How To Not Dissolve Completely

It seems increasingly impossible to imagine human life without technology. Ranging from sociality, to medicine, to the military—the industries that preserve as well as destroy life are mediated through digital technologies on a planetary-scale. While big corporations keep growing with seemingly endless resources and capital, human realities are increasingly marked by precarity and an impending feeling of doom. There is little space left for agency and maneuvering when going against systems that cultivate the myth of their own infinity. The reinsertion of materiality, of humanness, and eventually of death into the understanding of technologically-mediated life can also, in turn, provide us with alternative ways of being. This publication is composed of two essays which grapple with the slippery and ever-fluctuating nature of data and technology. By placing them side by side, a new dialogue emerges. Coming from different contexts and grounded in different cases, they surprisingly often speak in tandem.