Revisiting Dead Drops as Public Anarchival Events

The first Dead Drop I visited was a digital exhibit for a gallery in Philadelphia. Soaking wet from a spring thunderstorm, I had located the flash drive in an apartment complex vestibule. Struggling to hold my laptop with wet hands, I was eventually able to access various artistic works that included images of broken media and videos playing the performance of someone waiting for a downloaded file. In the exhibit's own words, they were “compositions anchored in spatiotemporal objects” that related to the experience of using, or put differently, blurring online-offline experiences.

Dead Drops are artistic practices that consist of 'injecting’ a USB flash drive in publicly accessible areas for offline file sharing. What looks like a laptop plugging into a brick wall. There are thousands of injected dead drops all over the world, a database can be found on the website deaddrops.com.

This form of injection through artistic intervention often takes shape through interfacing with a cemented USB stick located in a wall, but they can also be mobile by adding them to buses, taxis, or even more enjoyable ways of interfacing like through the collar of a dog. Here, we are led through unforeseen network routes emerging in real-time where there are missed connections, interfacial events on the fly, chance moments of communication through an animal's patterns. Many Dead Drops are filled with books, movies, music, but also intimate pictures, travel notes, favorite recipes, and art. One Dead Drop recounts that the two young lovers who installed the USB drive will be moving away from each other the next day, and so, on their last day, they injected their own Dead Drop for others to share and explore writing, music, and photos.

Dead drops as a network interface find themselves operating as a critical agent in the governmentality that urban planning can implement, through either expanding or limiting affective relations.

Where one encounters a Dead Drop presents a network of habits that un-cloud moments, present awkward fumblings while pushing metal into brick, and create reimaginings of democratic transparency. These potentials to rearrange and re-emerge with different behaviors and sociospatial norms highlights how much the city inhabitant is influenced by their embedded infrastructure, their embodied memory and habitual networks.

With this in mind, we can reflect on encountering a material Dead Drop as an interfacial event that leads one to take on not just a participatory role in urban planning, but that of caretaker, for the collection as well as the material storage of information itself. One has full autonomy, they can mend the cement, bend the metal, insert, edit, delete, or destroy the device entirely.

In May of this year I decided to inject my own Dead Drop and further explore what could be felt, if anything, from these practices. My Dead Drop contained a loose assortment of books, political organizing tools, music I was enjoying that week, and an editable txt file for others to engage with. I found a tunnel near my house that led to the local train station and I cemented the drive between two bricks and waited.

When I finally go back to visit the dead drop, I awkwardly scrap my laptop against brick, leaving traceable markings (I of course still carry with me normative ideals of smoothness, transparency, and seamlessness when it comes to interfacial expectations). Once I connected I see no one has deleted my content, in fact the only thing that has changed is someone had edited the txt file, which was empty other than the title: Hello Stranger.

Not knowing what to do, and giddy with the idea that at least one person has found my digital device wedged in concrete, I leave without making any changes. A few days later, when I return, I found that my Dead Drop was destroyed, removed, and the hole plastered over. Nothing was left but metallic bits scattered on the train stop floor.

While nothing significant came from my Dead Drop (yet!) outside of the haunting ‘hello,’ I had the urge to try and write, produce something, that explained the product of the strange communication I was wrapped up in and the unfamiliar temporal longing to go back. Practices of the anarchive, like file sharing, are essential in giving these intensities their own time, like an opening to consider the temporal moments of waiting. This made me think of the downloading, the walking, the plugging in with Dead Drops. What could be learned from urban design that would consider time in relation to these forgetting, dying, and glitchy elements of technology?

For me, each node, each point in the Dead Drop as network, leads us to potential vulnerable transparencies, risks and paranoia that arise with the digital glory holes.

The collaborative nature of dead drops plays with old methods of file storage and new rhythms of urban relation that are not anticipated or “pre-programmed,” instead they are tactical and resilient, elusive and destructive, they provide an artistic intervention that at the very least considers an open ethics of offline temporality when we design HCI devices.

In my experience with these devices, I cannot help but feel led to a familiar modulation of control, to follow the orders of the USB, to sit, to wait in the patient temporal process of communicating with the offline network that says, “No, after you.”