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The hostile takeover of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe totally destroyed a Library of Congress NRPB project I had been working on for about three years.
Covid also spelled the death knell for other precarious inter-institutional projects that took me years to get off the ground. I guess in these cases you put what you got done on the vita and move on. But damn. Our media archival situation is rolling downhill at lightning speed.
Something dramatic is going to have to happen to save our cultural record before it decays. Pretty sure we've past the point of no return for a good number of possible projects. The problem typically boils down to competition for funding + resistance to a collaborative mindset.
Do we collectively, truly care about discovering and revivifying forgotten and suppressed cultural memories and embodiments? I'm not so sure. Sounds good until people have to dig into the political economy of copyright law, material preservation, and cross-sector research.
I'll write some papers in the new year about what I'm thinking about as the "anthropology of archival preservation." It literally takes hundreds of thousands of dollars, coordination across three sectors, and a strong political mandate to do this work...that no one wants to do.
It's time to come to terms - we've willfully allowed local and alterity U.S. history to disappear before it got its due. Good work will still get done. It should have been more, and 2020 just made it a lot more difficult. We've lost valuable memory and it won't be recovered.
