Toward a Minor Tech:Mladentseva

The Problem of Scale in the Conservation of “Big Tech” Heritage Objects

As “big tech” products and platforms proliferate and become increasingly present in our lives, it is important that we consider whether and how these technologies will become part of our cultural heritage. The somewhat mundane hardware and software objects such as smartphones, social media sites and mobile applications may offer valuable cultural insight to future generations. Indeed, museums have already started integrating objects that may be described as “big tech heritage” into their collections, including the Victoria & Albert museum who have collected the iPhone 6 and the instant messaging service WeChat as part of their ‘Rapid Response Collecting’ initiative. At the same time, in media studies, we observe a renewed interest in, what Melanie Swalwell refers to as, a ‘vernacular digitality’: ‘computing and computer culture as it was practiced by “ordinary” people’ (Swalwell 2021, 12). Although Swalwell’s formulations of a vernacular digitality are rooted in a media archaeological exploration of microcomputing practice from the 1980s and its associated “homebrew” games, someday the sites and applications that we use daily today will, without doubt, also age and become part of computing history.

Yet there is one key factor that divides these new technologies from the old ones: scale. This essay problematises the scale of big tech heritage objects in the context of their future conservation by expanding on Franco Berardi’s explorations on psychopathology and exploitation founded on speed. I revise Berardi’s argument using Anna Tsing’s formulations on scale; and in particular, the tension that manifests between the “bigness” of capitalism and difference. With the rise of information technologies, Berardi notes a shift of manual labour into cognitive labour (Berardi 2009, 79). What makes this shift problematic is speed, as manifested in flexibility, “just-in-time” production and other precarious and insecure working conditions (Berardi 2009, 86). Besides speed, desire becomes an essential characteristic of this new category of labourers—the ‘cognitariat’—that ‘[put] their [souls] to work’ (Berardi 2009, 24). Interpreting communities of technology enthusiasts as a category of labourers whose work is underpinned by desire, I question whether contemporary technologies, in line with Berardi’s argument, position this desire as exploitative—rather than genuine—and thus unsustainable. Tsing, on the other hand, writes on ‘supply chain capitalism’: a theory that addresses both the scale of capitalism—‘global integration’—and the diverse niches—'varied class niches and racial, ethnic, national, sexual, and religious positions’—that it forms, suggesting that it thrives on difference (Tsing 2009, 150-152). I argue that these readings offer insight into the problematic landscape of affect that big tech products and platforms craft, which may have lasting effects on the way in which the objects that emerge out of these technologies are conserved. With so much of knowledge required for the conservation of born-digital artefacts being dispersed across self-organising fan or enthusiast communities, it is important to question whether contemporary computer technologies allow for a genuine construction of desire in the way that earlier technologies did. Many cultural objects built with obsolete technologies are cared for by communities that are nostalgic over the times they spent interacting with them. Will objects that emerge out of products created by industrial, big tech giants be cared for in the future in the same way?

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. For example, 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). In other instances, these communities take it upon themselves to perform the conservation work. CyberTown is one of the earliest massive multiplayer online role-playing games that was built with VRML (virtual reality modelling language) and a plug-in developed by Blaxxun Interactive. As a three-dimensional standard, VRML has been superseded by X3D, while the Blaxxun plug-in that turned single-user VRML into multi-user environments has become defunct together with the company that supplied it. Nonetheless, CyberTown enthusiasts have been independently migrating the world, giving it a second life with the help of contemporary JavaScript frameworks (see https://www.cybertownrevival.com/#/place/enter).

Both restoration projects are undoubtedly laborious and other alternative, less time-consuming restoration pathways—such as emulation—exist. Yet these projects appear to be driven not by productivity or efficiency but nostalgia, desire and other systems of affect. Indeed, Jack McConchie, time-based media conservator at the Tate, writes that caring for objects supposes an ‘often hidden mode of personal relating: connecting through, feeling and showing love’ (McConchie 2022). Although, for Berardi, capitalist productivity and personal affect are becoming increasingly entangled by virtue of contemporary information technology. Berardi notes a significant disparity between ‘craftsmen’ and ‘info-workers’:

‘The investment of desire, which for the craftsman deeply connected to its local community and its needs used to have a reassuring character, for the info-worker develops along very different lines, producing anxiety, incertitude and constant change’ (Berardi 2009, 86).

In this way, although both craftsmen and info-workers apply creativity in their work, the latter are subjected to psychopathological outcomes such as anxiety, panic and depression—the ultimate antithesis to desire.

It is interesting that Berardi identifies speed—or ‘constant change’—as comorbid with cognitive labour, as I would suggest that scale is far more significant. After all, many of the products and platforms on which we perform such cognitive work are manufactured by industrial giants such as Amazon, Google and Apple. Moreover, following Tsing, these giants rely on global supply chains for the assembly of their devices, many of which are made up of precious metals and minerals mined all over the world, sometimes in disadvantaged communities. The psychic stress that Berardi describes results from a ‘constant exploitation of attention’ (Berardi 2009, 105)—machine learning algorithms that manifest in curated timelines designed to capture and exploit our attention for data and profit. The outcome is a somewhat artificial manifestation of desire—celebrating difference in a cruel way and exploiting diversity for the sake of generating clicks and capital. Most importantly, this sort of desire is unsustainable.

To conclude, it is difficult to imagine that ordinary users of contemporary, big tech products will possess a personal attachment to technology in the same way that CyberTown restorers do over the relatively unknown, early internet technology of VRML. This raises issues with regards to the sustainability of cultural objects that depend on these technologies. Despite the highly problematic landscape that these technologies engender, they form a significant part of computing history and are therefore worth preserving. Perhaps we should start a process of ‘scaling down’ these objects in order to preserve them.

References

Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. 2009. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Guez, Emmanuel, Stricot, Morgane, Broye, Lionel and Bizet, Stéphane. 2017. ‘The afterlives of network-based artworks.’ Journal of the Institute of Conservation 40, no. 2: 105-120.

McConchie, Jack. 2022. ‘‘Nothing Comes Without its World’: Learning to Love the Unknown in the Conservation of Ima-Abasi Okon’s Artworks.’ Tate Papers, no. 35. Accessed 16 December 2022. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/35/learning-to-love-the-unknown-conservation-ima-abasi-okon-artworks.

Swalwell, Melanie. 2021. Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Tsing, Anna. 2009. ‘Supply Chains and the Human Condition.’ Rethinking Marxism 21, no. 2: 148-176.

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