ABSTRACT
Lists are important because they travel across media networks and historical ways of knowing. They operate at a layer that is not often studied: formats, paperwork, and cultural techniques. Listing activities inscribe distinctions that have material effects on the composition of populations, knowledge formations, and temporal operations. Lists show us how media networks function and change. They even offer a space for imagining alternate possibilities—not just for media and technological development, but for social and political life. Modern listing activities trend towards oppression and control. A deeper history of the form shows that there are other kinds of lists. These offer a glimmer of ways we might make our administrative and calculative techniques more just. The point is not to escape or ignore bad political trajectories by retreating into aesthetics. It is to demonstrate poetic techniques and traditions that clear a space for thinking about alternative political realities.
