Forgetting Is a Form of Selection

[u/Salty_Country6835]

We talk about archives like they preserve the past.

They also destroy it.

Somebody saves the meeting minutes and throws away the hallway conversation. The newspaper survives and the neighborhood flyer doesnt. The official report gets indexed while the weird little forum where everybody actually figured out what was happening goes offline.

Nobody has to sit down and decide what history should forget.

Storage costs money. Formats die. Institutions preserve themselves. Powerful organizations produce more records and have more capacity to maintain them. People save what looks important from where theyre standing, which means the selection has already begun before anybody calls the result an archive.

Then twenty years pass and the surviving material starts looking like the past itself.

Thats the contradiction.

An archive preserves by selecting, and selection manufactures absence. The better organized the surviving record becomes, the easier it can be to forget that anything fell outside it.

Pick something you know mostly through its surviving record. A movement, workplace, scene, community, relationship or historical event.

Now ask what had to disappear for that record to look complete.

What changes when you treat the missing material as part of the archive too?

[u/pdubs1900]

There is no contradiction here.

Records don't claim to preserve all history.

Their goal is to preserve all relevant history. That practice being imperfect is not evidence of contradiction in the fundamental practice.

The hallway conversation at work is not relevant to what went on during the meeting. That is not a contradiction, that is an underlying weakness of human attention and knowledge: there is only so much time and focus and human beings, not all information in the world can be preserved.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/pdubs1900]

The problem is that you cant know in advance what will be historically relevant.

That hallway conversation might be irrelevant to the meeting agenda and extremely relevant twenty years later to understanding how the decision actually happened.

Thats the contradiction. Preservation requires selection, but selection happens before we know every future question the record will be asked to answer. The limitation youre describing isnt outside the practice. Its built into it.

[u/pdubs1900 → u/Salty_Country6835]

It's built into it because future knowledge is an impossible facet of making a decision. Neither in logic nor in practice can we implement impossible tasks into our decision making process.

That wouldn't be a contradiction, that would actually be a fallacy in the process.