Paper short abstract:

Unpacking the embedding of old technologies in the new provides space to construct alternative accounts of inevitability and accelerationism in human experience of the digital.

Paper long abstract:

Two stories dominate our understandings of the drumbeat of technological change: one of its inexorable drive and one of its quickening pace. But we don't have to look too far though to find how the old is embedded in the new. Twitter, whose communication model nods towards the conventions of mobile phone text messaging (standardized in 1987) and whose client-server computational infrastructure is a legacy of 1970's distributed system design. Apple's iPhone, an icon of the contemporary, runs an operating system developed on the 1980's (BSD) branch of an operating system whose development began in the 1960's; and while there are no hard drives spinning in Apple's Watch, its operating system nonetheless treats its memory as if it were a magnetic medium from the 1950's. The programming concepts that lie behind each of these systems are older still. What, we might ask, is the oldest line of code in the Watch's operating system? Could it be older than the average age of Apple employees (reported as 33 in 2012)? This is not only possible but likely.

In this paper, I look for the resources that allow us to see the enfolding of many different human temporalities within the digital and hence to escape the logic and language of both inexorable change and acceleration. Thinking through the ancient, the immovable, the obsolete, and the obstreperously persistent helps us to find spaces for different human experience in the digital.