On Record Collecting, or The First Time I Encountered the Death Drive

“In this age of lying and looting, the authority of the archive dissolves. The learned appreciation for the material world corrodes and the making of knowledge about it descends into barbarism. Truth becomes a matter of brute force—political, economic, computational and otherwise. In such a world collecting can be a defiant consideration of the relationship between words and things, between past and present; collecting as a way to collectively ask questions about those human relationships beyond the dictates of the algorithm and the oligarchs; collecting as a ceremonial performance against the acceleration of the same . . .”