Dear Instagram Archivists -

To witness such a dramatic cultural shift in my short twenty-four years of life is, predictably,  quite jarring. As a teenager, I begged for parental permission to get on Instagram–I longed for  the opportunity to curate the way my peers saw me with precision. My hair was long, frizzy, and  the black winged eyeliner I painted on daily was often messy and uneven. Any chance to prove  to my classmates that I wasn’t annoying and undesirable was an important one–the weight of  that social judgement, even then, was quite oppressive. With that in mind, I grow increasingly wary of the newer tendency to use Instagram (among other major social platforms) as an “archive”–your performative social media curation is not a complete historical document. 

Arguably, there is little distinction now between public and private domains–the data we keep  stored on our phones in notes or pictures is likely in a cloud, accessible by law enforcement, a  TSA inspection, or even an appropriately savvy layman. Richly accurate records of personal  information are available for a small fee. Our smart home doorbells are surveilling our neighbors  as modern-day slave patrols (ICE agents) ruin, splinter and violently end lives, barely bothering to hide the eugenic Nazi hate symbols tattooed on their necks. Everyone is coughing, illnesses are mutating, and we are all sick and getting sicker.  

I spent this past year working at Brooklyn’s Lesbian Herstory Archives, and in that year I met some of the most earnest, driven, careful and exacting people I’ve known. Inside that building, which the organization has owned since the 70s, there are books shelved from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, spilling over onto metal carts that creak underneath their weight. I opened a box to catalogue drugstore 5x7s and found a yellowed, typewritten letter addressed from Audre Lorde’s home on Staten Island. The LHA taught me what it meant to archive–not necessarily to fabricate stories, produce, or complete, but to be entirely driven by a need for preservation, to devote a life to carving out space for those you love. The LHA takes in any material related–even peripherally–to lesbians. In a file labeled “sadomasochism”, I pored over a written correspondence between two San Francisco dyke publications arguing about the morality of promoting the original Samois flagging code. Much in my life has contributed to the development of my identity and the way I move through the world, but sadomasochism and my leatherdyke contemporaries are owed the bulk of the credit. Discovering that my queer lineages were having the same discursive arguments thirty years prior made me laugh. 

In their seminal 2009 book Frames of War, Judith Butler grapples with recordings. In considering the morality of documenting global suffering (specifically that which spawns from imperial violence), they flesh out a theory of “precariousness” in which they discuss the privilege of living socially. That is, the way in which one’s life becomes meaningful only in relation to others–who do we have to rely on to get our information? Who is feeding us our “fact”? Who and what allows us to be “grievable”? When I read that, I thought of recorded histories of San Francisco leatherfolk in the 1980s and 90s. Our/their lives at that time were predicated on that precariousness–in order to find the pleasure they needed, they had to exist mostly secretively, accessing spaces by word of mouth, showing up in public with one another to prove they cared. Most of their friends had died due to the authoritarian neglect of the AIDS epidemic, and the way they fucked their friends and lovers was illegal.

There are a few things that happen when we utilize social media–namely Instagram–to curate so-called “archives” of information and culture. We’re likely getting a quite narrow perspective: one individual is sharing media they find compelling (often under the guise of universality) to tell a story that resonates for them. We miss out on the chance to discover ourselves within history–it becomes too subjective–and too easy. Said ease of pulling up physical evidence of any given event, person, relationship also strips any possibility of anonymity. People who maybe were represented or did participate in these histories but weren’t visually documented are then effectively erased two-fold. So again, in the context of San Francisco in the 80s and 90s, we have to think about who could afford (monetarily and safety-wise) to publicly associate themselves with the scene. Here, we inevitably run into racial divides: social status and comfort often come with money, which often comes with whiteness. Independent archives (like the Lesbian Herstory Archives, or the Chicago Leather Archives & Museum, etc.) have a team of leaders to help ensure that their outreach expands to all the appropriate corners and to allow people to witness a breadth of stories–to see themselves in history, to not feel alone.

To be even more clear: the archive is not benign. Saidiya Hartman posits this clearly in her 2019 book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments as she discusses the authoritarian archive’s role in the modern cultural understanding of Black women. The archive has been used to lie: to surveil Black communities and develop police records, to tout European colonizers as empathetic saviors, to manufacture consent for the imperial annihilation of Iraq, Iran, and the Levant, to name a few. But by definition, the archive is a gathering place of information. The archive doesn’t have to be siphoned into authority–in fact, it shouldn’t be. So with this in mind, I dream that the archive isn’t in your phone, or mine. I dream that my pervert friends and I have to and want to work together to share the information that we need to stay safe, that we can build beautiful and robust networks of dissemination and create spaces like the LHA and the LA&M where we can learn when and how we want to. There’s sanctity in that.

Instagram has removed the thrill of discovery, the sound of air purifiers, the shuffle of bankers boxes and the hum of old halogen bulbs from our specific history. When you page through Del LaGrace Volcano’s photography from the 1990s, you don’t have to question the authenticity of the image–whether or not it was produced by an AI generator capitalizing off of our overworked proletariat. Public knowledge and sharing is crucial, but not when it serves to continue the horrifying accumulation of wealth of Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the media elite. 

This collection of thoughts and stories serves to remind us of the importance of our non-procreative creation (sodomy, if you will). To challenge the social instinct of gathering information instantly, whenever we want, and never questioning the sources. A professor of mine spoke of the availability of information through artificial intelligence as a complete flattening of our media–I urge people to re-engage with the effort of discovery, to unflatten the layers. If you have a question, what work should you put in to find the answer? Would it ever be easier to ask the man in the park playing the clarinet about the functionality of his instrument instead of googling its anatomy? I want you to go poring over years of print of one periodical to find a story that mirrors your current love. And I hope you, too, someday find the equivalent of Audre Lorde’s typewritten love poem and start to preserve the information you care about outside of this oppressive digital universe. 

With insistence,  

Eve