Arctic Archives: Temporal Politics of Platform Power
A hybrid public lecture by Katie MacKinnon.
Abstract
Over the past couple of years, several deep-time data archival projects have emerged. With them, the politics of data loss in deep-time archival processes reveal how platform centralization and control reshape the future of data preservation. The Arctic World Archive is located in an abandoned coal mine in Svalbard, Norway. It stores data offline using silver halide crystals on polyester film which is created, operated, and maintained by the Norwegian company Piql. In February 2020, GitHub curated an algorithmically selected “greatest hits” collection of 17,000 data repositories, migrating them from GitHub servers to this deep time archival format known as Piql Film, which claims to preserve data from somewhere between 500-1000 years.
Similarly, Microsoft’s Project Silica is an archive media primarily for Microsoft Azure, their cloud computing platform. Data inscribed on quartz glass is a “low-cost, durable WORM media that is electromagnetic field-proof and offers lifetimes of tens to hundreds of thousands of years […] storing data for millennia.” Cerabyte, a German company is developing ceramic nano memory that is a “new way to store data without media life limits […] with a 5000-year track record as a reliable data storage”. And Lonestar, an American company, is sending SpaceX rockets with data to the moon. Through an empirical examination of these various projects and theoretical engagement with the temporalities of platforms and archival technologies, this paper expands on emerging work in STS, media studies, and critical data studies that attend to the politics of deep-time data preservation. It contributes to these fields by foregrounding how platform-driven archival practices extend centralization into the future, creating conditions in which the preservation of data paradoxically entails its stasis and potential obsolescence.