H-Sci-Med-Tech: New posted content
Simon on Murphy, 'We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World' [Review]
Murphy, Brian Michael. We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World. : University of North Carolina Press, 2022. 316 pp. $32.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781469668284.
Reviewed by
Sara M. B. Simon (Northwestern University)
Published on
H-Sci-Med-Tech (December, 2025)
Commissioned by
Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=62232
In We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World, Brian Michael Murphy explores the origins of the US data complex—his term for what started as an obsession with collecting and preserving data, then mutated into a condition that now exists to preserve itself. As Murphy explains, over the course of the twentieth century, major institutions from corporations to government agencies latched on to the data complex especially in moments of crisis. Powered by increasing military budgets, these institutions regarded data collection as a balm for anxiety, a way to assuage fear. But this framing of data storage as reassurance obscured the complex’s productive power, Murphy writes. As scientists and archivists created new methods of data preservation, new motives for expanding the data complex were schemed up just as quickly. Now, in the twenty-first century, this spiral is in full swing. Backups of backups are perceived to be needed, given the ephemerality of, say, digital files. Through this spiral, Murphy argues, the “biobody” has become entangled with its “data body.” In other words, with crises fueling anxiety and anxiety fueling the demand for more and longer-lasting information, the data complex has come to control both our material and immaterial selves.
The book’s six chapters move chronologically through “extreme cases of data preservation in their historical moment of crisis,” Murphy writes, together showing that with each crisis, the data complex intensified and grew (p. 19). Chapter 1 begins in the late 1920s and follows a stack of librarians all “microscopically meticulous” in their attempts to rid books of pesky insects, gritty air particles, and contagious diseases (p. 50). In chapter 2, Murphy uses two major time capsules—the Westinghouse capsule buried underground at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and the Crypt of Civilization, housed in Brookhaven, Georgia, and sealed in 1940—to examine eugenic anxieties of the era, with capsule creators aiming to preserve their own visions of American ideals. We the Dead next takes readers into the bomb-proof bunkers that housed microfilm backups of important records at the start of the Cold War (chap. 3), then into the networked facilities that allowed institutions to use these data storage sites not just for disaster recovery but for everyday function, too (chap. 4). In chapter 5, Murphy explores recent efforts to blend cutting-edge technology with methods of “time-tested permanence,” like etching (p. 157). Finally, the sixth chapter grapples with the recent swarm of wealthy investors interested in DNA storage, Bill Gates at the forefront.
Much like Mél Hogan’s work on how data centers demand the accumulation of more data, and much like Dan Bouk’s, too, on the US government’s infrastructural commitment to data doubles, Murphy asks readers to consider whether the now-pervasive data complex “is actually serving its ostensible human rulers” (p. 11) or has merely become a profitable way to prop up the data complex itself.[1] To answer this question, Murphy invites readers into his own data complex spelunking. Building on the work of Lisa Parks, Murphy’s lively first-person voice serves as a tour guide through the topsy-turvy but highly material world of data centers, archives, and bunkers.[2] In one particularly memorable passage, he describes the bizarre experience he had at Pittsburgh’s Heinz History Center, home to the archives of Westinghouse Electric. As Murphy explains, upon arriving, he asked to watch a film stored in the collection, but the archivist would not allow it. Willing to compromise, Murphy asked if he could at least see the physical film reel itself. Still, no dice. The Heinz Center aimed to keep the artifact in top condition, the archivist said, so that future researchers might someday be able to study it. In a laugh-out-loud passage, Murphy describes acquiescing and, while waiting for his approved records to be wheeled out, streaming a digital copy of the film he found available on the Internet Archive.
By the end of the book, Murphy’s conclusions are sharp and convincing. Given the gobs of paradoxes baked into the data complex—a system stuffed with backup loops, built on both hopes and fears, with crises at once quelled and created—this is certainly “no story of progress,” he writes (p. 166). Indeed, where his historical actors fretted over the nightmarish threat of information loss and thus took extraordinary measures to ensure that they, the dead, would have their lives and legacies somehow sustained, Murphy concludes that this new “overabundance” of data might instead be what leads to the much-hyped end of humanity (p. 181). The people who built and fueled the data complex relied on new technologies to make the country’s records permanent; they regarded the data complex as a powerful tool “to control the uncontrollable” (p. 56). But as We the Dead shows, data is often far more fleeting and simply far more complicated than that. The book is a brilliant and refreshing romp through these odd contradictions.
Notes
[1]. Mél Hogan, “The Data Center Industrial Complex,” in Saturation: An Elemental Politics, ed. Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz (Duke University Press, 2021), 283-305; Dan Bouk, “The National Data Center and the Rise of the Data Double,” special issue, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 48, no. 5 (November 2018): 627-36.
[2]. Lisa Parks, “Stuff You Can Kick: Toward a Theory of Media Insfrastructures,” in Between Humanities and the Digital, ed. Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg (MIT Press, 2015), 355-73.
Citation:
Sara M. B. Simon.
Review of
Murphy, Brian Michael.
We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2025.
URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=62232
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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