Life in the ruins of digital futures. Knowledge infrastructures in late digitisation
Keywords:
ruination, late digitisation, knowledge infrastructures, project websites, link rotAbstract
Starting from the ritual of creating a website at the beginning of every research project, this talk proposes ruination studies as a lens on “late digitisation”: a moment in which the promises of connectivity regarding knowledge, power, and the material world are confronted with their ruins. Naming these ruins is a first step, followed by asking which parts need shoring, which can be repurposed as spolia, and which are rubble to be cleared. An exploratory probe into the afterlife of websites of digitalisation projects funded by the Research Council of Norway since 2004 finds that most survive as unmaintained archives on institutional servers that can safely be deleted, while robust standardised systems such as the DOI deserve shoring. Facebook pages and WordPress or Wix sites carry a “ruin memory” of past platform moments, and some abandoned domains have been taken over by casino advertising – parasites thriving in the ruins. (abstract prepared with the help of gen AI, the manuscript itself is 100% written "manually")
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