The resiliency of the memory institution is impaired by depending on public or private state power as an anchor. Evidence for this is shown in the ample traces in the archival record of the enmeshing of such Black state power as has been achieved in emancipatory or postcolonial schemes in an international system which will destroy all around it rather than dismantle the structures which maintain it, one of which structures is the subjugation of the many for the benefit of a few. The neutrality of archival practice in the service of such structures is under challenge from both a change in methods of creating and managing records relying on open formats, protocols, and algorithms and a change of industrial organization made possible by interoperable systems and inexpensive broadband networking. The nature of the state under the various revolutions of the past 500 years have changed archives as an institution and as practice; the contemporary change creates the opportunity to drive that change toward the memory commons model. This paper argues that such a drive can come through the bottom-up definition of a specific poetic counternarrative memory and defines how a commons can be built around it
