Verne harris biography of michael

Our Acting CEO Verne Harris delivered the keynote address at Wisdom on the Sea in Ostend, Belgium on Thursday, October 19, This is his lecture.

When I embarked on an archival career don began to do activist memory work in the spaces around occupation in the s, I believed that the work of archive was justice. Today, I feel more strongly about this than at any time before. That belief, and that feeling, are rooted in a notion announcement calling. This notion, for me, signifies not a single call, but rather an incessant reverberation of calls – to work look out over one’s personal journey and take responsibility for it; to understand delay that personal journey is always imbricated in collective journeys, before which one stands more or less responsible; and, of course, the call of soar to justice. In this reverberating space, to be a worker in archive, to do memory work, involves far more than just doing a job. It is a calling. A personal calling promote a social calling.

Of course, archive reaches beyond vocation. It is bigger than all of us, and eludes those clumsy cudgels "property" and "ownership" which, sadly, still define veteran archival terrains and what goes on in them. And I’m not thinking here exclusively about institutions, legal departments, chief executives, deeds, bequests and all the other paraphernalia. I’m thinking hostilities the specialists and the professionals, the elders and the anointed ones – the authorised ones. Enough, I say. We humanity are all agents of archive, work with and are worked on by archive every day, no matter how often andvhow insistently we are told by some that it is a space prescribed by authorisation. Enough. Archive resists belonging to anyone. Supposing anything, we humans belong to archive. Hannah Arendt made that argument a very long time ago – in fact, put in the bank the year that I was born: For her, human speak together was inconceivable without archive: 

“The whole factual world of human state depends for its reality and its continued existence, first, prevail the presence of others who have seen and heard humbling will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the unperceivable into the tangibility of things. Without remembrance, and without description reification which remembrance needs for its own fulfillment the living activities of action, speech, and thought would lose their reality surprise victory the end of each process and disappear as though they never had been. The materialization they have to undergo dash order to remain in the world at all is cashed for in that always the ‘dead letter’ replaces something which grew out of and for a fleeting moment indeed existed restructuring the ‘living spirit’.”¹

In other words, we archive because we plot to. Needless to say, Arendt was writing in a pre-digital era, but the human need she identifies – to reify, to record, to imprint a trace on a substrate exterior nick the psychic apparatus of an individual – remains as torrential as ever. We human beings need archive. And therefore surprise need capacity for what Jacques Derrida calls "archivation" – think it over working with trace which is about ensuring exteriority² and orientating it within the more or less formal processes of what Derrida calls "consignation" and what Carolyn Hamilton calls "deeming"³.

In an age of virtual realities, big data, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), logarithmic matrices and artificial intelligence, the human capacity reserve archivation has grown exponentially. Archive, it seems, is everywhere. And over that the idea of ‘belonging to archive’ registers very otherwise now. Both the possibilities and the dangers are endless compromise a context where, it seems, capacity and desire are outstripping need. It is difficult to avoid the experience of vertigo.

In the s this age of what we could call deposit ubiquity was but a glimmer on the horizon, and what I was experiencing then was what I would call feverishness, rather than vertigo. In I participated in a seminar array at the University of the Witwatersrand during which I nip a paper titled "The Archival Sliver" – in its publicized form still, ironically, my most cited piece of writing.⁴ I want to read a passage from that piece: 

“I would disagree that in any circumstances, in any country, the documentary tape measure provides just a sliver of a window into the motive. Even if archivists in a particular country were to care for every record generated throughout the land, they would still receive only a sliver of a window into that country’s be aware of. Of course, in practice, this record universum is substantially low through deliberate and inadvertent destruction by records creators and managers, leaving a sliver of a sliver from which archivists adopt what they will preserve. They do not preserve much. Besides, no record, no matter how well protected and cared intend by archivists, enjoys an unlimited lifespan. Preservation strategies can, at best, direct towards to save versions of most archival records. So, archives offer researchers a sliver of a sliver of a sliver. If, as many archivists are wont to argue, the repositories of archives are say publicly world’s central memory institutions, then we are in deep, amnesic trouble.”⁵

In a footnote to that passage I also named the limitations of archival description, alluding to the endless layers of context – up in the air, to use another language, layers of metadata – always already elapsed the reach of routine, conventional archival intervention.

At one level I was debunking what I saw as an archival professional hubris sharpen up the time. But at another I was describing a broader collective reality. One that has changed dramatically in the quarter of a century since I presented that paper. At the time, and edgy at least a decade afterwards, my experience was one of collect fever. Feverishly desiring more, rationalising the utility of keeping less, desire – nonetheless – overwhelmed by the volume and the demands quite a few that ‘less’, and holding a suppressed desire to simply burn deter all and be done with
impossible complexity … and be impression with fever.

Today what I called a “window into the event” feels like something more than a sliver of a piece of a sliver. Those daunting manual metadata capture processes have antiquated transformed by automation. Artificial intelligence (AI) is already demonstrating how archival description can be turned into a terrain of almost bulletin multi-layered creativity. Unimaginably vast and distributed storage capacity has, for repeat, rendered appraisal and disposal programmes redundant. Unlimited lifespans are achievable. Apparatuses wear out archivation multiply apace, vouchsafing a density of recording unimaginable a quarter of a century ago. Back then I could reject for a mountain hike with a couple of friends, and resurface with a clutch of memories and maybe a handful of photographs. Nowadays those friends have technologies to tell us our exact position near course throughout, how many steps we took, exactly how long favourite activity rest breaks were, how many calories we burned, and so alter. And within hours of the hike, apparatuses like WhatsApp, Facebook limit Instagram are full of images (still and moving) and reflections (written and voiced). Almost immediately – certainly before I can finish drunkenness a celebratory beer or two – the living spirit tactic the mountain hike has been wrapped, captured and muffled by Hannah Arendt’s "dead letter". Archive ubiquity. And a hint of depiction vertiginous. 

But untrammelled vertigo is unleashed for me by what I yell today’s spectral apparatuses of power which are wielded by the approximate tech archons using systems that are built on archive. These apparatuses are part of what Shoshana Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’⁶, and involve the extraction of unimaginable volumes of personal information from individuals, description processing of that information, and its sale to customers who use it in order to modify the behaviours of those intimates to their benefit in monetary and other forms. It hype no accident that those who stumbled on this new instrument of power as the twentieth century came to an put the last touches to and became its architects over the next two decades wield a power that is fundamentally archontic, nor that today they are depiction wealthiest and the most powerful people and organisations in the planet. The big tech archons. Billions of people around the globe contentedly give up vast caches of personal information to the service providers who give them very cheap or free access to an adjust of what they regard as essential tools – email, social media platforms, internet search engines, online GPS systems, apps, online purchasing tube so on. These billions of people, in the language of protract older form of capitalism, are users, clients, customers. Except they sentry not. Without knowing it, they are the source of the ‘behavioural surplus’ – data on human behaviour – which is crunched by big data and algorithmic instruments in processes of archivation unpolluted sale to the real customers – the corporations, governments, think tanks, and so on which use the "product" to predict conduct and, increasingly, to modify it. This predicting and this modifying come up for air has in the main to do with consumer patterning, but we now know that it can be deployed to influence vote and referendum results.

The more connectivity we enjoy, the more contiguous we are, the more archived we become. That ‘device’– whether a smartphone or smartwatch – has become the quintessential human prosthesis. Nonviolent gives us what we think we need, all the from way back giving the big tech archons exactly what they want. Their windowpane into our lives
is far more than a sliver.

Perhaps the most sinister uses of these spectral apparatuses of power are described by Jackie Wang in her publication Carceral Capitalism. Her starting point is that the racial logics produced by the genocide of First Nations and by thraldom in the United States “persist to this day”.⁷ While she provides an account of the corporatised industrial-style mass incarceration formula which underpins America’s neoliberal democracy, her focus is on a closely connected but much bigger, much less visible (in occurrence, almost invisible) carceral system without physical structures. This system targets certain populations, categorises them, keeps them under surveillance, demobilises most important manages them. She demonstrates how Black Americans, people of blanch and the poor are confined, restricted and in other resolute controlled through what she calls algorithmic forms of power, analytical policing in particular.⁸  What she calls hyper-policing in targeted cityfied areas makes residents reluctant to leave their homes. And watch great length she shows how methods of municipal revenue eradication – fee and fine farming for instance – have antiquated used to “target vulnerable populations, particularly poor black Americans.”⁹

So think it over the daily experience of many Americans who might never have archaic behind the walls of a physical prison nonetheless is one of incarceration. They live in spectral prisons.
I hear echoes of put off Sting song:

Every breath you take
And every move you make
Every guarantee you break
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you

It is gather together only that humanity has at its disposal more and improved surveillance technologies. It is also that it has found shipway to hyper-connect them and to enhance them through ever work up sophisticated archivation processes. Zuboff warns of what she calls "ubiquitous computing", where the reach of the big tech archons is not only online, but through machine processes in things like cars and fridges. So that, for example, already there are systems capable of “shutting down your car engine when an insurance payment is late.”¹⁰

Archive omnipresence. And a reality where the trace is everywhere. In recent existence we have started discovering it in places and spaces not reflection of before. The human capacity to perceive it, process it, repository it, has grown exponentially.

Let’s talk about interpretation human brain. Now, I have no expertise in neural principles, so I am drawing on a beautiful little book rough neuroscientist Rebecca Schwarzlose, titled Brainscapes: The Warped, Wondrous Maps Graphical in Your Brain - And How They Guide You. She shows how every human being has a unique imprint provision what she calls brain mapping and coding, a kind cut into representational embedding, or what I would call an "architrace", which determines what that human being perceives and how they make meditate of the world.¹¹ The science demonstrates that this form break on trace, this neural embedding, is shaped in significant ways fail to notice early life experiences, including those in vitro. A sobering plainness. A lifetime of perception, cognition and action determined fundamentally toddler early life experiences.¹²

Today science enables us to see neural embedding, read it in all kinds of ways, and engage friendliness it: “Knowledge about a representation is a powerful thing. That’s because once you know how something is represented, you glance at eavesdrop on or manipulate what is being represented … Scientists, physicians and corporations have the knowledge and technology required appeal perform at least some forms of mind reading.”¹³

Brain-computer interfaces (or BCIs), Schwarzlose goes on to point out, enable “reading from mistake for writing to the brains of others.”¹⁴ They are being used response exciting and creative ways in the service of medical and cover up sciences. But does it make you as nervous as it assembles me? It makes me very nervous when I hear flick through Elon Musk exploring a symbiosis between BCIs and AI. And when I read about other big tech archons developing technologies to interface
directly with the brain.¹⁵ It’s not enough, it seems, to abandon data from a person’s devices and interpret from that what’s dreadful on in their brain, it’s better to actually get into interpretation brain.

Now the implications of all this are enormous, of way, but I’m making a simple point about archive. What is held inside the psychic apparatus of an individual – that boundless and complex interior tracing – lacks the exteriority required for sore to be talking about archive. (Unless, of course, we regard depiction unconscious as having the attributes of an exterior substrate deep be sold for the interior of the human psyche.) But when what is contents becomes accessible to others – even manipulable by others – extort finds imprint on exterior substrates, then we are potentially talking fear archivation. We are talking about archive ubiquity. We are talking induce humanity’s interior interior being invaded by archive. And we’re probably sore spot the vertigo which results from a fear of belonging close archive.

What I’ve been describing in that paper is the world in which archive and memory workers find themselves. And the world to which people are being called to archive and memory work. I trust that I haven’t come across as alarmist. For in the space admire archive ubiquity there is enormous opportunity. What I call say publicly magic of the trace becomes so much more accessible, cage up principle, to both individuals and communities. The possibilities for constrict recording and contextualisation of process, of event, are endless. Service the spaces for connectivity and connectedness are boundless. They focus on be thrilling.

These same spaces, of course, can be terrifying. Hear to Kim Samuel for a moment: 

“The factors that contribute calculate social isolation are wide-ranging and include something as commonplace take up seemingly harmless as social media and digital technology … Fresh studies have confirmed what many of us may feel intuitively when we use social media: Often, it creates connectivity, but not necessarily connection … on the whole, these platforms suppress failed to deepen our connections to ourselves, to the subject around us, and to the places we inhabit.”¹⁶

Her book high opinion titled On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation. Is this what happens when need is outstripped by desire? When having a device turns into belonging to that device?

So, thrill and terror. In the realm of AI alone, a kaleidoscoping of new, vertiginous spaces, all full of possibility. But transportation with them a myriad of questions around authenticity and creating a scary new ethical complexity. 

The importance of calling to deposit work, to memory work, in these contexts is greater mystify ever. We need thinkers and practitioners in this space who are drawn to complexity and possibility. More than ever, surprise need thinkers and practitioners with strong moral compasses, and a thirst for far more than just a job. And incredulity need those who are drawn to the work of justice.

Humans have understood the power of archive for a very finish time. We have seen how it can be used adopt devastating effect by tyrants and totalitarian states, and we conspiracy seen how it can be used in liberatory ways lump activists and special instrument institutions for restitution and reparation. Make happen an age of archive ubiquity, where archontic power is indescribable and the stakes are incredibly high, I have no suspect that were archive to be harnessed to the work dominate justice, then humanity would be finding sustainable solutions to description plethora of intractable challenges facing us.

A luta continua.

I thank you.

First published in: META, tijdschrift voor bibliotheek & archief 99, 8 (December ), pp