Category:Post-Digital Itch

In 2018, in collaboration with Wikimedia Foundation Philippines and Bantayog ng mga Bayani (BB) Foundation, a small team of researchers was tasked with digitizing BB's small archive on mosquito press ephemera from the 70s and 80s, the tail-end of the dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda. ^[1]

This 3-month program at Bantayog ng mga Bayani—officially under the Wikipedian in Residence format—had a specific goal: to use the digitized material from Bantayog’s archive as secondary sources in the writing of wiki pages about the Marcoses and their cronies. The initiative arises in response to repeated, concerted attempts at historical revisionism on Marcos-related Wikipedia pages. This suspicious editing activity was flagged by experienced Wikipedia editors and democracy activists in Manila. The revisionism coincided with the election of Rodrigo Duterte, aka The Punisher, as president of the Philippines and with the failed vice-presidential campaign of Bong Bong Marcos, son of Ferdinand and Imelda. Though Bong Bong's bid for the vice presidency was ultimately unsuccessful, Duterte has still expressed his support for the Marcos heir, raising concerns about the possibility of a larger return of the Marcoses to power. There is a fear that, should any of the Marcos family members gain larger political traction, one of the first orders of business on their agenda would be to dismantle institutions such as BB and destroy evidence of their historical abuses.

The resulting digitized material of the WiR program has been requested from BB in order to safely upload and store it on a server outside of the Philippines. Students of PZI XPUB will be tasked to construct an archive structure that should safeguard this material, making it difficult to locate and dismantle in case of attempted censorship. Playing upon the idea of a "mosquito" archive—a swarm or scourge of information that is difficult to exterminate—the idea is to leave behind a fully functional file storage system that may also take into account the following on-the-ground needs for political activists engaged in gathering data. These are, specifically, needs related to fact creation (making original information sources), fact assembly (creation of archives of these sources), and fact retrieval (building of narratives with original sources). These facts refer to politically sensitive topics in which a microminority opposes an authoritarian regime's interests. They are framed here within the biological condition of the mosquito itself.