Data Deletion as Environmental Ordering and Memory Politics
Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, University of Copenhagen
Abstract
This talk examines data deletion and destruction as sites of environmental ordering, infrastructural care, and political contestation in contemporary digital societies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from the ERC-funded DALOSS project, I explore how data becomes waste through practices in Danish public sector administration and at data destruction facilities—revealing data loss not as system failure but as governance.
Through interviews with municipal archivists, IT administrators, and representatives from the IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) industry, the research reveals deletion as a complex negotiation between regulatory compliance, institutional memory, infrastructural opacity, and environmental responsibility. I examine how bureaucratic actors develop what I term "counter-infrastructural competencies"—the ability to work both with and against digital infrastructures designed primarily for data production rather than destruction. This empirical focus on deletion practices offers a window into broader questions about digital memory politics. While datafication is typically understood through metaphors of accumulation, I demonstrate how digitalization simultaneously produces disappearance, destruction, and dispossession at scale. The talk connects mundane deletion work—the friction, uncertainty, and labor of making data disappear—to urgent debates around the Right to Be Forgotten, governmental data erasure, and what it means to care for data in an age of supposed perfect memory.
By studying data as waste and residue, i.e. attending to what persists, what resists deletion, and what deletion practices reveal, this talk establishes new grounds for understanding how digital governance actually functions at the operational level, beyond policy documents and legal frameworks.
Biography
Nanna Bonde Thylstrup is Associate Professor (Promotion Programme) in Modern and Digital Culture. She is PI of Data Loss: The Politics of Disappearance, Destruction and Dispossession in Digital Societies (DALOSS) funded by the European Research Council and the Danish Foundation for . She received her PhD (in Modern Culture) from University of Copenhagen and MA (in Modern Culture) from the University of Copenhagen. Her research and teaching focuses on the politics and ethics of data, machine learning and digital infrastructures. Thylstrup is the author and editor of several books, including Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for the Age of Big Data (MIT Press, 2021), (W)ARCHIVES: Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press 2021), and The Politics of Mass Digitization (MIT Press, 2019) (a "watershed work",JASIST). Thylstrup has moreover edited several special issues, including Big Data & Society, First Monday, Platform & Society, and Philosophy of Photography and she has published in a range of journals including Journal of Cultural Economy, Digital Journalism, Media Culture & Society, Ephemera, and Internet Policy Review. She is a member of the Editorial Board for Elements in Literature and Objects, a new series within Cambridge Elements, and part of the editorial collective of the open access series Cambridge Forum on AI: Culture and Society.
Location
STS Seminar Room / Universitätsstraße 7 (staircase II / 6th floor) 1010 Vienna & online via zoom (Zoom-link, Meeting ID: 663 1690 4921, Passcode: 182974)