Paper short abstract

This paper detects and analyzes temporal logics of blockchain and their operationalization within blockchain communities and media. Categorizing these logics as preserving, anticipatory and apocalyptic, the paper inquires into the material, narrative, and social production of digital temporalities.

Paper long abstract

Time is a constitutive part of blockchain, as blocks are ordered according to intervals of time, creating a chain of data packets stretching into past and future. This technical configuration underlies blockchain thinking around past immutability, and simultaneous anticipatory futurity. In order to interrogate temporality on blockchain, this paper detects three operational temporal logics; preserving, anticipatory and apocalyptic, analyzing how these logics materialize within blockchain communities and media.

The paper draws on material from blockchain content gathered in forums, blogs, news outlets, blockchain platforms etc., as well as through participatory fieldwork and interviews in select blockchain communities. From this material, the detected temporal logics of blockchain are shown to have narrative, technical, material, and social outcomes and conditions. In the material, blocks are often understood as immutable and therefore to be permanent and persistent over time. These preserving notions of blockchain are, however, both complicated and extrapolated in imaginaries and material conditions of change and breakdown of blockchain systems.

Fundamentally, this paper draws on the work of Swartz (2017), and her conceptualization of radical blockchain projects as performatively leaning into and creating futures. This paper also draws on the work of scholars who have interrogated the material and social aspects of digital temporal regimes. It seeks to expand on critical data and storage studies on the friction-filled relationship between material data presents and imagined data futures (Bresnihan & Brodie, 2023; Velkova, 2021; Halpern, 2017), developing these thoughts within the framework of blockchain.

Paper short abstract

This paper analyses the tension between ephemeral data storage and its long-term material implications. I propose to examine palimpsestic temporal regimes behind current data storage practices and highlight the cryogenic condition of these “hardwired temporalities” (Volmar and Stine 2021).

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses the tension between ephemeral data storage and its long-term material implications. I propose to examine palimpsestic temporal regimes behind current data storage practices and highlight the cryogenic condition of these “hardwired temporalities” (Volmar and Stine 2021). That is, the overlapping, sedimented logics of time that govern today's short-term demands for instant availability alongside the material consequences of the infrastructures serving them.

Contemporary life is increasingly organized around the desire for perpetual digital availability of data, services, and other digitalized commodities. What may have become a naturalized and thus invisible condition is an anthropogenic cryosphere facilitating this hyperconnected world: cooling technologies ensuring the continuous storage and transmission of information in real-time.

Although virtual storage may appear as a smooth and frictionless operation, the infrastructures sustaining this and the data itself are subject to tangible friction and decay. Viewed through the lens of deep time, the disproportion of scale becomes stark: to sustain our onlife experience that constitutes a vanishingly small fraction of our planet's history, we are depleting rare earth minerals at critical rates (cf. Crawford 2021) as well as fresh water for rising cooling demands.

Drawing on literature from infrastructure and media studies, and philosophy of technology, I examine the “hardwired temporalities” and cryo-political drivers that shape current storage practices and sustain expectations of permanent digital availability. I argue that current practices of data storage are driven by short-term capital interests following a logic of deferred decay or “slow violence” (Nixon 2011).

Paper short abstract

We examine how the temporalities of biodata are constructed in policy, critically discussing the futures that are imagined, the ways in which the limits of data storage are defined, and the circumstances under which data storage may end.

Paper long abstract

Data repositories and knowledge bases are now central to research in the life sciences. These forms of data storage (collectively termed biodata resources) include well-known knowledge bases such as UniProtKB, but also a wide range of biodatabases and repositories of varying sizes and visibility. These resources are framed as enabling data-intensive research methods, supporting long-term reuse and traceability of research outputs, and allowing researchers to meet open access mandates. As such, there is increasing emphasis on ensuring their ‘sustainability’. Within this expanding patchwork of biodata resources, however, temporal aspects of data storage remain strikingly undefined: how long data should persist, what level of preservation is desirable, and at what point deaccession can become legitimate. 

This project explores these dimensions by examining how the temporalities of biodata are constructed in coordination efforts from bodies such as the Global Biodata Coalition and ELIXIR. We present an analysis of empirical materials from these bodies that lay out the process of selecting ‘core’ resources - those deemed especially important to sustain. In doing so, we identify assumptions about the temporality of data lifecycles, collection, use and preservation, and critically discuss the futures that are imagined, the ways in which the limits of data storage are defined, and the circumstances under which data storage may end. By bringing together STS sensibilities with approaches from archival studies, we suggest that it is important to examine not just what data storage is represented as being for, but when those uses are imagined.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how indigenous temporal concepts can be stored in digital systems. Focusing on the Tzeltal (Mexico) and Yupno (PapuaNewGuinea) languages, it shows how uphill/downhill time metaphors challenge Western-biased infrastructures and can inform more inclusive, non-colonial data storage

Paper long abstract

Long before computers and digital systems were used to store information, society employed various other methods. For instance, the Roman census in Egypt and other texts on clay or papyrus illustrate that the need to store and index information has existed since the very beginning of the world civilization.

In recent decades, the Western world has developed the technology and infrastructure necessary to run computers and store information. The heterogeneity of information storage solutions, from mobile phones to data centers, underlines our lack of control over where and how our information is stored.

An emerging negative side-effect is that those systems primarily support a Western way of thinking. Since their foundation, software companies have embedded various colonial biases in their solutions. For instance, structures of information were built that did not include support for indigenous knowledge practices, such as storytelling, and Western working hours defined the format of the electronic calendar. Therefore, it has proven difficult to represent indigenous knowledge when technology is used (Christie, 2005), which has a ripple effect on social inclusion.

Using a post-humanistic theoretical framework, this paper discusses how different indigenous representations of time can challenge Western-biased infrastructures and support more inclusive, non-colonial data storage.

The primary example used in this study is the linguistic representation of time going uphill (i.e., the future) and downhill (i.e., the past). This linguistic representation is used by the remote “Tzeltal”-speaking rural community of Tenejapa, in Chiapas, Mexico and in the “Yupno”-speaking area of Papua New Guinea (Cooperrider, 2022).