Situating dead-and-dying platforms: technological failure, infrastructural precarity, and digital decline

Abstract This double special issue explores internet histories through the lens of “platform death” as a way of understanding how digital communities grapple with absence, invisibility, and disappearance. Collectively, the contributions in this issue address the cultural, geopolitical, economic, and socio-legal repercussions of what happens when platforms fail, decline, or expire. The manuscripts draw on divergent methods, data, and analytical frameworks; in turn, they address what digital death as a metaphor reveals about the internet’s growth and stagnation, its present and futures, and its multiplicities. This collaboration has drawn on a collective understanding that mortality as a metaphor can serve as a discursive mode of contesting the control and corporatization of the internet. The impetus for it came from a panel in the Communication History Division at the May 2020 International Communication Association’s Annual Conference, entitled “Dead-and-dying platforms: The poetics, politics, and perils of internet history.” We hope its contents inspire other scholars to think creatively and daringly about technological failure, infrastructural precarity, and digital decline.