start

Introduction :
- Aim: present core arguments clearly to invite questions and feedback
- Positioning: research–creation (research–bricolage), not philosophy per se
- Four axes: persistent online worlds & historicity; the concept of ruins (broadly construed); archival processes; archaeologies (metaphorical-fictional and media archaeology)

virtual worlds in ruins: an interdisciplinary approach to media archaeology

Where the Project Stands :
- Year 4; groundwork for writing underway
- Three-part outline distilled from three years of notes
- Large working dossier (~2,000 pp.) → structured synthesis
- Methodological implication: curation, reduction, and re-rhythmization of an abundant literature
- Focus: the end of the concept of ruins

A Compressed Genealogy of Discourse
- 1990s–2000s: technophilic utopias vs. technophobic dystopias
- some worlds persist; others disappear / subsequent contraction of discourse → need to test earlier claims over time
- 2021: corporate turn (post-COVID) and metaverse revival → cognitive dissonance

Why Ruins?
- Ruin as an agentive lens for contemporary modes of living
- Objects exceed neat frames → engineered passageways between surface/depth, virtual/actual, imaginary/concrete
- Question: what methods fit abandoned yet still-running worlds?

Temporal Scope and Corpus :
- No strict chronological boundary: industrial time and the present dominate
- Focus on pioneers to probe initial intentions, desertion, decommissioning
- Habitat (1985, off), Active Worlds (1995, on), Second Life (2003, on), Roblox (2006, on), AltspaceVR (2015, off), Decentraland (2020, on)

Ruins Where None Appear :
- Surface intactness: meshes placed, buildings not collapsed
- History of persistent worlds = history of non-ruin / absence of ruin
- Contemporary construction resists "beautiful ruins" (needs long time, noble materials, architectural integrity)

Countercultural Lineages & Ephemeral Communities :
- Stewart Brand & the Whole Earth Catalog: autonomy, distributed networks, system-wide scope
- 1968 sections: Whole Systems / Shelter & Land Use / Industry & Craft / Communications / Community / Learning / Nomadics
- Shelter/Nomadics: light, demountable, leave-no-trace → logistics of mobility
- The WELL: "access to peers" (forums, hosts, archives, mutual aid)
- Turner: from communes to networked individualism; depoliticizing tech imaginaries (California Ideology)
Rosedale / Burning Man → Second Life: self-built, participatory, ephemeral city transposed in-world (Burning Life/BURN2)

Bégout: "Campervans Do Not Make Ruins"
- Late-modern fragility
- Abbreviated temporality (Tocqueville): rapid value rise/erosion; permanence becomes unproductive
- Houses as demountable prototypes → fewer classical ruins
- Critique: late-bourgeois promotion of mobility + protected patrimonial niches
- Shift from monumental remains to diffuse, discontinuous residues

Brand’s Time of Buildings (How Buildings Learn):
- Architecture as temporal art: use, maintenance, repair, appropriation
- Shearing layers: site / structure / skin / services / space plan / stuff; adaptability needs “play”
- "High Road" (prestige, rigid) vs. "Low Road" (ordinary, hackable)
- Norms: users as co-designers; maintenance elevated; modular standards to lower mutation costs; critique of image-driven spectacle

World Repelled by Ruination?
- (Bruno) What archaeology in an era repelled by ruins?
- Virtual consummates surface absence: traces dissolved, remains off-staged to infrastructure
- Abundance rhetoric masks infrastructural finitude

Presentism, Runtime, and Uchronia :
- Virtual = illusion of reversibility (build/deconstruct without debris) → “plastic house”
- Abandoned returns = permanent present (Hartog’s presentism): no aging, sediment, or becoming
- Reversal: from surface present to machine depth—vestiges maintained in real time (runtime archaeology)
- Couchot: “real time” as uchronia → uchronic ruins (presence without history; patina neutralized; collapse deferred)

The Hypermnestic Illusion :
- Countercultural utopias → belief in integral retention & limitless storage/consumption
- Three fictions: infinite supports; indifference to time; equivalence of traces
- Reality: finite infrastructures; selective archiving; technical/economic/political thresholds

Metaphors: From Surface Belief to Critical Instruments :
- Screen metaphors (window, smoothness, liquidity, frictionlessness) → surface-centric belief system
- Bolter & Grusin: immediacy/hypermediacy; Galloway: protocol & control; Chun: perpetual updating as staged stability
- Metaphors as shared investigative tools for non-specialists
- Ruin metaphor: focuses residues & maintenance; reframes interface as cover; compels descent to material layers (repair, e-waste, supply, energy)
- Outcome: puncture hypermnestic fantasies; stress-test Silicon Valley hippie-yuppie utopias; shift from spectacle to upkeep & responsibility