Abstract
Documentation has long been tied to knowledge production, and this chapter shows how both practices of documentation and of knowledge production are changing in today’s “post-fact” era. It focuses on documents related to preparedness, a national security paradigm that moved to the center of U.S. policy after September 11, 2001 and that simulates future catastrophic threats in order to plan for their emergence. Lindsay Thomas argues that by presenting speculation about future events as descriptions of the present, preparedness documents invest fiction with the epistemological weight and authority of fact. Additionally, paying attention to the mechanisms through which these documents are published and stored online reveals how the knowledge such documents claim to produce about the future are subject to constant updates and revisions. Thomas claims these shifts in practices of knowledge production change our understanding of documentation itself: to document comes to mean creating a world in addition to observing and reporting on that world. By documenting events that have not occurred and that cannot, by their nature as fiction, ever occur, preparedness documents use fiction as a source of empirical knowledge production. They are examples of what knowledge looks like after the fact.