In October 2018, critic and journalist Kate Wagner published an article in The Baffler about online communities of hobbyist preservationists. They were collecting imagery of decaying and decommissioned buildings and posting their investigations on image-based social media sites, gaining huge followings. The phenomenon as described by Wagner constitutes a shadow populist historic preservation movement that rivals “the two most substantial national surveys of written, photographic, and architectural documentation of American vernacular architecture, combined,” meaning the Library of Congress’s Historic American Building Survey (HABS) and Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS).
Instagram has its own brand of hobbyist preservationists. Rather than collective image gathering that defines
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