The doyen of film archivists, Paolo Cherchi Usai, pointed out a conference laste last year in Wellington that of approximately 47 minutes of film exposed in 1896 we have about 42. Of about 9 billion hours of film and television released in 1999, the world's archives hold less than 0.1 per cent. Archiving, canon formation, biography as well as history become tied to arts of forgetting and erasure. Amnemotechnics replace mnemotechnics.That said I have a 4Gb drive full of mail, a collection of floppies, zips and CDs not to mention a variety of online stashes with heinous quantities of archived images, animations, , PhDs, book and journal manuscripts. The difficult thing is that you never know when you will *absolutely* need the reference from the file you just erased, but erase we must, and trust the wisdom of sysops to maintain what is public in the public domain of listserve archives, while what is intimate belongs to the lovers and enemies to whom the intimacies were addressed. One day no doubt the world will mourn the loss of my juvenilia. The mourning will be a better experience than reading them. 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