As more information is created by institutions over time the value of each individual piece of information goes down. Whereas when dealing with scarce medieval documents one must extrapolate the context from the scant information which can be divined from the records, now the broader context must be established first in order to limit the vast quantity of information available to what is actually relevant. If the archive contains everything, it becomes as useless as if it contained nothing. And if the role of the archivist is merely to hoard everything the institutions that create records produce rather than critically evaluating which possible records best reflect the reality of what is being documented, then archival studies cannot really be a field in its own right, because it merely collects rather than studying. Cook is right that archivists must record the forest rather than getting lost in the trees.

Robinson is right to emphasize the particular threat securitization poses to Black and Indigenous people, but wrong to frame this as the main issue, as though securitization of public space would be fine if only it were racially equitable. Homeless, mentally ill, or otherwise marginalized people are still endangered by the police even if they happen to be white, because the function of police is first and foremost to defend the propertied from the unpropertied.