How do we preserve history in a violent present for an uncertain future? What is the next era of collection management?
Today’s archival tools operate as though we’ve reached an unchanging global stability, which Francis Fukuyama once crowned, “The End of History.” Our tools assume a static world where archives and their meaning never change, relying on flows of capital, expertise, and materials that only briefly could be guaranteed.
But the wider world is shifting rapidly, challenging the ways we collect, preserve, and provide access to cultural heritage. Faced with fragile digital infrastructure, adversarial AI, and the increasing weaponisation of networks pose, the Western ideal of permanence gives way, revealing an inherent fragility it has fought to hide. Now, on the cusp of The End of the End of History, cultural stewards face existential threats to their archives—a widening gap between archival philosophy and the deteriorating material conditions threatening our collective memory.
New Design Congress and NDF invite you to join a collaborative exploration of digital preservation’s hidden vulnerabilities. Through accessible exercises that surface shared anxieties and threats, we’ll examine alternative paths for computing that embrace impermanence, decentralisation, ambiguity, and contextual resilience designed from unstable environments. Together, we’ll map the digital and physical risks facing Aotearoa’s cultural repositories and propose new threads for safeguarding cultural memory in a multi-crisis future.
Participants will leave with:
Informal training in the NDC Anxiety Games framework, enabling them to facilitate participatory and accessible evaluations of institutional vulnerabilities across multiple domains
Shared, multi-perspective strategies for building resilience in digital preservation systems
New perspectives on prioritizing preservation efforts in resource-constrained environments
A deeper understanding of the socio-technical nature of archival challenges, presented from a perspective of strength beyond doomerism
Connections with colleagues facing similar challenges
This workshop is designed for cultural stewards, archivists, curators, librarians, technologists, and policymakers involved in preserving Aotearoa’s cultural heritage. No technical background is required.
ABOUT CADE
Cade Diehm is the founder of the New Design Congress, an international research organisation forging a nuanced understanding of technology's role as a social, political and environmental accelerant. He studies, writes, consults and speaks regularly on topics such as digital power structures, privacy, information warfare, resilience, internet economies and the digitisation of cities.
With a background in information security, interface politics and digital systems, Cade and his team at New Design Congress work tirelessly to tease out and weave threads that can be pulled together to build a truly hopeful future.
Cade has collaborated with organisations across the world, including Signal, Google, Mozilla, Bauhaus Earth, Webrecorder, Open Archive, Superbloom Design, Furtherfield, C/O Berlin, Art Sonje Center, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, the International Institute for the Environment and Development, the European Commission, the World Health Organization, the London College of Communication, Protocol Labs, the Deutschland Bundestag Prototype Fund, the Center for Digital Resilience, the Algorithmic Transparency Institute and many others.
Cade resides in Berlin with his partner and two Shiba Inus, Ripley and Kodak.