Short Abstract

This panel foregrounds the politics of storage as a key site through which the material, temporal, and environmental dimensions of data are negotiated. It invites papers that approach data storage through the lens of deep time.

Description

As many scholars have observed over the past decade, we are in an era of data accumulation marked by escalating computational demands and expanding infrastructures of datafication. Yet alongside the accumulation of data lies its inevitable loss, decay, and disappearance—revealing that ephemerality is not an anomaly but a constitutive feature of digital systems. This panel foregrounds the politics of storage as a key site through which the material, temporal, and environmental dimensions of data are negotiated. Questions of resiliency, sustainability, and efficiency are inseparable from those of availability, affordability, and access, positioning storage as a deeply political terrain.

Across geography, political ecology, media, and environmental studies, scholars have traced how storage not only sustains the capitalist value of data but also participates in worldmaking: producing new temporalities, shaping planetary material flows, and obscuring the extractive and degenerative realities on which digital life depends. Emerging innovations in storage—ranging from glass, ceramic, and stone to biological and cryogenic media—further reimagine the scales and lifespans of data, extending archival imaginaries into geological and planetary timescales.

This panel invites papers that approach data storage through the lens of deep time—as both a conceptual provocation and a methodological orientation that foregrounds long temporal entanglements. How might deep time render visible the sedimented infrastructures, colonial inheritances, and ecological afterlives of digital systems? Contributions may draw on perspectives including:

• Fossil, mineral, and geological imaginaries of computation

• Material afterlives of data centers, servers, and e-waste

• Temporalities of decay, obsolescence, and ruin in digital infrastructures

• Archival futures and speculative storage experiments

• Energetics and environmental costs of data preservation

• Indigenous temporalities, custodianship, and data sovereignty

• Infrastructural maintenance, repair, and care across deep timescales

By bringing together diverse engagements with storage’s temporal and material politics, this panel seeks to open new modes of experiencing and theorizing data’s deep temporal situatedness.

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