The replies to this are really something. My fave: “Nazi memorabilia.” The conventional wisdom (ideology, really) is that e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g needs to be preserved at all cost, and the usual rationale orbits roughly around Santayana — you know, those who forget the past etc. This often takes the form of performative pearl-clutching about the barbarity of it all, after some artifact or site has been lost. Of course I get it, AND I also see how that pack-rat ideology is part and parcel with the cult of data. As Felix Stalder told me (and had probably written somewhere), after the communications revolution came the data counter-revolution. And that counter-revolutionary impulse drives the demand to preserve everything no matter what. So…here we have people openly saying f*ck that. One comment: “sometimes, unfortunately, artifacts get destroyed while history is being made.”