Hey Lachlan Yes but 1. there are engines for the storage of our missives that we wot but little of (I'm constantly ego-surfed by students checking my credentials who then ingratiate themselves by quoting 'publ,ications' I never knew I had, a common enough thing, and) as Cap'n Beefheart once said I'd like to give my music away for free, it didn't cost anything where I got it from. The internet is a self-archiving entity by nature, so why privatise memory when it can be socialised? 2. the privilege of the personal archive reduces to one thing only: the right to erase. Exercise of this right reveals only a hankering for a pre-modern Enlightenment privacy. Unless of coursxe you are an Enron executive, member of the unelected government of the USA, recovering alcoholic in charge of genocide against the Palestinians or otherwise disgraced person, in which case you have forfeited the right to be treated with the usual ethical obligations reserved for mammals 3. The contemporary culture is intensely ephemeral. Those dull Derrideans who wrte endless preambles to the foreward before the preface believe they are writing in the sprit and style of the events they understand to be a-foundational. Perhaps we shd on principle delete everything in the intray on the principle that because it is in the intray it is obviously out-of-date (incidentally a phrase which first appeared in popular journalism circa 1896 . . . ) Now keep out of trouble, and delete this message s Sean Cubitt Screen and Media Studies Akoranga Whakaata Pürongo The University of Waikato Private Bag 3105 Hamilton New Zealand T (direct) +64 (0)7 856 2889 extension 8604 T/F (department) +64 (0)7 838 4543 seanc@waikato.ac.nz http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/ Digital Aesthetics http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita The Dundee Seminars http://www.imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/sean/index.html