The Politics of the Container
We often assume that a "file format" is just a technical specification—a boring list of bytes and headers. Archaeobytology rejects this neutrality. A file format is a frozen set of decisions about what matters in the world.
When a format compresses data, it must decide what to throw away. These decisions are not purely mathematical; they are ideological. They prioritize specific human senses (psychoacoustics), specific economic goals (bandwidth efficiency), and specific legal regimes (Digital Rights Management).
Case Studies in Encoding
Archaeobytologists study formats to decode their underlying worldviews:
The MP3 and the Ear
As Jonathan Sterne documents in MP3: The Meaning of a Format, the MP3 algorithm was built on a model of "perceptual coding." It assumes that the human ear cannot hear certain frequencies when louder ones are present (auditory masking). It deletes these "irrelevant" sounds.
The Ideology: The file asserts that fidelity is less important than portability. It enshrines a specific biological model of "normal hearing" as the universal standard, literally deleting data that falls outside that norm.
The PDF and the Page
The Portable Document Format (PDF) was created by Adobe to ensure a document looked exactly the same on any screen. Ideally, it mimics paper.
The Ideology: The PDF values visual rigidity over semantic fluidity. Unlike HTML, which reflows to fit the user's device (democratizing access), the PDF enforces the author's original layout as sacred. It is an authoritarian format that privileges the printer over the reader.
Field Notes
The "Raw" Fallacy: Even so-called "Raw" formats (camera RAW) are ideological. They capture what the sensor sees, but the sensor acts based on the manufacturer's color science (Bayer filter arrays). There is no "zero-degree" recording; every capture is an interpretation.
Ghost Data: In 2013, Xerox photocopiers were found to be silently altering numbers in scanned documents. The JBIG2 compression algorithm, optimized to make text look "clean," was hallucinating "6"s into "8"s because they looked similar. The format's ideology—"cleanliness is better than noise"—overrode the truth of the document.
Ephemera
Format Ideology explains why the "Glitch Art" movement is political. By breaking the codec (databending), artists reveal the hidden structures and assumptions of the format. A glitch is the format confessing its own rules.