Powerful players can make big decisions about our data, and we have an obligation to stay informed.
 | By Parker Richards Staff Editor |
Last year, HBO Max — now just "Max" — began removing TV shows and movies from its streaming platform. Of course, streaming services remove content all the time. The difference with the Max removals was that many of the targeted shows were so-called "Max Originals." They were only released digitally. No physical copies were ever released, or possibly even made. |
Over the coming months, as more films and shows came offline, it became clear that in many cases, even the artists who had worked on the media could not access their creations. There was nowhere to buy a digital or physical copy. Owen Dennis, the creator of the show "Infinity Train," told me in an email that the only copies he has of his own show "are from files I pirated online." |
I don't think many people saw Max's memory-holing of its own shows — which it had done largely to avoid paying artists residuals for programs that were not widely viewed — and the National Library of Australia's funding crisis as linked, but to me they seemed to be a pair: stories about how, thanks to the vicissitudes of political expediency or corporate greed, the public could instantaneously lose access to massive quantities of information. |
There was also, frankly, more to it. Digital archives and "big data" are a critical aspect of our everyday lives in the 21st century, even when we're not fully aware of it. Politicians erase their texts, preventing proper oversight. Tech businesses turn users' data into assets to be exploited. Files simply go missing, accidentally wiped or misplaced. |
By the time we'd sent drafts back and forth and published her essay, Max was barely mentioned and the Trove archive wasn't referenced at all. The story of data loss and data management was so vast, and its implications so broad, that what had initially inspired me to reach out to Thylstrup became a footnote on a much larger project. |
A show being removed from a streaming platform is no more a latter-day Library of Alexandria conflagration than a cellphone's photos being accidentally wiped, but taken together, the state of data loss in the digital age is bleak: unaccountable corporate and political leaders (in addition to mere error) govern much of our collective memory — and there is little agreement on what a better system might look like. |
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