Reference Rot: Digital Decay, White Supremacy, and Endangering Data

Reference Rot:Digital Decay, White Supremacy, and Endangering Data Diana Flores Ruíz (bio) I've often wished for many of my objects of analysis not to exist. As one might expect, scouring digital footprints of white supremacists yields rather disturbing material. But last year, when I returned to study the image gallery of a long-standing nativist militia group, I was perplexed to find the home page redirecting to a network domain advertising an Indonesian beach. I refreshed the page: same cerulean waters. I re-typed the address and confirmed: adios to the clunky, xenophobic website of the Mountain Minutemen with its front-page call to donate and share posts. This Southern California–based nativist extremist organization emerged from the Minutemen Project movement as part of the anti-immigrant mobilization following 9/11, which fueled a new security paradigm rooted in the idea of homeland. Throughout my research, which took place from 2016 to 2021, I took screenshots from the photo gallery to analyze particular photos. I had always counted on the ability to access the full gallery depicting scenes from 2005 to 2015. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine had steadily crawled the site but didn't capture nested pages beyond the home page. The images were gone. Now that this page was no longer accessible, what about the hundreds of lost photos that told the story of how these "counter-narco terrorism" vigilantes recruited members or trained their "Patriot Point Posse" to hunt people End Page 190 on the move?1 At the same time, I found it incontrovertible that removing access (by any means) to live platforms that disseminate and enshrine Far Right ideologies is something to celebrate. So herein lies the paradox and the strange sting of my unexpected wish fulfillment: as a scholar of racialized violence and media infrastructures, how was I to parse the implications of losing this archive that materially contributed to harm yet was full of objects of analysis that unlocked critical junctures of inquiry? For all my desire that these images never exist in the first place, losing access provoked an uneasy realization about my sense of analytic claim over them. How might I distance myself from seeing this as a personal research tragedy and instead zero in on the generative qualities of this disappearance? This essay examines the afterlives of inaccessible, discriminatory media through the lens of reference rot, or the breakdown of active or functional website components. Writing in Scientific American in 1995, Jeff Rothenberg first warned of the "imminent danger" of losing digital information.2 Reference rot refers to the process of losing access to websites, hyperlinks, or source data needed to make a site run properly. The term encapsulates the precarious nature of digital material from unanticipated equipment failures, terminated domains, inactive servers, and degraded data within the context of ever-evolving web formatting and technical standards. On top of these components, Marisa Leavitt Cohn considers the labor contingencies in the construction of software itself: "the moral economy of software work also applies to its aging and obsolescence."3 Given these various processes and reasons for digital decay, scholars have developed ways of picturing and describing the inability to archive all data. The ideas of a "digital dark age" and of "link cemeteries" connote a large-scale, mournful loss, while "digital heritage" suggests preservation practices with analog equivalents for cultural workers across film and media industries.4 Potential solutions to curb reference rot include Google vice president Vint Cerf's notion of a "digital vellum," which would index both content and operating system to create "an ecosystem able to remember what bits mean over long periods of time."5 Until such speculative solutions become standardized, data remain just as endangered as nitrate film or museum artifacts. As cultural workers know all too well, the politics of preservation have long been asymmetrical and contested, based in value-laden questions about what's worth saving, why, and for whom. With this background I ask, What about data that endangers? Reference rot might just as easily encompass End Page 191 anti-racist digital mediations that are worth holding onto. However, the archival impulse to preserve hateful media produces more...