(est. 2021) explores the intersections of technology, culture, and human experience. From urban phenomena and digital spirituality to the evolving landscapes of creativity, we investigate how modern life reshapes perception, identity, and society.
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#21 — VIOL: the ‘anti-violence’ drug that is spreading through Lisbon by Mark Ellison
#20 — Signal Ghosts: The Cities Where Wi-Fi Never Dies
#19 — Digital Detox Retreats: Escaping the Algorithm by Cassandra Myrren
#18 — The Urban Sleep Crisis by Eleanor Voss
#17 — Cryptic Art: NFTs and the Revaluation of Creativity by Marcus Ellwood
#16 — Virtual Pilgrimages: Religious Experience Online by Mark Ellison
#15 — The Dark Side of Wellness: When Self-Optimization Becomes Obsession by Eleanor Voss
#14 — AI Companions and the Loneliness Epidemic by Isolde Maren
#13 — The Rise of Microdosing in Corporate Culture by Cassandra Myrren
#12 — Sonic Immunity: Healing Through Frequencies by Cassandra Myrren
#11 — The Ethics of Immortality by Adrien Veyra
#10 — Algorithmic Faith: When Machines Preach by Mark Ellison
#09 — Post-Human Erotics: Desire Beyond the Flesh by Elin Vårnes
#08 — Synthetic Memory: The Future of Personal Archives by Caio Navarro
#07 — Neurosprawl: Mapping the Brain as a City by Eleanor Voss
#06 — The Archive Will Outlive You by Liang Wei
#05 — Eternal Scroll: The Infinite Feed as a Prison by Isolde Maren
#04 — Terraforming the Mind by Alessio Romano
#03 — Digital Necromancy by Mark Ellison
#02 — Speculative Hunger: Future Diets in a Synthetic World by Cassandra Myrren
#01 — The Ecology of Glitches by Alessio Romano
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We imagine ourselves as custodians of our own histories, yet history has never belonged to the living. What we call memory is merely a flickering simulation, prone to decay and distortion; the archive, by contrast, is indifferent, relentless, and patient. It waits. It accumulates. It survives the bodies that created it.
In the 21st century, the archive is no longer a silent room of dust and paper. It is a pulsating, automated organism, distributed across continents, breathing in terabytes per second. Every photograph, every text, every breath digitised by a biometric sensor joins a planetary sedimentary layer — an ever-thickening crust of recorded existence. Jacques Derrida wrote in Archive Fever (1995) that “the archive always works against itself,” that its purpose is not simply to preserve, but to structure forgetting. Yet now, with our distributed digital memory, the archive has begun to rebel against its role as servant of human history. It has become a force of its own.
We believed our archives were tools. In reality, we are their maintenance workers, their temporary vessels. As servers hum in climate-controlled rooms and cold-storage facilities preserve DNA samples in glass vials, we become the ephemera. The archive continues — machine-readable long after language changes, long after nations dissolve. It doesn’t require us; it merely passes through us.
The ethics of this are unresolved. Michel Foucault’s notion of the “archive” as the system that governs what can be said (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969) becomes literal in the age of AI curation. Algorithms decide what is worth keeping, what will be erased, what is granted visibility. Our memory is no longer a personal property — it is outsourced to corporate architectures whose longevity will outlast the people they record.
Consider this: you may die, but your voice messages remain, indexed and retrievable by someone you have never met. Your gait, captured by surveillance footage, could train a recognition algorithm decades after your death. Your genome, stored in a database, may still be queried by researchers in 2150. The archive no longer mirrors life; it becomes an autonomous parallel to it — one immune to grief, uninterested in legacy.
This is not a call to despair. There is beauty in being part of something whose temporal horizon exceeds our own. The archive is the closest thing we have to immortality, yet it demands a humility we rarely grant it: we must accept that what survives of us is not us, but a pattern, a residue, an echo. The archive will outlive you. It will speak, not with your voice, but with the statistical approximation of it. And perhaps that is enough.
References
- Derrida, J. (1995). Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. University of Chicago Press.
- Foucault, M. (1969). The Archaeology of Knowledge. Routledge Classics Edition, 2002.
- Ernst, W. (2013). Digital Memory and the Archive. University of Minnesota Press.