On Are.na and Archival Anxieties
On Are.na and Archival Anxieties
Firuza Huseynova
Bibliography:
Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz, University of Chicago Press.
I am a very loyal user of Are.na, a creative research platform for connecting ideas and archiving the digital ephemera one comes across while web-surfing. I say this with zero brand deal in sight, but when I first came across the site whilst stalking a friend’s online presence, I found myself so drawn that I near-instantaneously began paying the monthly subscription to access premium features. As someone who refuses to pay for streaming services and torrents everything, this was an astounding occurrence. It’s hard to explain, but there was something calling me to Are.na. Maybe it was the non-algorithmic chronological explore feed which appears the same for every user, no matter their location. Maybe it was the lo-fi UX with an emphasis on functionality over frivolity. Maybe it was the fact that I needed an outlet to document my short-form thoughts ever since I stopped using Twitter after Elon transformed it into a casino-cum-AI slop farm. Whatever the reason, I was eternally grateful to have found a new digital platform to archive my web.
The first few hours I spent navigating Are.na were—and I do not use this word lightly—dope. I started my first channel (an organizational hub for content) to house information related to cyberfeminism, logging everything from Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index to Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. From then, I created ‘ironic detachment’, a channel to store absurd, (post)ironic, and existential memes brimming with digital unease. My third channel, ‘silly web design’, quickly became filled with URLs of accidentally or intentionally clunky, outdated, and silly websites embracing a web 1.0 feel. To date, this remains my most-followed channel, with 43 followers.
43 people may not seem like a ton to those accustomed to the sheer scale of platforms like Instagram and TikTok, but I hold each one dear in my heart. While traditional social media platforms boast their ability to propel users into viral fame via the ever-increasing accumulation of quantitative metrics, Are.na forgoes a focus on scale for a slower, more meaningful existence. As a medium, Are.na does not give users the ability to ‘like’ blocks or directly message other users, and their comment function is quite basic. This choice in user experience makes browsing Are.na feel more like walking through a garden than a shopping mall.
However, after a few days of heavy Are.na usage, I noticed an anxiety brewing inside of me. Here I was: archiving links and images, uploading my thoughts, and organizing my digital brain, on a social platform I knew nothing about. What’s to stop them from bestowing my data to third-party collectors? Or selling ad space to an online casino for kids? Or getting bought out by a private equity firm who, within days, fires half the team and raises my subscription fee to $200/month without warning? This feeling was so overwhelming that, within the first week of heavy Are.na usage, I uploaded a block (a piece of user-added content in any format, including text, URL, MP3, or PDF) which read:
the perils of finding a new little website you really like and then searching up whether or not it’s independently owned to determine if it'll be shut down any time soon
These concerns do not come out of nowhere.
In Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, the deconstructionist philosopher traces the word ‘archive’ through its Greek, Latin, and French origins. The meaning of archive partially stems from the Greek arkheion: a site of domesticity, where the commanding archons (power-wielding lawmakers) resided. Official documents were filed in the archons’ private homes, leaving them as the de-facto guardians of information.
Today, the guardians of information no longer reside in domestic sites, but in shareholder boardrooms and startup exit strategy meetings. Fast-forward a couple millennia, and the arkheion has been replaced by servers owned by corporations whose real interest lies in data extraction, not cultural preservation. Over the years, capitalism’s tendency towards consolidation has resulted in myriad monoliths of subculture becoming subsumed by and complicit in corporate interests. With each passing day, there seems to be a new corporate merger or acquisition in the culture industry, substantiated on the basis of enhanced organizational efficiencies and corporate synergies.
Take one example: Bandcamp, a music marketplace considered more quote-unquote ethical compared to its relatives Spotify and Apple Music, was acquired by Epic Games in 2022 and sold to Songtradr in 2023. Post-acquisition, Bandcamp laid off 49% of their staff and Songtradr made no effort to recognize Bandcamp’s employee union. Another example: Boiler Room’s recent sale to Superstruct (itself owned by KKR, a private equity and investment firm with links to Israeli weapons manufacturers and defense contractors) occurred quietly, so as not to risk reputational damage. Despite the care taken to conceal this acquisition, Boiler Room still faced significant enough pushback to issue a public statement clarifying that “no Boiler Room staff at any level held any ownership or voting rights in the company and had no control over the sale.”
Regardless of Boiler Room staff’s ostensibly well-meaning intentions, the buyout only highlights the need for cultural institutions and spaces with genuinely community-driven values. Charles Broskoski, an outspoken co-founder of Are.na, has doubled down on his commitment to sustainable growth and user-centric approach in running the website. In an interview with Kernel Mag, he stated, “the reason the quality has remained so high on Are.na is because we grow slowly, and we have the patience to do that. And that’s why I think we can be in this for a long time: the primary goal is not to make a shitload of money.” Are.na offers an independent vision of the archive, one centered on the virtues of collectivity and care rather than the clinical logics of efficiency, profitability, infinite growth, and return-on-investment. For now, at least.
Are.na is 16 years old, just one year younger than Instagram. There are, of course, differentiating factors between the two platforms which make Are.na’s commitment to slow growth and user accountability understandable. Are.na’s 35,000 monthly active users, half of whom pay for premium services each month, are already the type of people who would care about ownership structures and funding sources. Are.na never purported to appeal to the masses (i.e. Instagram’s 2 billion monthly active users) or grow their membership indefinitely; in fact, if they did, it would be completely antithetical with the values held by the niche audience they’ve positioned themselves in. Thus, Are.na gets to be a rare exception to the cutthroat, all-subsuming startup financialization game. In Broskoski’s words, “The goal is to be good. And for us, the only way to be good is not to grow fast.”
In many ways, we’re still living under the rule of the archons—only now they’re venture-capital-backed and brand-optimized. Control over archives has simply shifted from the private residences of ancient bureaucrats to the cloud servers of tech monopolies. But not all archives follow this script. Outside of Are.na, there exists the Internet Archive, a digital pirate ship of plundered .pdfs with a goal to provide ‘universal access to knowledge’, which has archived 835 billion webpages, 44 million books, 15 million audio recordings, and 10.6 million videos for anyone with internet access to ruffle through. Their ongoing $621 million lawsuit with major publishers and music labels is perhaps an indication that corporate interests will always try to get in the way of independent, non-profit preservation efforts. Digital archiving is far too important, inefficient, and unprofitable to be left to corporations. Are.na knows this; hopefully the rest of the world will catch on soon.
The first few hours I spent navigating Are.na were—and I do not use this word lightly—dope. I started my first channel (an organizational hub for content) to house information related to cyberfeminism, logging everything from Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index to Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. From then, I created ‘ironic detachment’, a channel to store absurd, (post)ironic, and existential memes brimming with digital unease. My third channel, ‘silly web design’, quickly became filled with URLs of accidentally or intentionally clunky, outdated, and silly websites embracing a web 1.0 feel. To date, this remains my most-followed channel, with 43 followers.
43 people may not seem like a ton to those accustomed to the sheer scale of platforms like Instagram and TikTok, but I hold each one dear in my heart. While traditional social media platforms boast their ability to propel users into viral fame via the ever-increasing accumulation of quantitative metrics, Are.na forgoes a focus on scale for a slower, more meaningful existence. As a medium, Are.na does not give users the ability to ‘like’ blocks or directly message other users, and their comment function is quite basic. This choice in user experience makes browsing Are.na feel more like walking through a garden than a shopping mall.
However, after a few days of heavy Are.na usage, I noticed an anxiety brewing inside of me. Here I was: archiving links and images, uploading my thoughts, and organizing my digital brain, on a social platform I knew nothing about. What’s to stop them from bestowing my data to third-party collectors? Or selling ad space to an online casino for kids? Or getting bought out by a private equity firm who, within days, fires half the team and raises my subscription fee to $200/month without warning? This feeling was so overwhelming that, within the first week of heavy Are.na usage, I uploaded a block (a piece of user-added content in any format, including text, URL, MP3, or PDF) which read:
the perils of finding a new little website you really like and then searching up whether or not it’s independently owned to determine if it'll be shut down any time soon
These concerns do not come out of nowhere.
In Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, the deconstructionist philosopher traces the word ‘archive’ through its Greek, Latin, and French origins. The meaning of archive partially stems from the Greek arkheion: a site of domesticity, where the commanding archons (power-wielding lawmakers) resided. Official documents were filed in the archons’ private homes, leaving them as the de-facto guardians of information.
Today, the guardians of information no longer reside in domestic sites, but in shareholder boardrooms and startup exit strategy meetings. Fast-forward a couple millennia, and the arkheion has been replaced by servers owned by corporations whose real interest lies in data extraction, not cultural preservation. Over the years, capitalism’s tendency towards consolidation has resulted in myriad monoliths of subculture becoming subsumed by and complicit in corporate interests. With each passing day, there seems to be a new corporate merger or acquisition in the culture industry, substantiated on the basis of enhanced organizational efficiencies and corporate synergies.
Take one example: Bandcamp, a music marketplace considered more quote-unquote ethical compared to its relatives Spotify and Apple Music, was acquired by Epic Games in 2022 and sold to Songtradr in 2023. Post-acquisition, Bandcamp laid off 49% of their staff and Songtradr made no effort to recognize Bandcamp’s employee union. Another example: Boiler Room’s recent sale to Superstruct (itself owned by KKR, a private equity and investment firm with links to Israeli weapons manufacturers and defense contractors) occurred quietly, so as not to risk reputational damage. Despite the care taken to conceal this acquisition, Boiler Room still faced significant enough pushback to issue a public statement clarifying that “no Boiler Room staff at any level held any ownership or voting rights in the company and had no control over the sale.”
Regardless of Boiler Room staff’s ostensibly well-meaning intentions, the buyout only highlights the need for cultural institutions and spaces with genuinely community-driven values. Charles Broskoski, an outspoken co-founder of Are.na, has doubled down on his commitment to sustainable growth and user-centric approach in running the website. In an interview with Kernel Mag, he stated, “the reason the quality has remained so high on Are.na is because we grow slowly, and we have the patience to do that. And that’s why I think we can be in this for a long time: the primary goal is not to make a shitload of money.” Are.na offers an independent vision of the archive, one centered on the virtues of collectivity and care rather than the clinical logics of efficiency, profitability, infinite growth, and return-on-investment. For now, at least.
Are.na is 16 years old, just one year younger than Instagram. There are, of course, differentiating factors between the two platforms which make Are.na’s commitment to slow growth and user accountability understandable. Are.na’s 35,000 monthly active users, half of whom pay for premium services each month, are already the type of people who would care about ownership structures and funding sources. Are.na never purported to appeal to the masses (i.e. Instagram’s 2 billion monthly active users) or grow their membership indefinitely; in fact, if they did, it would be completely antithetical with the values held by the niche audience they’ve positioned themselves in. Thus, Are.na gets to be a rare exception to the cutthroat, all-subsuming startup financialization game. In Broskoski’s words, “The goal is to be good. And for us, the only way to be good is not to grow fast.”
In many ways, we’re still living under the rule of the archons—only now they’re venture-capital-backed and brand-optimized. Control over archives has simply shifted from the private residences of ancient bureaucrats to the cloud servers of tech monopolies. But not all archives follow this script. Outside of Are.na, there exists the Internet Archive, a digital pirate ship of plundered .pdfs with a goal to provide ‘universal access to knowledge’, which has archived 835 billion webpages, 44 million books, 15 million audio recordings, and 10.6 million videos for anyone with internet access to ruffle through. Their ongoing $621 million lawsuit with major publishers and music labels is perhaps an indication that corporate interests will always try to get in the way of independent, non-profit preservation efforts. Digital archiving is far too important, inefficient, and unprofitable to be left to corporations. Are.na knows this; hopefully the rest of the world will catch on soon.