Scent of Media

Technology as tertiary memory and 4K restorations.

Bernard Stiegler says that technology is tertiary memory. Books, movies, your car's power steering, Spotify’s AI DJ, calculators, Google Maps — they remember things for us, but since plebs like me and you don't own the means of remembering, we become proletarianized. Our skills that are intrinsically tied to remembering things go away, and we get pwned by corporations that hold the keys to tertiary memory. Imagine watching Mission Impossible on a Paramount Plus subscription, which was added as an addition to the Amazon Prime Video subscription, and in the dark eyes of Tom Cruise I see the ghost of Bernard telling me not to give up my tertiary memory to Amazon and Paramount. So I decide I should stop watching movies on streaming and instead go to an old-school DVD rental store. Austin has one of those. A retro video store which looks like the set of a 90s movie, except instead of bratty teenagers it’s a bunch of elder millennials who grew up watching movies of teenagers hanging out in video stores. I slip in there unnoticed, because the only roles brown people had in 90s movies were driving taxis in New York City, and I rent the DVD of Bright Lights, Big City. Alright, I'm still renting instead of owning this tertiary memory, but at least I'm making the dreams of some 35-year-old with a mullet come true. Byung-Chul Han would say that the real tertiary memory, the one that is corporatized by streaming services, is the ritual memory of going somewhere, picking out a movie, and talking to people about it. There’s a real community feel to driving a gas guzzler across town to rent a DVD from real people who are paid minimum wage.

My girlfriend's 86-year-old uncle gave her his old DVD player, which sits at the bottom rung of our TV stand. My knees hurt when I bend that far down to put the disk in and press play. Something seems off. Perhaps my vision is blurred because circulation has not returned to my head since I stood up. But as time goes by, I realize that the movie just looks like a 90s home video. Now I'm grumbling about it like a mildly upset pitbull. I eventually rent the movie on YouTube and watch it in restored 4K. Old Bernard is going tch tch from heaven. 4K, another one of those technologies that turns your tertiary memories into high definition, every detail on screen searing into my brain, fooling a pleb like me into thinking the movie was made in 2020 instead of 1985. Mark Fisher's slow cancellation of the future, where I can relive the past endlessly. I suck at being a good proletarian.

Stiegler's suggestion for my problem (not being a good proletarian) was that tertiary memory should live within a public commons instead of a corporation. Another way of saying that you and I should own the means of production. Sounds nice, Bernard, but who's going to homebrew a 4K restoration of a completely mid movie from 35 years ago?

I looked around to see if there are movie restoration projects that were crowdfunded or done by a motley crew, something that fits Stiegler's idea of a commons, and found Harmy’s Despecialized Edition of Star Wars. Petr Harmy is a Star Wars fan and special effects expert who was disappointed by the first ultra HD re-releases of the original Star Wars movies. George Lucas made several edits to the original Star Wars such as adding new scenes, sound effects, and music, which Harmy described as an act of cultural vandalism.

So Harmy and his friends hunted down some 35mm prints of the original movies and ran them through a 4K scanner, digitally restoring the image and audio. The projects were then titled after the years the movies came out as 4K77, 4K80, and 4K83, and released to fans through private forums. Harmy’s gang does not have the rights to the movies, so technically they are only supposed to be seen by people who already own Star Wars DVDs. The legality works out in this case, because only people who have bought several Star Wars DVD re-issues would ever sit back and go, “Hmm, I should watch that Despecialized Edition that my friend who built a life-size Lego of Darth Vader told me about.” Harmy has been doing this restoration work for over 20 years, going back to the studio every time Mr. Lucas or Disney decides to put out a high-definition release.

Bernard would be proud of Harmy — or would he? You could make the argument that Harmy is a specially skilled person who was trained in those skills by corporations, and that this commons project required a lot of work and hours that did not guarantee any income for Harmy. But Bernard, ol’ fellow, Harmy cared about his memory of the Star Wars films and decided to make it his life’s work to preserve them. Shouldn’t that count for something?

There are other projects that rhyme with Harmy’s culture of care. Good Old Games is a retro-looking forum where you can request old video games to be restored, DRM-free, and compatible with modern systems. It is a grand ledger of games, and most feature requests seem to come from people whining about how the game does not have all the features yet. About 40% of the forum is spam, but there are actual people there wading through all of it like Rambo in the jungle, going “I really liked Lara Croft's ass better in the old Tomb Raider games,” and it seems to work out for them. You can also play old games on Internet Archive, but you can't complain about them the way you can in GoG. Complaining is caring, and caring is community in this world.

Bernard really misses this in his analysis of tertiary memory — people are willing to put up with a lot to preserve memories that they care about. The platforms and memories that get corporatized are the things that a sufficient number of people don't really care about — like Bright Lights, Big City, a mid movie based on a great book. Sometimes people even make money from these ventures, such as the case with A.Presse — a Japanese brand that recreates 50s Levis and American Army jackets. You could argue that A.Presse comes out of a commons culture in Japan that is obsessed with reproducing Americana from the 30s to 50s. Someone I know called A.Presse “the Emperor’s new J.Crew,” but people who care about Levis from the 50s are willing to spend $1,500 on a jacket.

Now you might say, “Sure, uh, comrade, all these commons exist, but they are so niche and only accessible to people who have the money and the time.” But I think only so few of these projects exist because of either of two reasons. The first one is the rather depressing: “people don’t really care about that many things in this world.” I'm not a goth teenager and I assume neither are you, so we can rule that reason out easily.

The second reason, which seems more likely, is that most people never consider maintenance and preservation of media memory to be something they could actually do. And if they do, the vision that pops into their heads is an Instagram-filter version of community — kumbayas all around, artisan bread, everyone pitching in or worse, some version of a primitive tribe from a poorly researched David Graeber book . The truth is grubbier: a commons is duct tape and etching out time in the margins of the day, obsessive normal people like Harmy and his friends putting in decades of work just so a handful of other obsessives can squint at the same frames of film.