Longtermist ideas and language have become an important ideological source for elite figures in ‘Big Tech’ today. This article critiques longtermism, arguing that it constructs an increasingly influential temporal plane which rebalances our grasp of historical time. Building upon historical theory, this article argues that longtermism’s historical time is distinct from that of ‘modern’ progress as well as presentism. To not only critique but to resist this historical time, this article draws upon Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history and methodology of actualization, arguing for the development and use of methods of resistance that pierce and disturb the historical continuum emanating from longtermism.

This paper draws on ethnographic and historical research at two Australian libraries to explore how the platformization of the web has altered the content, character, and potential future utility of web archives. I argue that, in attempting to collect social media, these libraries face a double bind: while web crawling undertaken at the National Library of Australia allows for immediate but often incomplete or inconsistent access, the API-based approach taken by the State Library of New South Wales constrains both the data collected and how it can be made accessible due to a shifting set of rules that are established and enforced by platforms. By examining the constraints of current strategies to collect, preserve, and make available social media content, I illustrate how changes to platform design and policies significantly influence what is included in web archives and how they are made available. As the ruptures and inconsistencies of collections of social media in web archives are often opaque to both creators of web archives and those using them, I argue that web archives can be read “along the archival grain” for evidence of the platformization of the web. This approach, which draws on anthropologist Ann Stoler’s critical readings on the form and placement of colonial archives (rather than just their contents), allows an assessment of how the gaps, silences, densities, and distributions of web archives are shaped by the shifting power dynamics between different actors involved in the production, circulation, distribution, and use of information on the web.

This paper charts the rise of the software container, or the packaging of software into deterministic and portable environments. Through containers and container management technology like Docker and Kubernetes, software at a high level can be segregated, hidden, moved, and interfaced with in a standard and replicable manner. Like the shipping container's transformations on global economic flows, so too does the software container's offerings of standardization and modularity enable the massive and opaque level of scale that characterizes the cloud today. I also argue that the container's undemocratic drive to scale is closely linked to discourses of openness and the commons, a culmination of Silicon Valley's understanding of freedom as an entrepreneurial endeavor. To articulate this claim, I trace the history of container technology development alongside the history of the cloud, from the roots of Unix through the 2010s. I conclude with a call for critical scholars of technology to not only consider the infrastructural components of platform capitalism but also its logistical aspects, or the techniques coordinating the circulation of capital.

The paper explores small-scale entrepreneurship on the early web, specifically identifying socio-economical practices of local/regional business in the Netherlands during the emergence of the new economy in the mid-90s and early 2000s. The new economy has been described in prior research as not only a novel, financial system but also as a cultural shift. Public media highlight the widespread optimism and subsequent disillusionment of the dot-com era; a period in which many traditional local/regional businesses migrated to the digital realm. In the Netherlands, a push is notable from ideological initiatives and state actors to make the internet accessible and functional for everyone. One can identify an interesting mix of neoliberalism, commercialism, and individualism, as well as everydayness and amateurism that created the backdrop against which local/regional industries took their businesses online for the first time. Following a grassroots approach and a mixed methodology, including computational analysis and content examination of archived websites, the research identifies the integration of domestic and commercial spheres on early websites, as well as a shift towards more professionalized e-business strategies over time. The paper contributes to the field by theorizing small-scale entrepreneurship in the move of local/regional businesses onto the web, offering a methodological framework for archival exploration, and enriching the historiography of the Dutch public web and the new economy from a bottom-up perspective. By foregrounding local/regional perspectives, it aims to provide a cultural-historical understanding of the web and encourages comparative analysis between under-studied narratives and dominant interpretations in the field of Internet History.