This was a really wild read. As a student of history, there are many times that think "this is the end". This book gives an interesting perspective on what happens to all the data when the end is near.

A very in depth and entertaining look at the data storage industry. I thought a lot while reading this book in how much data I generate and by the tour that Professor Murphy provides I was astonished both at the history of data collection and storage but also the implications for the future. Well researched and well written.

oh no i'm so sorry this wasn't for me. i am not the specialist they are targeting. this was way too dense for common folk like me. DNF

Thanks to Netgalley and University of North Carolina Press for the ARC of this. I switched back and forth between the Audible edition that I purchased when I was reading this.

This is definitely full of information that I had no experience with, the cover and topic just sounded really intriguing. The author is, at times, very funny, which I appreciated to help break up some of the drier bits. Overall, I think if you are really interested in how data is stored and how paranoid humans are about their data storage, you will find this interesting as well. I wish the whole tone had leaned harder into funny/conversational, but I’m happy I read it and learned some new things I’d never given much thought to before.

A solid exploration of a niche subject. Murphy charts the history of various schemes to preserve data, from the optimistic (time capsules meant to be opened by our genetically perfect descendants in the year 8113 A.D.; the Voyager Records) to the mundane (ways to protect books from air pollution in early-industrial cities; the ever-growing digital archives of random crap held by modern companies) to the weird (gas chambers for killing bookworms; a performance artist's microscale etching of images onto a satellite in "graveyard orbit" around the Earth).

It's often interesting but rarely revelatory, and Murphy does sometimes lose the plot a little bit - for instance, spending a huge amount of time discussing American contests about who could be "the most typical American family" and all the racial, economic, and patriarchal stereotypes that entails; this is presumably to provide context for the weird eugenically-utopian beliefs held by some of the organizers of the long-scale time capsules he talks about, but it didn't really feel on-topic. Also, I was disappointed in the extremely cursory mention of the topic of how to warn future (indeed, very-far-future) humans about the dangers of nuclear waste storage sites. I've learned a little about that on my own outside of this book, and it's a fascinating subject (prone to outside-the-box ideas like bioluminescent cats) that fits the "End of the World" subtitle of this book to a T, so it's a shame not to include it here.

First, thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the eARC provided in exchange for an honest and fair review.

"We the Dead" is, summed up in a word, fascinating. In a time where we are living multiple digital lives, where a good portion of us (me included) can't leave the house without our phones, where bits and pieces of all of our data gather in places here and there, consciously or unconsciously given, this book is a fascinating journey of the data-complex, of human recordkeeping and data-collecting and preservation of data.

Though the subject was fascinating and I've made a career out of reading long academic texts, I did keep checking to see how many pages I had left in some of the chapters just so I could stop for a while. It's fascinating, yes, but also lengthy. It would be a good addition to a relevant graduate classroom, I'm sure, but just to pick up and read, it did get difficult to maintain interest through an entire chapter sometimes.

Overall, though, it WAS fascinating, and I did enjoy Brian Michael Murphy's writing. I'm sure for those heavily invested in data collection and preservation, it'd be a thrilling read with less checking for how many pages are left. Some books just aren't for some people, and this one just wasn't for me. It was, though, pretty good nevertheless which I think speaks to Murphy as a writer.

4/5.

A fascinating academic study both of how data is collected now and how data collection has evolved over the past century, with a heavy emphasis on the fears and anxieties of the Cold War.

This is a very good book, just not the book I ever wanted to be reading. It is smart and thoughtful and I read sections of it out loud to my partner—and yet it took me a full month to get through the dense academic text. It is a rewritten dissertation and is not for the general public. That’s sad since I think it is a fascinating topic. However, I consider myself to be a curious person and I couldn’t manage to maintain interest in this tome. The number of times I checked how many pages left to go was HIGH.
Read this if you are fascinated by the idea of why we care about preserving data and how we do it…but only read this if you also have a high tolerance for long lectures.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free e-copy in exchange for my honest review.

We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World by Brian Michael Murphy is unlike any other Nonfiction book I have read. An absolutely fascinating and philosophical look at data preservation! Immediately, the cover caught my eye. It looks like a 1950s rock album turned apocalyptic and reminded me of Fallout, for my video game lovers out there.

Murphy starts this book off with his experience at the Corbis Film Preservation Facility. Something I did not know, is that CFF is just one of many vaults in Iron Mountain's National Data Center in Boyers, Pennsylvania, but there are currently over 2,600 data centers in the U.S. Some of the data center's clients include Stephen Spielberg, United Airlines, Warner Brothers, HBO, and Nationwide Insurance.

Murphy discusses the term, "Mummy Complex" throughout the book:
"When we preserve, we manifest our Mummy Complex and tell ourselves that no matter what happens in this uncertain world, that no matter who is left alive when a war or economic meltdown or rash of terrorist attacks concludes, a trace of us will remain."
Murphy goes on to say it is not unlike the Egyptains who preserved their organs so that they too, could be used in the afterlife. This is a very philosophical way of looking this topic and that really piqued my interest.

So basically, humans rely on digital infrastructure to preserve, record and redistribute data. Anything from photos, film, books, artifacts, records, etc. Murphy shares many examples of data throughout time. Along with his fantastic writing, he shares some captivating photographs from different archives.
I would reccomend this to anyone interested in a fascinating glimpse in to the past, present, and future of data. A unique and engrossing read!

Brian Michael Murphy is a poet and a “media archeologist” (oh, and a Fulbright Scholar and the Dean of the College and Director of the MFA in Public Action at Bennington College with a PhD in Comparative Studies from Ohio State University, where he was a Presidential Fellow) and his latest book (based on research from his doctoral dissertation), We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World, is one of the most philosophically interesting things I’ve read in a long time. I thought this was going to be a book about the Singularity — which it’s not, until it sort of is — but it’s even more out there than that: Tracing the history of America’s information collection and storage systems (what Murphy calls “the data complex”), We the Dead lifts the veil on some dark history, a shadowy present, and an uncertain future; it’s the kind of read that makes you wonder, “How are people not talking about this stuff all the time?” I was interested in absolutely everything here — from the broad historical context that Murphy provides to his personal anecdotes of visits to public libraries and military-guarded deep-mountain storage bunkers — but if I had a caution it’s that Murphy writes from a definite point-of view: this is not a dispassionate academic work, and it solely focuses on the American experience, but as an accessibly-written exposé of that experience, it often blew my mind. Not what I was expecting, but incredibly interesting and well-written. I hope this will be widely read.