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As an archivist, I’m excited about what disruptive innovations like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and artificial intelligence can have for archives. But I’m also worried. These developments pose existential threats to our field and, consequently, the survival of human history and culture.
I donate old movies for free. It started in 1999 when I was fascinated by the promise, excitement, and fairness of the gift economy. Not 30 seconds after we met, Brewster Kahle, the creator of the Internet Archive, asked me, “Do you want to upload your movie archives online for free?” Facing the new world of video digitization and sputtery streaming changed my life. The images in our archive allowed thousands, perhaps millions of artists, videographers, educators, and even children of the post-communist Polish village to mix history and bring the past to the present. I never knew how many people used our material or who they were, but wasn’t that the point?
In 1999 the future of our archives was to be consumed in order to enrich public memory with new evidence without problems. I wanted our archives to be as ubiquitous as the infrastructure, to go to every corner of the network, to spread everywhere, without the need for imputation or credit. I wanted our archives to disappear online.
I still do.
But the survival of the archives we know now is certain. Whether we know it or not, we all rely on the history and cultural heritage of the world of chronically underfunded public and private organizations that we trust and make available to all of us. Every time we see an old photo, listen to a historical recording, watch a news story, or find a document of family history, it is likely to be created in an archive. While we view and touch massive digital archives online, most archives are still collections of largely un Digitized physical media, such as film, video, music, photographs, and paper documents. Depending on the design, the archives are deliberate and thoughtful, with a timeline designed to preserve the culture “forever”. There are no shortage of weather interruptions to build on.
It was only a matter of time before the market invented a way to manufacture and sell digital handicaps, and the market for cultural objects has had a good time in the archival ecosystem. Artists, gamers, animators, athletes, and executives now sell authenticity that says NFT, the tokenized digital object, ensures the reverse traceability of blockchain transactions. The combination of Covid-19 isolation and cryptocurrency profits created a powerful incentive for positive digital collectors to compete for these NFTs, and some creators are working on Ethereum.
Professor of Law Tonya M. Evans optimistic suggests crypto art allows black artists and communities to avoid the porters of white art and “capture and appreciate the value of the culture they produce”. While today’s boom may be the success of the 1920s Florida landslide, NFTs are the first step toward a strong market for single or scarce digital objects. Many of these digital objects will not be created digitally; instead, they will be digitized copies of physical materials, and there could be a huge market. Who wouldn’t own a master digital copy of their favorite author’s magazine, a photograph of Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglass, or a newly recovered news story from the 1919 Black Sox scandal?
Nothing could be a greater cultural and ethical blow to archives than NFTs. The main one archive ethics in general, that all users are treated equally and that archival materials are not disclosed or sold to large bidders. When archives select storage materials, they often believe that they have an ethical duty to do so.
If an archive has a commercial business, it is very small: keychains and postcards. Since it is just as appropriate to tokenize archive collections as NFTs with the DNA of the archive, the possibility of exploiting digital materials by selling NFTs while maintaining physical materials is a great temptation. The archival world is a world of inadequate budgetary and financial constraints, with paid staff and massive resource-poor projects like digital preservation, and a challenging role to digitize analog materials. Will the archive be tempted by the potential rise of NFTs and believe in digital representations of their crown jewels (or the rights to those assets)? This would already worsen the bad situation, where organizations like our Library of Congress store physical copies of millions of movies, TV shows, and recordings because someone else has the copyright. Ideally, archives and museums should contain and monitor the physical and digital condition of their collections. This will not happen if they need to sell or allow NFTs to survive. And there is another risk: to unify NFTs a lot of energy (although we expect a cleaner process), climate change is a threat to future archive security. If researchers have find almost all archives will be affected by risk factors such as rising sea levels, rising temperatures or heavy rainfall.
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