Description: "Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America's most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records that now accompany each of us from birth to death. This data complex backs up and protects our most vital information against decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and government institutions whose power is also preserved in its bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces. This book traces the emergence of the data complex in the early twentieth century and guides readers through its expansion in a series of moments when Americans thought they were living just before the end of the world"--
Brief description: Brian Michael Murphy is Associate Professor of American Studies at Williams College and Faculty Associate at The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Review Quotes:
"Gas and glass, capsules and crypts, microfilm and mines and monuments: these are among the tools we've deployed to protect our data from a host of threats--from dust and vermin to demographic diversification and nuclear war. In We the Dead, Brian Michael Murphy takes us on a simultaneously breathtaking and explosive tour of the various archives and databases that hold our records, and the human subjects they document, in suspension between life and death."--Shannon Mattern, author of Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media