Temporada 5 · Descolonizar la Singularidad · JVV-T5-10
Data-morgue and bituminous packing: selfie funeral homes on the cloud periphery
I The morgue where bytes stop breathing
“Cold storage” backup centres —basements at 12 °C, windowless, packed with LTO tape and vacuum-sealed drives— are the funeral homes of the cloud:
- Selfies of dead users with no digital heir,
- post-ransomware forensic logs,
- container snapshots no CI/CD will ever “resurrect”.
To preserve them the trade uses synthetic bitumen: black polymer resin that floods the bays and drives out oxygen; the drive is buried alive inside an anti-fungal sarcophagus.
“Eternal memory smells of hot asphalt and freshly filtered air.”
II Layers of bit embalming
| Mortuary phase | Physical action | Necropolitical purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Washing | Ultrasonic cleaning of the platter | Strip the “sins” of humidity ↔ erase corporate guilt |
| Perfusion | Epoxy-bitumen resin injection | Seal the heads; prevent casual reading |
| Shroud | Mylar bag + nitrogen | Isolate from cyber-taxidermists |
| Cold tomb | LTO tape shelf in a 12 °C crypt | Keep the corpse accessible for a $$$ fee |
III Formula for embalmed longevity
- Q_b
- bitumen quality (mg inhibitor / cm³)
- D_t
- data density (TB/platter)
- H
- humidity %
When L ≥ 50 años, the provider labels it “Archive Ultra”.
But every extra inhibitor costs money; low-cost funeral homes settle for L ≈ 17 años: long enough for the legal officer to retire before the leak.
IV Case - Cold Zone “Platón Noir”, Utah
| 2025-26 metric | Value | Strange epitaph |
|---|---|---|
| “Mummified” drives | 54,000 units | 1.1 EB of life |
| Consumption kWh/year | 4.2 GWh | → heating for the algae farm next door |
| Exhumation requests | 213 | 38 % fail: broken checksum |
Users pay 299 USD to recover 1 TB and receive a corrupt ZIP—the thing is too far gone.
V Digital mourning ritualsafe
-
01
Print on paper 5 photos you swore to keep “forever”.
-
02
Put them in a black envelope and store it in a cold drawer.
-
03
A week later, decide: will they still be there in ten years?
- If you hesitate, upload them to a public CC0 repo (life > death).
- If you trust them, accept that the envelope is your analogue bitumen.
VI Ghosts & counter-fires
| Risk | Manifestation | Necro-ethical response |
|---|---|---|
| CRC looters | They resell database corpses for GPT-training | Epoxy with fake BOMs; the dataset self-destructs |
| Green-washing archive | Dead data counts as “carbon neutral” | A CO₂ tariff on bitumen (kg resin → kg CO₂) |
| Vanished memory | The family demands the photos, the morgue burned down | Decentralised IPFS escrow copy with a notarised timelock |
VII Coda
“The eternity the cloud promises fits in a drum of tar.”
Let us understand the data-morgues: they are cemeteries of technological promises, places where capitalism files away its informational hangover until it writes it off.
Maybe it is time to mourn our bytes, burn a few, and let the rest fly free before they end up sealed under polymer asphalt, breathing only in the dream of a checksum nobody will ever read again.