A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an essay in ArtReview by Michelle Santiago Cortés titled “We All Have ‘Archive Anxiety’ Now.” It put into words something I — and probably you, too — have felt for a while now: the constant urge to save. Everything. Screenshots, PDFs, voice notes, pirated books, broken links, family photos, tweets we’ll never revisit. It’s not just digital clutter. It’s a quiet, increasingly urgent form of resistance.

Cortés calls it “archive anxiety,” borrowing the phrase from writer Bami Oke, who once described her mother’s 53 open browser tabs as a kind of digital survival instinct. Why do we keep so many things we may never use again? Because, in a world where everything we make can be deleted with a click, saving becomes a form of control — over our history, our culture, our memory.

The entry point into Cortés’ essay is a moment of pop culture poignancy: Bad Bunny’s 2025 album Debí Tirar Más Fotos — “I Should’ve Taken More Photos.” The title sparked a viral TikTok trend: people posting old photos of relatives, neighborhoods, homes that no longer exist. Some were soft and sentimental; others quietly political. Diasporic communities — especially Palestinians — embraced the trend with particular intensity, using it to preserve what is at risk of being erased. Even Bad Bunny himself joined in, posting a tearful video under his own song as personal and collective memories flowed through the algorithm.

But this isn’t just about nostalgia. Cortés describes a new kind of digital activism: shadow archiving. In an age of disappearing links and unstable platforms, people are downloading en masse — creating their own libraries of books, films, academic papers, leaked documents. One striking example is Anna’s Archive, a decentralized open-access repository born after the takedown of Z-Library. And it’s not just students and researchers using it. According to Ars Technica, Meta has scraped over 80 terabytes of data — including content from LibGen and Z-Library — to train its AI models. Meanwhile, individual users have been prosecuted for downloading a fraction of that material.

It’s a sharp reminder that digital ownership is mostly an illusion. The music we “buy” on Apple, the films we “own” on Amazon — they’re licensed, not truly ours. Even major outlets like i-D and MTV have been deleting their own archives simply to cut server costs. What happens when cultural memory is managed by shareholders?

Cortés argues that the archive, once a dusty room full of boxes, is now a battleground. And in this context, saving becomes radical. Archiving becomes political. Preserving becomes an act of defiance against digital amnesia.

We save things — not because we’ll definitely need them again — but because one day, someone might. Because in a world designed to forget, the act of remembering is power.