Archiving is a form of activism

 

I ended up reading a news article yesterday about The KLF on Pitchfork.com that led me to this video from 2018, titled 'How to be a responsible music fan in the age of Spotify'. It's based on an article by musician Damon Krukowski (Galaxie 500).

Towards the end of the article he talked about small getsures... "The actions outlined here may seem very small in comparison to the power of a corporation like Spotify, whose upcoming IPO is expected to be valued at as much as $19 billion, much less that of the biggest tech company in the world, Apple.

... The small gestures we make directly to one another are real. And sharing is a beautiful gesture. It might be the most fundamental gesture behind all music.

So share your money deliberately when you spend it on music, and it will be a real gesture with a real effect. Share the context of your information online, and its content won’t be stripped from you..." 

 

There's a discussion in the video on how Spotify playlists strip out context, eg what musicians played on the song, who produced it, where was it recorded, and so on, information they note you can find on sites like Bandcamp and Discogs. 

As part of that discussion, they throw up this quote from historian, writer and activist Howard Zinn, which caught my attention: "Archiving is a form of activism." 

 

Okay who is Howard Zinn and what's he on about? Read his biography here. He was born in Brookyln in a working class, immigrant family, worked on the shipyards, enlisted in WWII and then went to college on the GI Bill.

 

Howard Zinn

"From 1956 to 1963, he taught at Spelman College [an all African American, all female school] in Atlanta, Georgia, where he became active in the Civil Rights Movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of political science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988." He passed away in 2010.

 

He wrote many books, most notably A People's History of the United States, published in 1980, which went on to sell over two million copies, and has been described as "changing the way we look at history of the United States." 

 

In recent years the book, often used in US schools, has come under attack from arch-conservatives trying to ban it from schools, and attracted the ire of President Trump in mid 2020, who  falsely slammed Zinn for writing propaganda tracts, at an event called the White House Conference on American History. No African American historians were there.

 So what was Zinn  on about with archiving being activism? I found this piece from 2010, quoting a speech Zinn gave back in 1970 to the Society of Amercian Archivists, decrying the traditional notion that archiving had to maintain neutrality.

"The whole notion, said Zinn, was a “fake,” a cop-out, a dangerously passive avoidance of the inherently political nature of the archival endeavor. Neutrality allowed the archivist to perpetuate the status quo, to reflect and reinforce society’s economic and political disparities, and to preserve the interests of the rich, powerful, literate, or otherwise privileged, at the expense of the less so.

Zinn: “The existence, preservation, and availability of archives, documents and records in our society are very much determined by the distribution of wealth and power. That is, the most powerful, the richest elements in society have the greatest capacity to find documents, preserve them, and decide what is or is not available to the public. This means that government, business, and the military are dominant.”

"Zinn challenged his audience to question their own unwitting acquiescence to entrenched power, to campaign against government secrecy, and to acknowledge and confront the societal biases that ignore the marginal, the poor, the non-literate, and even the ordinary; in essence, to embrace an activist rather than passive mindset.

"This generated a considerable amount of controversy at the time, but in the 40 years since, numerous writers and participants in archival discourse have invoked the word activist in calling for new approaches to a range of archival concepts and practices, including ownership, diversity, non-textual cultural heritage, information rights, community archives, the definition of the record, user participation, ethical codes, and the responsibilities of the archivist."