Center for Humanistic Inquiry CHI Salon - We the Dead: Preserving Data at the End of the World

Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America's most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records that now accompany each of us from birth to death. The data complex backs up and protects our most vital information against decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and government institutions whose power is also preserved in its bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces.

Dr. Brian Michael Murphy will present his work on the history of the data complex, bringing us into conversation around the ways in which the data complex increasingly blurs the lines between human and machine, biological body and data body, life and digital afterlife.