To describe the media we use, our sense of time must be expanded to include the staggering expanse of earth history. With a better understanding of the deep time of media archaeology, we could potentially find “roots of the ways in which we modify, manipulate, create and recreate means of hearing and seeing.”
It would also be better fit for our new waste, the abandoned media that doesn’t ever really die. Digital waste is forming a new layer of sediment atop deep geological strata. It is hard to destroy properly and so “retains a toxic materiality surpassing the usual time scale we are used to in media studies.”
Our machines are ultimately reflections of the planet itself, and the “deep time of the planet is inside our machines, crystallized as part of the contemporary political economy: material histories of labor and the planet are entangled in devices, which however unfold as part of planetary histories.”