Science & Tech Quote by Sean Booth

Preserve it, but don’t pretend the hard drive is a cathedral. Sean Booth’s line lands like a calm provocation from someone who’s spent decades turning machines into feeling. The first sentence is almost conservationist: an insistence that something fragile in culture - sound, process, mistakes, texture - deserves guarding. Then he undercuts the contemporary reflex that “digital” automatically equals progress. Storage, in his framing, isn’t liberation; it’s a kind of stasis. Endless archiving can become a mausoleum of options, where nothing has to be decided, and therefore nothing has to mean as much.

The pivot to “digital manipulation” reveals where his excitement actually lives: not in hoarding perfect copies, but in transformation. Manipulation implies touch, risk, authorship. It’s the difference between backing up a file and bending it until it becomes a new object. For an electronic musician, that’s a manifesto in miniature: the computer isn’t valuable as a vault, it’s valuable as an instrument.

There’s subtextual suspicion here of how digital culture sells permanence while quietly eroding memory. When everything is stored, nothing is kept; it’s just retrievable. Booth’s interest is in the active, messy moment where a sound is pushed, glitched, re-contextualized - where the human decision re-enters the machine. Preservation matters, but not as nostalgia. It matters so the raw material survives long enough to be reworked, misused, and made strange again.