Vast accumulations saturate our world: phone calls and emails stored by security agencies; every preference of every individual collected by advertisers; ID numbers, and maybe an iris scan, for every Indian; hundreds of thousands of whole genome sequences; seed banks of all existing plants, and of course, books... all of them. Just what is the purpose of these optimistically total archives, and how are they changing us? This issue of Limn asks authors and artists to consider how these accumulations govern us, where this obsession with totality came from and how we might think differently...