This panel seeks to explore the precariousness of media, from its physical integrity and digital ephemerality to the complications of human-machine interaction and the elided histories of players, users, fans, and tech developers. With the current encroachment of generative AI in the workplace, media production, information circulation, fan reception, real estate, and the environment, it becomes urgent to question how precariousness underlies the development, deployment, and dissipation of past media. Focusing on the intersection of labor and technology with gender, race, class, and nationality, this panel aims to expand on global histories of media technology that grapple with issues of extraction, infrastructure, engineering, and ecology; obsolete expertise; forgotten apparatuses; marginal archives; invisible bodies in the tech industry; unpaid creative production; media sustainability and environmental exhaustion; decayed media objects; dead links, websites, and platforms; lost films or incomplete media; postcolonial sound and oral histories; AI activism and resistance; cancelled shows and cancelled celebrities; unexplored digital intimacies; ephemerality in the internet; the promises of Web 3.0 and the detritus of Web.1.0, to name a few possible topics. 

Please submit abstracts of about 350 words and a short presenter bio to danselmo@sas.upenn.edu by August 10th.