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- Convenor:
-
Katie Mackinnon
(University of Copenhagen)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
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.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
The paper detects and analyzes imaginaries of blockchain’s temporal resilience, found in blockchain proponent documents. Such visions of blockchain pervasiveness “past-apocalypse” are linked to temporal logics of resource extractivism and transhuman accelerationism.
Paper long abstract
To enthusiasts, blockchain presents an “apocalypse-resistant” data-storage system, due to its robust decentralized structure and immutability (Big Questions, n.d.; CoinGecko, 2023; Howard, 2021). In Halpern et al. (2017), operative visions for the futures of digital infrastructures’ can be seen to contain both doom and hopefulness. Drawing on this frame, this paper identifies and discursively analyzes imaginaries of long-term resilience found on high traffic blockchain media and news platforms. Detected peri- and post-apocalyptic visions of blockchain within these documents are linked to temporal logics of resource extractivism and transhuman accelerationism. Analyzing the political and cultural implications of imaginaries of blockchain’s pervasiveness addresses a gap in critical scholarship, as well as expands on overall critical data and storage studies on the friction-filled relationship between material data presents and utopic data futures (Bresnihan & Brodie, 2023; Velkova, 2021).
Within the gathered documents, blockchain is seen as highly resilient, able to withstand internet and power outages, as well as political, ecological and economic crises. As blockchain nodes are stored in local computer hard disks and remote data centers, this resilience rests on the extraction connected to digital hardware production and maintenance (Brodie, 2025; Soto-Hernández, 2026). Such extractivist temporalities expect a time “after” extraction, where riches will make up for present damage (Jonkman & van Roekel, 2023). This aligns with transhumanist accelerationist logics of a time “after” the material boundness of consciousness (Krüger et al., 2021). Interrogating blockchain’s temporal logics expands the view of the socioeconomic and environmental aspects within visions of resilient technological systems.
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
Storage infrastructures reach their limits, DNA and biological storage emerge as alternatives. This paper explores the ethical and political questions raised by storing data in living media and asks whether these archives aim to transmit knowledge to future generations or preserve humanity’s memory.
Paper long abstract
As traditional infrastructures such as hard drives, magnetic tapes and data centres reach their physical and energy limits, new experimental forms of storage are emerging. Among these, data storage in DNA and storage in living biological forms offer a radical and ethical change. Transforming digital information into biological sequences encoded in DNA nucleotides is a particularly promising first step for this new generation of storage. This technology promises unprecedented storage density and the ability to preserve vast amounts of information for centuries, even millennia.
However, the promise of quasi-permanent memory raises important ethical and political questions. Which biological (living) elements can be considered suitable for storing data? What ethical frameworks should govern the use of biological media to preserve human information?
These new forms of storage also raise a fundamental question of purpose: for what purpose should storage on such a scale be implemented? One initial avenue explored in my research is that of transmission to future generations. However, in an increasingly unstable environmental and political context, these technologies rely on extremely sophisticated decoding and comprehension systems. Therefore, the desire to store ever more data can also be interpreted as an attempt to preserve the memory of humanity itself, in the event of its possible disappearance. This paper thus proposes to ask an essential question: who, in the future, would be able to decode and understand this stored information, if not perhaps ourselves?
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).