The Archive at the End of the World: Speculative Preservation and the Politics of Loss

This chapter proposes the possibility that future textual ecologies will inherit an archive marked not by abundance, as is often supposed, but by profound loss, whether from climate catastrophe, economic disaster, or digital decay. How might textual ecologies prepare for such an archive? Drawing on theories of dark archives, disaster librarianship, and “post-apocalyptic computing,” this chapter develops a speculative preservation framework that treats redundancy, community mirroring, and federated metadata as anticipatory responses to (textual) ecological instability. Rather than assuming infinite reproducibility and perpetual abundance, this chapter centres loss as a constitutive horizon for future textual cultures, asking what new forms of reading, ethics, and governance emerge when preservation is no longer guaranteed.