Virtually Disposable: A Theory and History of Digital Trash

Abstract

Virtually Disposable: A Theory and History of Digital Trash historicizes and critically analyzes the conditions under which the cultural category of trash does and does not come into play in historical and contemporary digital environments, from the American 1980s to the present. Understanding the determination of real-world objects as trash as a reflexive, cross-cultural aspect of the maintenance of physical space, this dissertation evaluates the criteria according to which modern users and web platforms perform the same calculus in their management of digital files, from the machine-readable forms of data collected by corporate entities to artifacts as potentially personally meaningful as a photo stored on one’s cell phone. Chapter 1 traces the development of delete functions on business-oriented personal computers, posing the graphical representation of delete in trash can-styled icons on user-facing interfaces as a design response to the limited storage affordances of local machines in the 1980s. This chapter locates the trash can icon as part of the same genealogy of digital waste-management strategies as commercial content-moderation of the Web 2.0 era (ca. 2006–) but advances their respective models of digital disposability in terms of “data custodians” (local, determined by storage) and “content janitors” (non-local, informed by hygiene). Chapter 2 thinks about the contemporary management of user-generated content by platforms in terms of archive, arguing that the cloud has ushered in a post-storage moment. The tacit valuation of user-generated content as data under platform capitalism may account for its seemingly indefinite maintenance online, but the same conditions of preservation and display on the user profile provoke new anxieties in the user that act upon their online self-representation in digital space, resulting in curated, digitally hygienic archives that are neither truly personal nor all that personally revealing. Chapter 3 then assesses the extent to which the value reflexively assigned to user-generated content (with a particular interest in digital images, in this case) under platform capitalism may reliably translate into extra-digital systems of value. This chapter catalogs various failed attempts on the part of relatively empowered cultural institutions such as the museum and art world to confer value on born-digital visual art and reads them in conversation with similarly doomed efforts to stabilize digital images as financial commodities, most notably in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Although digital media may appear virtual, digital culture of our post-cloud, post-Web 2.0 moment relies upon material infrastructure, the ongoing support of which depends upon the consumption of rare-earth minerals, energy, and water and which results in the generation of toxic e-waste. Virtually Disposable builds upon research located at the intersection of critical discard studies and environmental media studies by questioning the implicit determinations of value that inform and have informed the personal and corporate maintenance and disposal of digital files both today and historically. Analyzing the logics according to which a digitally mediated thing becomes disposable, as well as attending to the functional suspension of trash as a cultural category under the cloud and financial imperatives of platform capitalism, this dissertation accounts for a variable in the equation seldom examined in existing studies of the flows of e-waste alone: that the physical machines that afford file-storage reach their breaking points in no small part due to the deluge of value-unclear files they are now made to store and process.