The Dead Formats Society

Wired News: The Dead Formats Society

In 1995, Jacques Derrida, the high priest of postmodernism, published a book called Archive Fever, which joined up the dots between Freud and e-mail, advancing the idea that “archiving represents both attempting to preserve something to be remembered and leaving out something to be forgotten.” This fever to archive, said Derrida, was as much a desire to sublimate and suppress the past as to preserve it.