steve kwan user experience designer

First, destroy the archives

(August 8th, 2006 - 8:45PM)

Regarding "First, Destroy the Archives" by Gale Courey Toensing:

My old boss used to say that when one country invades another, the first thing they do is destroy the archives. I thought this was a marketing ploy to make our archivist prospects feel important. But it turns out it's true.

Never underestimate the power of human history. It's one of those things that seems unimportant until you find yourself without it. Believe it or not, you could survive without the Internet. You might go through withdrawl for a weekend (I know that's happened to me when Shaw makes an oopsie), but life will go on. You can even make do without television, without telephones, and maybe even without electricity. But you can't make do without human history.

What would you do if every record of your existence completely disappeared? Can you even imagine? And what would happen if everyone's records disappeared? That's what's happened in Nablus.

All of our recent inventions are nice, and they greatly enhance the quality of our lives, but they are just building blocks laid on top of the foundation we call human knowledge. This is a foundation that's been constructed piece by piece, human by human, for millennia. That's why when you want to cripple a society, you start by destroying that foundation: the archives.