Digital Archives as Resisting Displacement

Abstract

Amid wider concern about the emergence of vast data archives that document and instrumentalize everyday user activities for the purpose of marketing, research, and governance, this article turns to a series of creative and activist initiatives that preserve heterodox internet histories. Though a focus on three case studies—artistic engagements with GeoCities, traces left by Indymedia in contemporary activism, and emerging ethical frameworks for reusing social media data—the article examines the political and ethical significance of attempts to archive specific instances of participatory online cultures before these cultures disappear. Drawing from and advancing Jodi Dean's conception of displaced mediators, or entities that set in motion the forces that ultimately displace them, the article argues that the significance of these digital archives is in their capacity to resist linear, commercial logics of displacement that attempt to narrow user agency. Instead, the article argues, creative and activist engagements with digital archives generate questions about whether the infrastructures that govern everyday online interactions could be otherwise, through showing how they formerly have been otherwise.