11 A Contribution to the Political Economy of Personal Archives Yuk Hui One of the still unfolding impacts of the computer age is that everyone now must be their own digital archivist. US Library of Congress, 2013 1 Introduction With digitization, archives are now everywhere, from online libraries to personal timelines on social media. hese days, the archive is less of a critical concept and more of a socioeconomic category. Indeed, the issues that surround the archive concern techniques of digitization and modes of access in an environment dominated by a few corporate players such as Google. In this new reality of the archive, the relation between the digital and the archive is oten presupposed: the digital serves the purpose of archiving, from management to access. In this chapter, I want to bring this presupposition into question. Let us irst ask: What really is an archive ater digitization? he way we talk about digitization and archives today assumes a concept of the archive comparable to the one from the nineteenth century. his concept can no longer serve us; we need to redeine the archive according to its technical condition and the possibilities opened up by that condition. In particular, and as shown in the above quote from the Library of Congress website, we have to recognize that everyone must be their “own digital archivist.” But what is an archivist? And why must we become our own archivist? 1 Available at the time of this writing: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/documents/ebookpdf_ march18.pdf. Compromised Data.indb 226 Compromised Data.indb 226 5/27/2015 3:16:31 PM 5/27/2015 3:16:31 PM