𝔰𝔥𝔦𝔟𝔠𝔬Mar 11

In 2015 I was on a beach in Hawai'i helping build the prototype of what became Signal. I argued that the app needed pseudonyms because abusers know their victims' phone numbers. I lost the fight that day. History proved me right, and Signal would move to usernames under @Mer__edith's stewardship.

In this new essay, I trace the line from Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace through smart-home forensics, metadata killings, and Archive Team's non-consensual Tumblr scrape to ask: when did we decide that a jpeg is a photograph, that a profile is a person, that storage is memory?

The answer involves a boat off Honolulu, the early days of Signal, Iran's missiles over Amazon's Dubai AWS facilities, and the communities already building for a world where the server goes dark. This is an essay about infrastructure, memory, archiving without consent, and what we lose when we mistake the filesystem for memory.

It is also the angriest and most personal text I've ever written. I'm furious, and you should be too. We bet an entire civilisation on a brutal and unreliable stack. Now, fate has come to collect that wager.

California has a lot to fucking answer for.

https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/who-will-remember-us-when-the-servers-go-dark/

Show threadPetra van Cronenburg

@shibacomputer I almost didn't read the text because I thought it was about Signal only.

Fortunately, I clicked on it anyway and am impressed. What a great essay on so many levels (including the literary one)! This interweaving of body, landscape, ideologies and virtual spaces says so much between the lines.
I read this text as someone who works with cultural heritage: in museums, in living traditions and storytelling. I remember when the Taliban destroyed the giant Buddhas and there was a rush

Mar 12 at 11:23amWeb
Show threadPetra van CronenburgMar 12

@shibacomputer to digitise everything. As if we could preserve our cultural heritage forever in the cloud, safe from threats.
And now comes the next thread, AI hallucinations, datacenters (and wars).

"Violence, then rebuild; profit, then philanthropy – repeat!" This is so much the USA acting at the moment.

Thank you so much for this brillant essay, these inspiring thoughts, I'll read it several times!