Join us and Internet Archive on September 25, 2025 for a book talk with Trevor Owens, author of “After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory”, in conversation with Shannon Mattern, as they explore how libraries, archives, and museums can reclaim their role in shaping a just and sustainable digital present.
The digital age is burning out our most precious resources and the future of the past is at stake. In After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory, Trevor Owens warns that our institutions of cultural memory—libraries, archives, museums, humanities departments, research institutes, and more—have been “disrupted,” and largely not for the better. He calls for memory workers and memory institutions to take back control of envisioning the future of memory from management consultants and tech sector evangelists.
After Disruption posits that we are no longer planning for a digital future, but instead living in a digital present. In this context, Owens asks how we plan for and develop a more just, sustainable, and healthy future for cultural memory. The first half of the book draws on critical scholarship on the history of technology and business to document and expose the sources of tech startup ideologies and their pernicious results, revealing that we need powerful and compelling counter frameworks and values to replace these ideologies. The second half of the book makes the case for the centrality of maintenance, care, and repair as interrelated frameworks to build a better future in which libraries, archives, and museums can thrive as sites of belonging and connection through collections.
ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS
DR. TREVOR OWENS is a social scientist, historian, and archivist working to deepen the positive impact of mission driven organizations on society through humanities and social science research. Owens serves as the first Chief Research Officer of the American Institute of Physics, a Public Historian in Residence at American University, and a faculty member for California’s Rare Book School. Owens is the author of four books, the most recent of which, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory was published by University of Michigan Press in Spring of 2024. His previous book, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2018, won outstanding publication awards from both the American Library Association and the Society of American Archivists.
SHANNON MATTERN is the Director of Creative Research at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. Previously, she held full professorships in media studies, anthropology, and art history at The New School and the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching focus on media architectures, information infrastructures, and urban technologies.
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