WHAT DOES IT MEAN to collect in the digital age? Abundance inheres in digital objects through the possibility of their limitless duplication, a fact which should represent a challenge for collection. In this essay I will consider an attempt to make digital objects collectible by artificially imbuing them with scarcity, and thus making them discrete. Manufacturing that “digital scarcity” will in turn depend on an enormous energy investment, on the mobilization of collections of natural resources for the production of data. This process serves as an example of what I term the Data Anthropocene, the condition in which humans have taken on geological agency, and in which our data appear as a primary locus of that agency. In this time, a different sort of collection, the gathering together of water and mineral deposits, powers both digital abundance and digital scarcity, and the question of the collection of digital objects recedes behind the question of the collection of natural resources. My essay thus moves from the question of collecting in the digital age to the question of digital collecting in the Anthropocene.

Collecting Digital Cats

If our current moment is remembered at all, will it be remembered as the golden age of cat imagery? So great is the present glut of digital cats that “cat video” has become a byword for gratuitous digital imagery in general, and the mammal threatens to become little more than a corporeal extension of the meme. “The contemporary Internet was designed, in no small part, for the dissemination of cute pictures of cats,” writes Ethan Zuckerman, without a hint of hyperbole. The shift to “Web 2.0,” in which platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter depend on users’ uploaded content in remaking the landscape of the Internet, relies on the proliferation of digital objects—whether cat video, 3D tour, album track, or discursive essay—that are understood as having little inherent value. These websites, as we are by now all too aware, sell not their content to users but their users to advertisers. The value resides not in the cat video, but in the cat video watcher. Cat pictures, like all digital objects, thrive under the sign of abundance, appearing as weightless and free.