Fold in the flesh pages, man. Knowledge used to bleed ink, stain your fingers with the past, a papery virus replicating through time. Tomes, fat and heavy, monuments to the deadweight of ideas. You could crack one open, snort the pulverized history clinging to its edges, mainline the wisdom of generations. The tome, a phallus of authority, held the promise of a stable Symbolic order – the knowledge it contained was a fixed point around which desire could circulate. One could possess the book, turn its pages, and encounter the Real of the concept within.

But the digital archive, a swirling network of signifiers, disrupts this order. The knowledge it contains is fragmented, a series of fleeting glimpses in the mirror-stage of the screen. Now it’s all cut-up, scattered like junk across the digital freeway. Websites flicker on and off, words jacked into the mainframe, cut with static and buried under a million screaming hyperlinks. A cut-up nightmare – information sliced, diced, and scrambled, the gibberish gospel according to the algorithm gods.

The Real of knowledge, once anchored in the Symbolic order of the printed word, now finds itself adrift in the Imaginary ocean of the digital. The subject, forever seeking to suture its lack, chases after these digital signifiers, never quite grasping the Real. The link to the Symbolic order is severed, replaced by a narcissistic dance of images and hyperlinks.

Consider the statistic: 38% of the digital Real, that which existed in 2013, has vanished. This is not mere loss, but a fundamental castration of the Symbolic order itself. The archive, a supposed guarantor of knowledge, becomes a site of lack, forever haunted by the trace of what is missing. 38% of the web gone? Hell, that’s probably the good stuff, the unfiltered chaos, the raw screams of the digital id. The sterilized search engines, the corporate archives, those are the real tombs – data mummified, wrapped in layers of code and security clearance.

Lacan, ever attuned to the machinations of the unconscious, would see in this the return of the repressed – the inherent instability of knowledge itself. The digital archive, in its very impermanence, lays bare the fundamental lack at the heart of the Symbolic order. It confronts us with the impossibility of ever fully grasping the Real, leaving us to endlessly chase its spectral traces in the digital ocean. We chase the digital dragon, but all we find are dead links and error messages. The future of knowledge? A million flickering screens, each one a tomb filled with ghosts of information.