Toward a Minor Tech:Mladentseva 500
The Problem of Scale in the Conservation of “Big Tech Heritage” Objects
Anna Mladentseva
Big tech products and platforms are proliferating and expanding with unprecedented speed, finding their way into cultural heritage collections. Indeed, some institutions have already started collecting objects manufactured by industrial giants, giving rise to the phenomenon of “big tech heritage”. These institutions include the Victoria & Albert museum in London, who have collected the iPhone 6 and the instant messaging service WeChat as part of their ‘Rapid Response Collecting’ initiative, dedicated to preserving contemporary objects from the world of design and manufacturing.
The sheer scale of these objects—coupled with precarious conditions generated by the industry of big tech—presents tensions with regards to their future conservation. Many of the older cultural objects built with obsolete technologies—including artistic experiments with technology, videogames and MMORPGs—are cared for by communities that are nostalgic over the times they spent interacting with them. For instance, enthusiasts of the early, online social world CyberTown have been independently migrating the world, giving it a second life with the help of contemporary JavaScript frameworks.
Moreover, the conservation of software and other time-based media has long relied on knowledge possessed by ordinary communities of users that have once interacted with a given technology in one way or another. Conservators at the Preservation & Media Archaeology Lab (PAMAL) in Avignon, France, when restoring a series of artworks made by Eduardo Kac for the Minitel terminal, have re-appropriated the underground practice of Minitel hackers to create their own single-channel micro-servers that the terminal can communicate with today, despite the original infrastructure being obsolete as of 2012 (Guez et al. 2017, 116).
With so much of knowledge and labour required for the conservation of born-digital artefacts being dispersed across self-organising fan or enthusiast communities—with notions of affect and desire at the core of their motivations for care—it is important to question whether some of the more contemporary computer technologies allow for a genuine construction of desire in the way that earlier technologies did.
In the climate of uninterrupted attention economies and imposed libidinal forces, big tech products proliferate through a careful, curated construction of subjectivity and desire. Franco Berardi notes this and argues for an emergent category of labourers—the ‘cognitariat’ that ‘[put] their [souls] to work’ (Berardi 2009, 24). Although, historically, certain categories of workers, such as craftsmen, have also been motivated by desire, Berardi argues that it takes a more malignant form with contemporary ‘info-workers’, ‘producing anxiety, incertitude and constant change’ (2009, 86).
It seems as though desire and affect, while at the core of care, are more closely interlinked with exploitation than one might think. Will objects that emerge out of products created by industrial, big tech giants be cared for in the same way as some of the earlier technologies, given how precarious the conditions of desire in these products and platforms are? Should we “scale down” these objects in order to preserve them and create a more equitable dynamic of care?