In a technoculture characterised by Facebook/Meta’s ‘move fast, break things' motto, the speed of innovation relies on obsolescence, waste, loss of heritage, and cultural hyperamnesia.  

What has been broken in the race for new, more powerful devices?  

The dead tech lib upturns this question through the practice of collection, repair, and the repurposing of forgotten technology as a mean of maintaining and building future cultural heritage. It holds technology accountable to its early promises of democratisation, challenging 'the always already new', through: 

• fostering maintain-repair-care culture through collecting, repairing, repurposing and preserving obsolete or obscure hardware and software 

• promoting open knowledge through open access technology, new skill development and collaboration

• reducing the environmental impact of technology through reuse 

• facilitating space for critical computing (e.g. exploring historic bias in computation, interrogating technology as liberation, expanding on STEAM—Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics—as an interdisciplinary field) 

• bridging alternative cultural imaginaries of technology 

• the use of ‘dead tech’ as a provocation to foster critical and open discussions

The dead tech lib is funded by the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab and a collaboration between Cécile Chevalier, Andrew Duff, Irene Fubara-Manuel, Alex Peverett (alphabetical order).