24.

Zoom out. Kenneth Goldsmith claims that, on the contrary, the archive constitutes the minimal element of writing since, as he notes, the digital genesis of textual corpora now results at once in their curated storage, with everything copied and stowed online in automated databases: “writers are plundering these vast warehouses of text,” not for “raw material” — “but rather to [. . .] reshape them” ;³⁸ moreover, “large-scale” venues for online social engagement (like Google, Facebook, and Instagram), archive all our interactions with their platforms, collating our utterances in a manner that might rival the repositories of surveillance in servers at the NSA. Each text that we publish in an online milieu now results in the creation of a “library” on our behalf, whose filing system records our writing, all of it searchable by algorithms.