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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).