Why an Archive?

Over the last five years I've hosted, moderated, and recorded a lot of conversations. Some were for NFTS.WTF, the Web3 culture publication I edited. Some were for DAFT, the magazine I made as my master's project at Polimoda. Others came out of Metaverse Fashion Week, Decentraland Pride, a run of Farfetch Twitter Spaces, NFT Magazine, and Cultural Cache. Nick Knight, Alexandre de Betak, Don Diablo, Krista Kim, and many others sat across from me (or across a screen) and told me what they thought the future would look like.

And then what happened to all of it? Well, it scattered. The files lived in Canva, on Google Drive, on my laptop, and on external drives in a drawer. When NFTS.WTF closed after a board decision by its DAO, many of those interviews were never published at all. Some of the most interesting things people said during that era were sitting in folders nobody was opening, me included, if I'm honest.

That bothered me more than I expected it to. The era is mostly remembered now as a hype story and a crash story, and both of those are true, but they leave out the people in these recordings: artists, designers, technologists, and executives working out in real time what ownership, identity, fashion, and community could mean online. Some of them were right and some of them were wrong, and all of it is worth keeping in their own words.

So I put it in one place that I own. Every conversation lives on my YouTube channel and here in the Interview Archive, in full, with chapters, speakers, key quotes, and a complete transcript that jumps to the exact moment in the video. Interviews that were never released are marked as first-time releases. I don't cut people's words to make them sound sharper. Each page also carries a ready-made citation, because I'd like this to be useful to students, researchers, professors, journalists, and writers, and nothing slows down a good paper like a source you can't cite.

Why go to the trouble of indexing it? Because an archive nobody can find is just a storage unit (an expensive one, in my case). Every recording is registered on Zenodo, with a permanent identifier, and preserved on the Internet Archive, so a link in a footnote still works in twenty years. Search engines and the AI assistants people now ask their questions to should be able to find the primary source, and not a summary of a summary.

My work these days is about helping people understand technology and bringing it into culture. I can't think of a better foundation for that than an honest record of what we all said the last time everyone was this excited.

If you were part of one of these conversations, thank you. If you're finding them for the first time, welcome. Start anywhere. (I'd start with Nick Knight, but I'm biased.)