I very much appreciate Enzo Mari’s “old man anger” in this video, at 3 minutes and 45 seconds. The Italian designer’s valuable rage here against redundancy, repetition and data chimes with what I think is the major cultural problem of our time: We’ve forgotten how to forget. We don’t know how to evaluate, how to eliminate, how to evacuate. We’ve let the archives overwhelm us. And without the ability to forget, we fail to clear a clean, fresh space in which to imagine.
Here’s what Mari says in the relevant section: “What is the problem, today? Think of technology, think of social systems, think of legislation, so many things. It’s redundancy. Billions of words are wasted, statements and counter-statements, everything and its opposite, in an infinity of repetition. Everyone talks about the internet, computers, data. So much data! But the problem with data today is that we need to erase 99% of it. Not erase it wholesale. Look at everything, case by case, and say to the bad data "Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off!” We need to eliminate the data which is leading us to death.“
The problem with this task is that none of us has time to go through all the data on a case-by-case basis. And even if we did, each of us would keep a different 1%. For the valuable data to be accessible, everything has to be accessible. The valuable data will probably arrive late in the day, on YouTube, for instance, in the form of a quiet afterthought to a million million-viewed pouncing kitten and waving bear videos. The archive hosts that, and then it hosts – for a paltry thousand scattered people – Enzo Mari getting angry with data, and telling data to fuck itself.
But that’s what data does: it reproduces.
