As online access to information becomes increasingly restricted, even the noblest feats of preservation and archiving are being hijacked
Bad Bunny’s latest album Debí Tirar Más Fotos (2025) bears a mournful title that translates as ‘I Should Have Taken More Pictures’. For this, his sixth studio album, the global Puerto-Rican superstar used his usual format – that is, the drunk and lovesick party anthem – as a means of feeling his way through the erasures of colonisation and the melancholies of diaspora under both Spanish and subsequent US rule. In its musical production and marketing, the album reaches into Puerto Rico’s cultural-historical archives as Bad Bunny dreams of a hoard of images to flip through and revisit in his old age in a reflection on the desire to remember and the fear of forgetting. That desire has proven contagious: the album’s title track soon became a TikTok trend in which users posted slideshows of their grandparents, their families’ homelands and their loved ones. The trend was also picked up by people in the Palestinian diaspora, who have shared photos from their lives in Gaza before the recent war’s escalation; Bad Bunny himself posted a video last month shedding a tear to the song in acknowledgement of the responses from fans.
To mourn a lack of documentation or a scarcity of information is always to mourn something else. To collect images, take photos, save files, maintain hard drives, keep notebooks and build archives, is always an effort to preserve a sum that is greater than its parts. Recently, I have encountered a rise in online activity that explicitly caters to the digital media collector in me. Some of the archive fodder I’ve come across on my feed this past month includes pirated books and films on current cinematic release, all easily searchable on X (formerly Twitter), which for legal reasons I must insist on not having touched. I’ve also encountered websites that upload streamable versions of everything from rare cult films to African cinema, and a publicly-accessible archive of over 500 films ‘from and about Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for liberation’. Newsletters and databases are homing in on the online public domain as an underused resource for everything from movies to copyright-free images. The writer, artist and curator Aria Dean opened her January newsletter with the line: ‘I am newly addicted to downloading art books on Anna’s Archive,’ a shadow library (an online library of pirated books), formed in the wake of the Z-Library shutdown.
For some, maintaining an archive takes place online as part of a community by (both legally and illegally) uploading and circulating information (whether that is books, films, documents or databases), and curating and adding to new digital libraries. For others, the goal is to download, wresting as much as you can from the clutches of cloud storage and social media. New backslides in content moderation across major social networks might explain a potential uptick in criminal activity now, but the twinned activities of uploading and downloading are also reacting to our increasingly unstable, unusable and unreliable knowledge infrastructures. The average person’s access to information is increasingly restricted by both the law and the market. Books are being banned and libraries (both physical and online) are being defunded. To ‘buy’ a movie through Amazon or a song through Apple Music is less like purchasing a DVD or CD and more like paying a flat fee for the open-ended rental of a very narrow kind of temporary streaming access. Media companies don’t care to spend the money it takes to maintain even their own archives: Publications like i-D and MTV yank their respective archives from the internet in order to save money, wiping away decades of culture and music journalism from the public’s reach. The TikTok ban earlier this year starkly reminded American users, once again, that it can all be taken away at a moment’s notice: you do not own what you create and post.
It’s ironic to watch the internet take on a dual role of serving as an important site for the preservation of media artefacts that would otherwise be lost, and being itself in dire need of rescue from the whims of corporations that can wipe away entire digital archives and libraries on a whim. The internet is where many choose to extend the lifespan of our cultural memory by excavating and recirculating what might be at risk of being lost offline. Yet it is clear that the internet is also in a process of losing its archival utility. The case of the Internet Archive made sure of it: major book publishers did not have the proof to support their claim that digital libraries were bad for business, but the courts agreed anyway. And just like that, over half a million books were ripped out of the archive’s online lending library.
The internet is being restructured by multinational technology conglomerates to open up its users’ private exchanges, personal information and media consumption into raw data primed for third-party exploitation. If the internet is built in the image of the Library of Alexandria, we are now the books, legible and randomly accessible to the highest bidder. And while access to free and legal information becomes increasingly paywalled or outlawed, even the noblest feats of preservation and archiving are being hijacked. Last month, ArsTechnica reported that newly unsealed emails from Meta confirm the company torrents ‘at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and LibGen’, illegally training its AI models on pirated books. While Meta has yet to face any legal consequences for their actions, ‘vastly smaller acts of data piracy – just .008 percent of the amount of copyrighted works Meta pirated – have resulted in judges referring the conduct to the US Attorneys’ office for criminal investigation.’
In an e-flux journal essay published in November 2023, writer and artist Bami Oke shares a story of what we might call ‘archive anxiety’. Oke identifies a common instinct among those close to her to hoard concurrent audio recordings, screenshots and links. This includes her mother, whose ‘internet browser regularly crashes because of the fifty-three tabs she keeps open at all times’. Oke asks: ‘What fuels the desire to keep computer files we will probably never look at again? What do we stand to gain by holding on to every last shred of our personal data?’ Oke traces this impulse to a widespread ability to produce information and do little else with it. We do not own what we do or make online. And in order to preserve it, you need a hefty wad of cash and specialised knowledge to pour into the ongoing maintenance of any kind of offline storage of a digital life.
‘Individual hoards inevitably fail to redistribute corporate wealth,’ writes Oke, ‘and corporate hoards are dependent on labor extracted from us in our “free time”.’ Ironically, everything we do online is optimised to produce information that in turn is saved and preserved, only in places and formats far beyond our reach. As externalised as so many of our efforts to document, preserve, collect and archive can be, they all point to an internal need to keep our information close – or at least, produce the illusion of proximity and power.
It surely will not be long before start-ups and for-profit services begin mining the gold of our archive anxiety. Effective archiving currently requires more time, knowledge and resources than the average person is willing to spend. It takes coordination, resources, time and know-how to make things last, often tedious work we’d often rather not do: not only creating and keeping but sorting notebooks, journals, books, magazines, articles, webpages, social media profiles, user reviews, CDs and LPs, photographs, letters and emails. It requires learning about bit rot and link rot; thinking about how to best format our files so they are less likely to corrupt with time. This is the work of divesting from the long arm of the internet, of resisting commodification and building something new, and putting the archive anxiety to good use.
Michelle Santiago Cortés is a writer and critic based in Puerto Rico
