Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen’s The Library: A Fragile History Citation: The Library: A Fragile History (Andrew Pettegree & Arthur der Weduwen, 2021) opens with the anecdote of a 16th-century Dutch scholar arriving to his appointment at the Holy Roman Emperor’s library to find it in a state of utter neglect and destitution. The printing press had only been around a century, but in that short time, the greatest enemy of archives—neglect—had already struck. We can fret about all manner of dramatic disasters. Global thermonuclear war, asteroid impacts, caldera volcanoes, x-risks, Skynet, cultural revolutions, second comings, alien invasions, Malthusian crises, birthrate collapses, pandemics, solar flares, and Local Group supernovae. We can try to engineer around every variety of society-threatening catastrophe, the seas boiling and the ground rumbling and the cities burning. We can imagine how decentralization could provide security against destructive scenarios, how it would protect an archive in case of invasion, fire, bombing, and cyberattack. But none of those are what primarily kills archives. Boring human neglect kills archives.
The most pressing question for decentralized storage services is: Can they inspire care?
