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Textualize Our Role As Information Maintainers in the Stewardship of Born-Digital Media

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Textualize Our Role As Information Maintainers in the Stewardship of Born-Digital Media Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary Hi, everyone. Thank you all for having me and for taking the time to attend today’s plenary. First, I’d like to thank the Best Practices Exchange Program Committee for selecting me as this year’s plenary speaker and to Jessica Meyerson for nominating me. While there were many surprises and changes along the way, I’m delighted to get the chance to capture your attention today and speak about the work and research I’ve participated in I believe is critical to a better understanding of labor and the power of digital archives in our profession and our larger society. 1 Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary I was invited to BPE to speak about my participation in the Information Maintainers group and its impact on my work as a trained librarian that specializes in digital preservation and more specifically born-digital archives. The Information Maintainers refers to a community of people who support the maintenance of information and those who manage, maintain, and preserve information systems. This group was borne out of the work that co-directors Lee Vinsel, Andrew Russell, and Jessica Meyerson began with the Maintainer, a global research network interested in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the many forms of labor and expertise that sustain our world. These groups both aim to interrogate the ways we traditionally interact with technology through community-based engagement and to refocus this relationship on the structures and labor that enable our world to function day to day. My experiences participating in the Information Maintainers community and writing the highly collaborative white paper, “Information Maintenance as a Practice of Care”, have greatly impacted my understanding of our field’s relationship with information and the actions that enable its use. It’s no secret that libraries, archives, and museums struggle to steward the wealth of digital objects in our care and the information they impart. While solutions can be found in technological systems, platforms, and tools, more often than not our field continually encounters first the constraints of poor infrastructure–both organizational and technological– and insufficient labor practices on our way to these solutions. So what then is our responsibility 2 Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary as information maintainers to support the steward of information while also sustaining and empowering the people, practices, systems, and infrastructure that enable its use. Born-Digital Media in our Sociotechnical World As Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russel wrote in their Aeon essay, “Innovation is overvalued. Maintenance often matters,” refocusing our society’s relationship with technology away from innovation and novelty and instead on maintenance and repair allows us to interrogate the structures and practices that enable our sociotechnical world to keep running and the ethical implications of our interaction with technology. While I will be discussing what it takes to sustain born-digital archives programs of work within libraries, archives, and museums today, I’d like to use an anecdote to guide this discussion. Credit: Screenshot from lgira.mesmer.net This story emerged through the course of a recent software preservation grant I led at the University of Arizona to preserve born-digital video games stewarded by the Learning Games Initiative Research Archive. The project team stumbled across this story while perusing the Archive’s catalog to choose use cases for our grant project. One of the use cases we settled upon was the Charles Grey game hack collection, a collection of game hacks by Gray 3 Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary Games, a video game company specializing in hack and homebrew market games, “making extreme and advanced games for the Atari 2600 system that could have never been created or conceptualized back when the Atari 2600 was a current game system” (AtariCompendium.com). A game hack takes an existing game and modifies it in some way so that it differs from the original. The game at the center of the story I am beginning with today is an original game from which a Grey Games game hack was derived, the well-known, infamous Atari 2600 game, E.T.: the Extra Terrestrial. The purpose of this anecdote acting as our guide for todays’ discussion is manifold. Overall, it highlights the wide-reaching effects of our society’s prioritization of technological innovation over maintenance and in doing so helps contextualize our role as information maintainers in the stewardship of born-digital media. Credit: Top image from http://bikeacrossamerica.net/tour/14/lascruces-to-alamogordo.htm; Lower left image by CNET at https://www.cnet.com/news/found-ataris-e-t-games-dug-up-from-new-mexico-landfill/; Lower right image from lgira.mesmer.net: E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Atari, Inc. (Howard Scott Warshaw). Atari, Inc., 1982. Atari VCS/2600. In 1983 the videogame company Atari paid the City of Alamogordo, New Mexico to dispose of 800,000 unsold cartridge games in a city landfill. At the time the global videogame market was experiencing a recession due to overproduction and market saturation 4 Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary compounded a growing market for personal computers (Wiki). While some media outlets reported on Atari’s decision to dump hundreds of thousands of games in the desert, the burial largely went uncovered by the public and over the next thirty years became an urban legend, with the infamous Atari 2600 game, E.T.: the Extra Terrestrial at the center of it. Credit: Image 1: https://hiscoga.wordpress.com/video-game-crash-of-1983/; Image 2: http://thedoteaters.com/?attachment_id=2381 Over the years many critics have referred to E.T.: the Extra Terrestrial as one of the worst video games and one of the biggest commercial video game failures ever. Based on and developed in conjunction with the film of the same name, in 1982 Atari thought the game would achieve high-selling figures and with this thinking directed programmer Scott Warshaw to develop the game in just five weeks–compared to the usual six to nine months–so its release could coincide with the film’s. Confidence in sales and expensive licensing led Atari to overproduce game cartridges: while the game sold roughly 1.5 million cartridges and was met with initial commercial success, it achieved low-selling figures due to overproduction with anywhere from 2.5 to 3.5 million cartridges left unsold. The oversupply forced retailers to repeatedly lower the game’s price and millions of cartridges were returned to Atari as unsold merchandise or customer returns. The game’s commercial failure precipitated the video game 5 Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary company’s fall into debt, facing a $5 million loss from E.T.’s failure alone and became an exemplar of the large-scale global recession in the video game industry from 1983 to 1985. In 2014 a garbage contractor, Joseph Lewandowski–who was on site for the initial burial–bought the garbage company that dumped the games in 1983. Lewandowski was not particularly interested in games himself but was enamored with the urban legend and so led a treasure hunt for the games. While the actual dig and analysis of game content was conducted by a range of actors–from Lewandowski and game enthusiasts to gaming and entertainment companies, Fuel Entertainment and Xbox–the treasure hunt led to the discovery of over 1000 games and about 50 different titles, ranging from best sellers and fan favorites like Pac Man and killer application Star Raiders to the infamous E.T. the Extra Terrestrial. Credit: Image from https://archaeogaming.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/et8194-ebay.png. After the games were discovered, over 800 of them were sold through an eBay auction. Profits to the tune of $100,000 went back to various Alamogordo city departments and projects, as well as a historical society. And E.T. the Extra Terrestrial–a game so worthless at its initial release it precipitated a company’s demise–was sold for around $1500. While the city of Alamogordo received a small financial and social benefit from the sale of the landfill videogames, the community was already deemed a dumping ground for technological waste 6 Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary evidenced by the fact that Alamogordo served as the site for nuclear detonation in the Trinity Test of 1945. The story of the Alamogordo landfill and E.T.: the Extra Terrestrial exemplifies the conventional role born-digital media plays within our society and its impact on local and global communities . In doing so, this story also lays out the wide-ranging network of economic, social, and ethical imperatives or lack of that commonly guide the creation and stewardship of digital objects. In this anecdote we see how our sociotechnical world routinely disadvantages both communities and the environment that are the farthest from nexuses of power. As information maintainers, our role lies not only in supporting the maintenance of information and those who steward information systems, but in doing so to also interrogate the larger questions, structures, and consequences maintenance of this information poses. What rings clear in the story of the Alamogordo landfill is, first, the unmistakable fact that our sociotechnical world is driven by financial incentives by those among us with the means to create and steward. In this way, both the creation of digital media and its inherent properties are similarly guided by first by financial incentives, often in opposition of the ideals we espouse as information maintainers. Atari’s lack of regard for the impact disposing game waste would have on the environment and the people of Alamogordo underscores a widespread ignorance for ethical disposal of digital waste and the tendency for the most disadvantaged amongst us to be most negatively affected by our society’s interactions with technology.
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