting images of being lost in Jose Luis Borges’s tales about labyrinthine
libraries.47 This section therefore turns to the infrastructural space of the
labyrinth, to show that this spatial imaginary, much like the flaneur, is
loaded with cultural ambivalence, and to explore the ways in which the
labyrinthine infrastructural imaginary emphasizes and crystallizes the
infrapolitical tension in mass digitization projects between power and
perspective, agency and environment, playful innovation and digital labor.
The labyrinth is a prevalent literary trope, found in authors from Ovid,
Virgil, and Dante to Dickens and Nietzsche, and it has been used particularly
in relation to issues of knowledge and agency, and in haunting and nightmarish
terms in modern literature.48 As the previous section indicates, the labyrinth
also provides a significant image for understanding our relationship to mass
digitization projects as sites of both knowledge production and experience.
Indeed, one shadow library is even named _Aleph_ , which refers to the ancient
Hebrew letter and likely also nods at Jose Luis Borges’s labyrinthine short
story, _Aleph,_ on infinite labyrinthine architectures. Yet, what kind of
infrastructure is a labyrinth, and how does it relate to the potentials and
perils of mass digitization?
In her rich historical study of labyrinths, Penelope Doob argues that the
labyrinth possesses a dual potentiality: on the one hand, if experienced from
within, the labyrinth is a sign of confusion; on the other, when viewed from
above, it is a sign of complex order.49 As Harold Bloom notes, “all of us have
had the experience of admiring a structure when outside it, but becoming
unhappy within it.”50 Envisioning the labyrinth from within links to a
claustrophobic sense of ignorance, while also implying the possibility of
progress if you just turn the next corner. What better way to describe one’s
experience in the labyrinthine infrastructures of mass digitization projects
such as Google Books with its infrastructural conditions and contexts of
experience and agency? On the one hand, Google Books appears to provide the
view from above, lending itself as a logistical aid in its information-rich
environment. On the other hand, Google Books also produces an alienating
effect of impenetrability on two levels. First, although Google presents
itself as a compass, its seemingly infinite and constantly rearranging
universe nevertheless creates a sense of vertigo, only reinforced by the
almost existential question “Do you feel lucky?” Second, Google Books also
feels impenetrable on a deeper level, with its black-boxed governing and
ordering principles, hidden behind complex layers of code, corporate cultures,
and nondisclosure agreements.51 But even less-commercial mass digitization
projects such as, for instance, E
ably translated into monetary values and redressed in business
models made possible by digital technology.”54 This is visible, for instance,
in Europeana’s usage statistic reports, which links the notions of _traffic_
and _performance_ together in an ontological equation (in this equation poor
performance inevitably means a mark of death). 55 In a blogpost marking the
launch of the _Europeana Statistics Dashboard_ , we are told that information
about mass digitization traffic is “vital information for a modern cultural
institution for both reporting and planning purposes and for public
accountability.”56 Thus, although visitors may feel solitary in their digital
wanderings, their digital footsteps are in fact obsessively traced and tracked
by mass digitization platforms and often also by numerous third parties.
Today, then, the user is indeed at work as she makes her way in the
labyrinthine infrastructures of mass digitization by scrolling, clicking,
downloading, connecting, and clearing and creating new paths. And while
“search” has become a keyword in digital knowledge environments, digital
infrastructures in mass digitization projects in fact distract as much as they
orient. This new economy of cultural memory begs the question: if mass
digitization projects, as labyrinthine infrastructures, invariably disorient
the wanderer as much as they aid her, how might we understand their
infrapolitics? After all, as the previous chapters have shown, mass
digitization projects often present a wide array of motivations for why
digitization should happen on a massive scale, with knowledge production and
cultural enlightenment usually featuring as the strongest arguments. But as
the spatialized heuristics of the flaneur and the labyrinth show, knowledge
production and navigation is anything but a simple concept. Rather, the
political dimensions of mass digitization discussed in previous chapters—such
as standardization, late sovereignty, and network power—are tied up with the
spatial imaginaries of what knowledge production and cultural memory are and
how they should and could be organized and navigated.
The question of the spatial imaginaries of knowledge production and
imagination has a long philosophic history. As historian David Bates notes,
knowledge in the Enlightenment era was often imagined as a labyrinthine
journey. A classic illustration of how this journey was imagined is provided
by Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Louis Castilhon, whose frustration is
palpable in this exclamation: “How cruel and painful is the situation of a
Traveller who has imprudently wandered into a forest where he knows neither
the winding paths, nor the detours, nor the exits!”57 These Enlightenment
journeys were premised upon an infrastructural framework that linked error and
knowledge, but also upon an experience of knowledge quests riddled by loss of
oversight and lack of a compass. As the previous sections show, the labyrinth
as a form of knowledge production in relation to truth and error persists as
an infrastructural trope in the digital. Yet, it has also metamorphosed
significantly since Castilhon. The labyrinthine infrastructural imaginaries we
find in digital environments thus differ significantly from more classical
images, not least under the influence of the rhizomatic metaphors of
labyrinths developed by Deleuze and Guattari and Eco. If the labyrinth of the
Renaissance had an endpoint and a truth, these new labyrinthine
infrastructures, as Kristin Veel points out, had a much more complex
relationship to the spatial organization of the truth. Eco and Deleuze and
Guattari thus conceived of their labyrinths as networks “in which all points
can be connected with one another” with “no center” but “an almost unlimited
multiplicity of alternative paths,” which makes it “impossible to rise above
the structure and observe it from the outside, because it transcends the
graphic two-dimensionality of the two earlier forms of labyrinths.”58 Deleuze
expressed the senselessness of these contemporary labyrinths as a “theater
where nothing is fixed, a labyrinth without a thread (Ariadne has hung
herself).”59
In mass digitization, this new infrastructural imaginary feeds a looming
concern over how best to curate and infrastructurate cultural collections. It
is this concern that we see at play in the
this loss of control which was at the
base of their self-understanding.”60 The Europeana professional then proceeded
to recount the profound anxiety experienced and expressed by knowledge
professionals as they increasingly came face-to-face with a curatorial reality
that is radically changing what counts as knowledge and context, where a
search for Courbet could, in theory, not only lead the user to other French
masters of painting but also to a copy of a porn magazine (provided it is out
of copyright). The anxiety experienced by knowledge professionals in the new
cultural memory ecosystem can of course be explained by a rationalized fear of
job insecurity and territorial concerns. Yet, the fear of knowledge
infrastructures without a center may also run deeper. As Penelope Doob reminds
us, the center of the labyrinth historically played a central moral and
epistemological role in the labyrinthine topos, as the site that held the
epiphanous key to unravel whatever evils or secrets the labyrinth contained.
With no center, there is no key, no epiphany.61 From this perspective, then,
it is not only a job that is lost. It is also the meaning of knowledge
itself.62
What, then, can we take from these labyrinthine wanderings as we pursue a
greater understanding of the infrapolitics of mass digitization? Certainly, as
this section shows, the politics of mass digitization is entangled in
spatialized imaginaries that have a long and complex cultural and affective
trajectory interlinked with ontological and epistemological questions about
the very nature of knowledge. Cladding the walls of these trajectories are, of
course, the ever-present political questions of authority and territory, but
also deeper cultural and affective questions about the nature and meaning of
knowledge as it bandies about in our cultural imaginaries, between discoveries
and dead-ends, between freedom and control.
As the next section will show, one concept has in particular come to
encapsulate these concerns: the notion of serendipity. While the notion of
serendipity has a long history, it has gained new relevance with mass
di
nds hilariously at odds with the curiosity it must cater to:
> Reviewing the personas developed for the D6.2 Requirements for Europeana.eu8
deliverable—and in particular those of the “culture vultures”—one finds two
somewhat-opposed requirements. On the one hand, they need to be able to find
what they are looking for, and navigate through clear and well-structured
data. On the other hand, they also come to Europeana looking for
“inspiration”—that is to say, for something new and unexpected that points
them towards possibilities they had previously been unaware of; what, in the
formal literature of user experience and search design, is sometimes referred
to as “serendipity search.” Europeana’s users need the platform to be
structured and predictable—but not entirely so.76
To achieve serendipity, mass digitization projects have often sought to take
advantage of the labyrinthine infrastructures of digitization, relying not
only on their own virtual bookshelves, but also on the algorithmic highways
and back alleys of social media. Twitter, in particular, before it adopted
personalization methods, became a preferred infrastructure for mass
digitization projects, who took advantage of Twitter’s lack of personalized
search to create whimsical bots that injected randomness into the user’s feed.
One example was the Digital Public Library of America’s DPLA Bot, which grabs
a random noun and uses its API to share the first result it finds. The DPLA
Bot aims to “infuse what we all love about libraries—serendipitous
discovery—into the DPLA” and thus seeks to provide a “kind of ‘Surprise me!’
search function for DPLA.”77 It did not take the programmer Peter Meyr much
time to develop a similar bot for Europeana. In an interview with
EuropeanaPro, Peter
e projects have a Facebook page on which they showcase their
material, just as they take pains to make themselves “algorithmically
recognizable”89 to Google and other search engines in the hope of reaching an
audience beyond the echo chamber of archives and to distribute their archival
material on leisurely tidbit platforms such as Pinterest and Twitter.90 If
serendipity is increasingly thought of as a platform problem, the final
question we might pose is what kind of infrapolitics this platform economy
generates and how it affects mass digitization projects.
## The Infrapolitics of Platform Power
As the previous sections show, mass digitization projects rely upon spatial
metaphors to convey ideas about, and ideals of, cultural memory
infrastructures, their knowledge production, and their serendipitous
potential. Thus, for mass digitization projects, the ideal scenario is that
the labyrinthine errings of the user result in serendipitous finds that in
turn bring about new forms of cultural value. From the point of the user,
however, being caught up in the labyrinth might just as easily give rise to an
experience of being confronted with a sense of lack of oversight and
alienation in the alleyways of commodified infrastructures. These two
scenarios co-exist because of what Penelope Doob (as noted in the section on
labyrinthine imaginaries) refers to as the dual potentiality of the labyrinth,
which when experienced from within can be become a sign of confusion, and when
viewed from above becomes a sign of complex order.91
In this final section, I will turn to a new spatial metaphor, which appears to
have resolved this dual potentiality of the spatial perspective of mass
digitization projects: the platform. The platform has recently emerged as a
new buzzword in the digital economy, connoting simultaneously a perspective, a
business strategy, and a political ideology. Ideally the platform provides a
different perspective than the labyrinth, offering the user the possibility of
simultaneously constructing the labyrinth and viewing it from above. This
final section therefore explores how we might understand the infrapolitics of
the platform, and its role in the digital economy.
In its recent business strategy, Eu
frapolitical
role that platforms are given in mass digitization literature. Citing digital
historian Tim Sherratt’s claim that “portals are for visiting, platforms for
building on,”97 Europeana’s strategy argues that if cultural memory sites free
themselves and their content from the “prison of portals” in favor of more
openness and flexibility, this will in turn empower users to created their own
“pathways” through the digital cultural memory, instead of being forced to
follow predetermined “narrative journeys.”98 The business plan’s reliance on
Sherratt’s theory of platforms shows that although the platform has a
technical meaning in computation, Europeana’s discourse goes beyond mere
computational logic. It instead signifies an infrapolitics that carries with
it an assumption about the political dynamics of software, standing in for the
freedom to act in the labyrinthine infrastructures of digital collections.
Yet, what is a platform, and how might we understand its infrapolitics? As
Tarleton Gillespie points out, the oldest definition of platform is
architectural, as a level or near-level surface, often elevated.99 As such,
there is something inherently simple about platforms. As architect Sverre Fehn
notes, “the simplest form of architecture is to cultivate the surface of the
earth, to make a platform.”100 Fehn’s statement conceals a more fundamental
insight about platforms, however: in the establishment of a low horizontal
platform, one also establishes a social infrastructure. Platforms are thus not
only material constructions, they also harbor infrapolitical affordances. The
etymology of the notion of “platform” evidences this infrapolitical dimension.
Originally a spatial concept, the notion of platform appeared in
architectural, figurat
h this is thought to take place.
Despite its inclusion in the entrepreneurial discourse of Silicon Valley, the
notion of the platform is also used to signal an infrapolitics of
collaboration, even subversion. Olga Gurionova, for instance, explores the
subversive dynamics of critical artistic platforms,110 and Trebor Sholtz
promotes the term “platform cooperativism” to advance worker-based
cooperatives that would “design their own apps-based platforms, fostering
truly peer-to-peer ways of providing services and things, and speak truth to
the new platform capitalists.”111 Shadow libraries such as Monoskop appear as
perfect examples of such subversive platforms and evidence of Srnicek’s
reminder that not _all_ social interactions are co-opted into systems of
profit generation. 112 Yet, as the territorial, legal, and social
infrastructures of mass digitization become increasingly labyrinthine, it
takes a lot of critical consciousness to properly interpret and understand its
infrapolitics. Engage with the shadow library Library Genesis on Facebook, for
instance, and you submit to platform capitalism.
A significant trait of platform-based corporations such as Google and Facebook
is that they more often than not present themselves as apolitical, neutral,
and empowering tools of connectivity, passive until picked up by the user.
Yet, as Lisa Nakamura notes, “reading’s economies, cultures of sharing, and
circuits of travel have never been passive.”113 One of digital platforms’ most
important infrapolitical traits is their dependence on network effects and a
winner-takes-all logic, where the platform owner is not only conferred
enormous power vis-à-vis other less successful platforms but also vis-à-vis
the platform user.114 Within this game, the platform owner determines
cting a software platform, but also
entering into a parasitical game of relational network effects, where
different platforms challenge and use each other to gain more views and
activity. This gives successful platforms a great advantage in the digital
economy. They not only gain access to data, but they also control the rules of
how the data is to be managed and governed. Therefore, when a user is surfing
Google Books, Google—and not the library—collects the user’s search queries,
including results that appeared in searches and pages the user visited from
the search. The browser, moreover, tracks the user’s activity, including pages
the user has visited and when, user data, and possibly user login details with
auto-fill features, user IP address, Internet service provider, device
hardware details, operating system and browser version, cookies, and cached
data from websites. The labyrinthine infrastructure of the mass digitization
ecosystem also means that if you access one platform through another, your
data will be collected in different ways. Thus, if you visit Europeana through
Facebook, it will be Facebook that collects your data, including name and
profile; biographical information such as birthday, hometown, work history,
and interests; username and unique identifier; subscriptions, location,
device, activity date, time and time-zone, activities; and likes, check-ins,
and events.115 As more platforms emerge from which one can access mass
digitized archives, such as social media sites like Facebook, Google+,
Pinterest, and Twitter, as well as mobile devices such as Android, gaining an
overview of who collects one’s data and how becomes more nebulous.
Europeana’s reminder illustrates the assemblatic infrastructural set-up of
mass digitization projects and how they operate with multiple entry points,
each of which may attach its own infrapolitical dynamics. It also illustrates
the labyrinthine infrastructures of privacy settings, over which a mapping is
increasingly difficult to attain because of constant changes and
reconfigurations. It furthermore illustrates the changing legal order from the
relatively stable sovereign order of human rights obligations to the
modulating landscape of privacy policies.
How then might we characterize the infrapolitics of the spatial imaginaries of
mass digitization? As this chapter has sought to convey, writings about mass
digitization projects are shot through with spatialized metaphors, from the
flaneur to the labyrinth and the platform, either in literal terms or in the
imaginaries they draw on. While this section has analyzed these imaginaries in
a somewhat chronological fashion, with the interactivity of the platform
increasingly replacing the more passive gaze of the spectator, they coexist in
that larger complex of spatial digital thin
16. 37. Wolff 1985; Pollock 1998. 38. Wilson 1992; Nord 1995;
Nava and O’Shea 1996, 38–76. 39. Hartmann 1999. 40. Smalls 2003, 356. 41.
Ibid., 357. 42. Cadogan 2016. 43. Marian Ryan, “The Disabled flaneur,” _New
York Times_ , December 12, 2017,
Death of the Cyberflaneur,” _New York Times_ , February 4, 2012. 46. Eco 2014,
169. 47. See also Koevoets 2013. 48. In colloquial English, “labyrinth” is
generally synonymous with “maze,” but some people observe a distinction, using
maze to refer to a complex branching (multicursal) puzzle with choices of path
and direction, and using labyrinth for a single, non-branching (unicursal)
path, which leads to a center. This book, however, uses the concept of the
labyrinth to describe all labyrinthine infrastructures. 49. Doob 1994. 50.
Bloom 2009, xvii. 51. Might this be the labyrinthine logic detected by
Foucault, which unfolds only “within a hidden landscape,” revealing “nothing
that can be seen” and partaking in the “order of the enigma”; see Foucault
2004, 98. 52. Doob 1994, 97. Doob also finds this perspective in the
fourteenth century in Chaucer’s _House of Fame_ , in which the labyrinth
“becomes an emblem of the limitations of knowledge in this world, where all we
can finally do is meditate on _labor intus_ ” (ibid., 313). Lady Mary Wroth’s
work _Pamphilia to Amphilanthus_ provides the same imagery, telling the story
of the female heroine, Pamphilia, who fails to escape a maze but nevertheless
engages her experience within it as a source of knowledge. 53. Galloway 2013a,
29. 54. van Dijck 2012. 55. “Usage Stats for Europeana Collections,”
_EuropeanaPro,_
here,” _EuropeanaPro_ , April 6, 2016,
2003, 154. 59. Deleuze 2013, 56. 60. Interview with professor of library and
information science working with Europeana, Berlin, Germany, 2011. 61. Borges
mused upon the possible horrendous implications of such a lack, recounting two
labyrinthine scenarios he once imagined: “In the first, a man is supposed to
be making his way through the dusty and stony corridors, and he hears a
distant bellowing in the night. And then he makes out footprints in the sand
and he knows that they belong to the Minotaur, that the minotaur is after him,
and, in a sense, he, too, is after the minotaur. The Minotaur, of course,
wants to devour him, and since his only aim in life is to go on wandering and
wandering, he also longs for the moment. In the second sonnet, I had a still
more gruesome idea—the idea that there was no minotaur—that the man would go
on endlessly wandering. That may have been suggested by a phrase in one of
Chesterton’s Father Brown books. Chesterton said, ‘What a man is really afraid
of is a maze without a center.’ I suppose he was thinking of a godless
universe, but I was thinking of the labyrinth without a minotaur.
evidence that cosmopolitan dynamics are in
fact at work. Instead, new colonial and neoliberal platforms arise from a
complex infrastructural apparatus of private and public institutions and
become shaped by political, financial, and social struggles over
representation, control, and ownership of knowledge.
In summary, it is obvious that the scale of mass digitization, public and
private, licit and illicit, has transformed how we engage with texts, cultural
works, and cultural memory. People today have instant access to a wealth of
works that would previously have required large amounts of money, as well as
effort, to engage with. Most of us enjoy the new cultural freedoms we have
been given to roam the archives, collecting and exploring oddities along the
way, and making new connections between works that would previously have been
held separate by taxonomy, geography, and time in the labyrinthine material
and social infrastructures of cultural memory.
A special attraction of mass digitization no doubt lies in its unfathomable
scale and linked nature, and the fantasy and “spectacle of collecting.”8 The
new cultural environment allows the user to accelerate the pace of information
by accessing key works instantly as well as idly rambling in the exotic back
alleys of digitized culture. Mass digitized archives can be explored to
functional, hedonistic, and critical ends (sometimes all at the same time),
and can be used to exhume forgotten works, forgotten authors, and forgotten
topics. Within this paradigm, the user takes center stage—at least
discursively. Suddenly, a link made between a porn magazine and a Courbet
painting could well be a valued cultural connection instead of a frowned-upon
transgression in the halls of high culture. Users do not just download books;
they al
re brought
online, as well as artifacts that attest to the violent regimes of colonialism
and patriarchy, an attendant need has emerged for an ethics of care that goes
beyond simplistic calls for right to access, to instead attend to the
sensitivity of the digitized material and the ways in which we encounter these
materials.
Combined, these issues show that mass digitization is far from a
straightforward technical affair. Rather, the productive dimensions of mass
digitization emerge from the rubble of disruptive and turbulent political
processes that violently dislocate established frontiers and power dynamics
and give rise to new ones that are yet to be interpreted. Within these
turbulent processes, the familiar narratives of empowered users collecting and
connecting works and ideas in new and transgressive ways all too often leave
out the simultaneous and integrated story of how the labyrinthine
infrastructures of mass digitization also writes itself on the back of the
users, collecting them and their thoughts in the process, and subjecting them
to new economic logics and political regimes. As Lisa Nakamura reminds us, “by
availing ourselves of its networked virtual bookshelves to collect and display
our readerliness in a postprint age, we have become objects to be collected.”9
Thus, as we gather vintage images on Pinterest, collect books in Google Books,
and retweet sounds files from Europeana, we do best not only to question the
cultural logic and ethics of these actions but also to remember that as we
collect and connect, we are also ourselves collected and connected.
If the power of mass digitization happens at the level of infrastructure,
political resistance will have to take the form of infrastructural
intervention. We play a role in the formulation of the ethics of
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