an archive, not a rewrite

Work that stops being true is usually deleted, or quietly left where it falls. This record does neither. Deprecated material was imported into a place of its own with its history attached, and later the pieces nested inside it were flattened into a single archive.

The tension is legibility against lineage. Keeping the pieces nested preserves the shape of how the work was organised, and that shape is itself a record of decisions — what was thought to belong with what. Flattening makes the material usable as one body of work and destroys the seams. Deleting is cleanest and loses the most, including the evidence that effort was spent.

The decision treats abandonment as an event with a destination. The import is labelled an import, the flattening is labelled a migration, and the archive states what it is. Nothing is retold to look as though it always looked this way, which is the ordinary way a project edits its history: not by deleting, but by narrating the past in the present tense.

What it costs is a permanent obligation nobody wants to fund, since an archive has no user to charge, plus the loss of structure a future reader would have needed to understand why the material was shaped as it was.

What it proves is that the team budgets for its own past. Retaining what failed, and labelling it as failure, is a more expensive habit than deleting it and a far better predictor of how the same team will behave when the next idea does not work either.