Cloning and erasing are inseparable operations within the contemporary archive. Digital culture permits almost frictionless copying: a file can exist simultaneously on a computer, cloud service, repository, website and external drive. This redundancy protects memory, increases access and allows materials to migrate across platforms, but it also generates obsolete duplicates, contradictory versions and false impressions of permanence. CyborgText describes a textual object constructed for simultaneous human interpretation and machine operation. Prose, metadata, links, tags, dates and persistent identifiers become parts of one composite body. Cloning such an object requires more than copying its visible words; its references, relations and provenance must also remain functional. Erasure is equally necessary. ArchiveFatigue emerges when records accumulate faster than they can be maintained or interpreted. A living collection cannot preserve every draft, broken link, redundant image or accidental repetition at the same level of importance. To delete is not necessarily to destroy knowledge. Selective erasure may clarify structure, restore navigability and protect attention. Yet it must be distinguished from censorship, institutional forgetting or the elimination of inconvenient evidence. The ethics of the archive lies in deciding what should remain publicly visible, what may be compressed, what must be protected and what can disappear without damaging the historical record. Cloning preserves the possibility of return; erasing preserves the possibility of orientation. Together they show that memory is not guaranteed by technical storage. It is designed through continuous maintenance, explicit versions, distributed copies and accountable decisions about what the collection can continue to carry.
Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Bender, E.M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A. and Shmitchell, S. (2021) ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?’, in Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. New York: ACM, pp. 610–623.
Chun, W.H.K. (2016) Updating to Remain the Same. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Derrida, J. (1996) Archive Fever. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dullaart, C. (2015) The Possibility of an Army. Eindhoven: Onomatopee.
Evens, A. (2025) The Digital and Its Discontents. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kittler, F.A. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Steyerl, H. (2012) The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Zielinski, S. (2006) Deep Time of the Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Anto Lloveras is a Spanish architect, urbanist, researcher and epistemologist working with distributed archives whose materials migrate between notebooks, websites, repositories, films and publications. His open-science practice treats duplication, versioning, editing and selective erasure as central operations of intellectual maintenance. CV · https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2024/10/cv.html · Project Index · https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html · Operators · Lloveras, A. (2026) ‘CyborgText’, Socioplastics. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19913674 · Lloveras, A. (2026) ‘ArchiveFatigue’, Socioplastics. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20358971
