The Inefficient Steward: On the Necessity of Forgetfulness
There is a mantra in our field, repeated so often it has become an unexamined truth: preserve everything. The core ethos of digital preservation and web archiving is one of maximalist capture. We fear the digital void, the loss of a single tweet, a forgotten blog comment, a transient government webpage. Our mission, we believe, is to build arks, to be the faithful stewards of every bit, lest we condemn some vital piece of our culture to the silent ocean of obsolescence. But what if this instinct, however noble, leads us astray? What if the most responsible steward is not a hoarder, but a judicious, even inefficient, editor?
The argument for forgetting runs counter to our entire training. We see the catastrophic losses of the early web and vow, ‘never again.’ Our tools are built for scale, for crawling and harvesting with industrial efficiency. Yet in this frantic race against time, we rarely pause to ask a more fundamental question: what is this *everything* we are saving? Is an archive of everything, in practice, an archive of nothing? Without curation, without the difficult work of selection, we risk creating vast junkyards of data, so overwhelming in their scale and so devoid of navigable meaning that they become functionally useless, or worse, misleading.
Consider the legal and ethical quagmire. A publicly available website is one thing; a comprehensive, perfectly preserved archive that captures every piece of personal data, every unmoderated comment, every piece of ephemera that individuals had every reasonable expectation would fade, is another. The maximalist approach assumes that context is forever static, that the public record is a monolith. But societies change. Norms evolve. What was once a casual, unremarkable online interaction can, with the unforgiving lens of hindsight, become a life-altering burden. The archiver, in seeking to prevent one kind of loss, can inadvertently become an agent of a different kind of harm, freezing individuals in digital amber without their consent.
This is not a call for negligence. It is a call for a more mature, thoughtful practice—one that embraces the graceful art of omission. The great physical archives of the world are not warehouses containing every scrap of paper ever produced. They are curated collections, shaped by human judgment. Librarians and archivists have always made decisions about what is significant, what tells a story, what deserves the resources required for preservation. This process is not a flaw; it is the very mechanism that imparts meaning.
Perhaps our goal should not be perfect, frictionless preservation, but rather, intentional and acknowledged loss. By being inefficient—by spending time and energy not just on capture, but on discernment—we create archives that are more navigable, more ethically sound, and ultimately, more valuable. We trade the impossible fantasy of total recall for the achievable reality of a meaningful record. The challenge, then, is not just to build better storage, but to cultivate better judgment. To learn, as societies always have, that memory is not about keeping everything, but about knowing what is worth keeping.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: