Foundations Series / Vol 01 Est. 2025

Chapter 2: The Archaeobyte Taxonomy — Understanding Digital Mortality

Opening: Four Artifacts, Four Fates

Consider four digital objects, each with a different relationship to death:

Artifact 1: A GeoCities homepage from 1998, hosted at geocities.com/SiliconValley/1234. When Yahoo shut down GeoCities in 2009, this site vanished from the live web. But Archive Team scraped it before shutdown, and it now exists as files in a 650GB torrent. The site is dead but preserved—murdered by its platform, rescued by volunteers, waiting for someone to resurrect it.

Artifact 2: Your current Twitter profile, actively maintained with daily posts. But Twitter's future is uncertain. Elon Musk's chaotic ownership has driven mass exodus to alternatives. Your profile is alive but endangered—functioning now, but vulnerable to corporate whims, algorithmic changes, or eventual shutdown.

Artifact 3: A Flash game called Homestar Runner, created in the early 2000s. Flash Player was discontinued by Adobe in 2020, rendering millions of Flash games unplayable. The files still exist, but without emulation software, they're inert. This artifact is technically dead but spiritually haunting—the data persists, but the experience is inaccessible without intervention.

Artifact 4: An ancient stone tablet with cuneiform writing, created 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. The civilization that made it is long gone, but the tablet survives in a museum. It's long-dead but monumentally preserved—so old that its mortality is complete, yet so durably encoded that it outlasted empires.

These four artifacts represent four fundamentally different states of digital mortality. Archaeobytology needs a taxonomy to distinguish between them—not just for academic precision, but for practical triage. Each state demands different preservation strategies, ethical considerations, and urgency levels.

This chapter introduces the Archaeobyte Taxonomy: a classification system for understanding how digital artifacts live, die, and persist.

The Archaeobyte Taxonomy: Four Categories

We classify digital artifacts into four types based on their mortality state and preservation status:

1. Archaeobyte (Dead and Preserved)

2. Vivibyte (Alive and Endangered)

3. Umbrabyte (Dead but Haunting)

4. Petribyte (Monumentally Preserved)

Each category has distinct characteristics, ethical challenges, and preservation needs. Let's examine them in depth.

1. Archaeobyte: The Dead and Preserved

Definition

An Archaeobyte is a digital artifact that:

The term combines archaeo- (ancient, belonging to the past) with byte (digital information unit). Archaeobytes are digital fossils—remnants of dead platforms waiting to be excavated, interpreted, and potentially revived.

Characteristics

Temporality: Archaeobytes occupy past time. They were created years or decades ago and reflect the technological, cultural, and social contexts of their era.

Accessibility: They exist in archives but aren't easily accessible. You can't just visit a URL. You need to know where the archive is, how to navigate it, and potentially how to run emulation software.

Functionality: Some Archaeobytes are fully functional if properly emulated (a Flash game can still be played). Others are fragmentary (HTML pages with broken images, databases without their front-ends).

Cultural Context: Archaeobytes often lack context. A GeoCities page preserved as raw HTML doesn't tell you who made it, why it mattered, or what community it belonged to. Interpretation requires detective work.

Examples

GeoCities Archives (Archive Team, 2009)

Vine Archive (Internet Archive, 2017)

Flash Games (Flashpoint Project, ongoing)

CD-ROM Multimedia (Internet Archive, various dates)

Preservation Needs

Archaeobytes require:

  1. Storage infrastructure: Servers, hard drives, distributed backups
  2. Emulation or compatibility layers: Flash emulators, old browser engines, virtual machines
  3. Metadata and contextualization: Who made this? When? Why did it matter?
  4. Access systems: Search, browse, discovery mechanisms
  5. Legal frameworks: Copyright exceptions for preservation (often operating in gray areas)

Ethical Considerations

Consent: Did the original creators consent to preservation? Many GeoCities users abandoned their sites and might not want them resurrected.

Privacy: Personal information (emails, addresses, photos) embedded in old sites may violate current privacy expectations.

Context Collapse: Artifacts created for small communities (a private forum, a friend's homepage) now exposed to anyone who finds the archive.

Authenticity: When you emulate a Flash game, is it still the "same" artifact? Or is emulation a form of transformation?

Triage Priority: Medium

Archaeobytes are already preserved, so they're not in immediate danger of disappearing entirely. But they're at risk of:

Priority increases if:

2. Vivibyte: The Alive and Endangered

Definition

A Vivibyte is a digital artifact that:

The term combines vivi- (living, alive) with byte. Vivibytes are the living endangered species of digital culture—thriving now but facing extinction.

Characteristics

Temporality: Vivibytes are present-tense. They're being created, updated, and used right now.

Accessibility: They're easily accessible—just visit a URL. But that accessibility is contingent on platform stability.

Dependency: Vivibytes depend on platform infrastructure. If Twitter shuts down, every tweet becomes inaccessible (unless archived).

Precarity: Their survival isn't guaranteed. They exist at the mercy of corporate decisions, algorithm changes, and terms of service enforcement.

Examples

Twitter/X (2023-present)

Substack Newsletters (ongoing)

TikTok (2020-present)

Discord Servers (ongoing)

Indie Web Personal Sites (various)

Preservation Needs

Vivibytes require proactive archiving:

  1. Continuous crawling: Internet Archive's Wayback Machine constantly archives the live web
  2. User-driven backups: Individuals exporting their own data (Twitter archives, Instagram data downloads)
  3. Institutional partnerships: Libraries and archives working with platforms to preserve content before shutdown
  4. Legal preparation: Advocacy for "right to archive" laws that allow preservation without permission

Ethical Considerations

Timing: When do you preserve a Vivibyte? If you archive someone's tweets daily, are you violating their expectation of ephemeral communication?

Comprehensiveness: Should you archive everything on a platform, or only what's "culturally significant"? Who decides?

Privacy: Many Vivibytes contain personal information shared with the expectation that it will disappear eventually. Permanent archiving changes that expectation.

Platform Relationships: Should archivists work with platforms (negotiated data dumps) or against them (scraping without permission)?

Triage Priority: Variable (Low to Critical)

Priority depends on threat imminence:

Indicators of rising threat:

3. Umbrabyte: The Dead but Haunting

Definition

An Umbrabyte is a digital artifact that:

The term combines umbra- (shadow, ghost) with byte. Umbrabytes are digital ghosts—artifacts that are neither fully alive nor fully preserved, occupying a haunting middle ground.

Characteristics

Temporality: Umbrabytes are caught between past and present. They died, but they haven't been properly mourned or memorialized.

Accessibility: They exist in fragments—dead links, broken images, corrupted files, screenshots, memories.

Liminality: Umbrabytes occupy a liminal state. They're dead enough to be inaccessible but alive enough to be remembered.

Urgency: Many Umbrabytes are in danger of permanent loss. If not rescued soon, they'll transition from "dead but haunting" to simply "dead."

Examples

MySpace Music (2003-2013)

Early YouTube (2005-2008)

Deleted Reddit Communities (various)

Flash Websites (1990s-2010s)

Private Forums and Message Boards (various)

Preservation Needs

Umbrabytes require urgent rescue:

  1. Forensic recovery: Hunting down partial copies, cached pages, user backups
  2. Community archaeology: Interviewing people who remember the artifacts
  3. Reconstruction: Piecing together fragments to create partial records
  4. Metadata creation: Documenting what existed, even if the full artifact can't be recovered
  5. Triage acceptance: Acknowledging that some Umbrabytes are irrecoverably lost

Ethical Considerations

Right to Be Forgotten: Some Umbrabytes were intentionally deleted by their creators. Should we resurrect them against their wishes?

Trauma: Some Umbrabytes are traumatic (harassment campaigns, doxxing, revenge porn). Should we let them stay dead?

Reconstructive Violence: Is it ethical to "reconstruct" an artifact from fragments if the result isn't accurate to the original?

Mourning vs. Resurrection: Sometimes the most ethical response is to mourn an Umbrabyte rather than resurrect it—to acknowledge its loss without trying to recover it.

Triage Priority: Critical (but often futile)

Umbrabytes are in the most dangerous state:

But triage is complicated:

The hardest triage decisions involve Umbrabytes: Do you spend weeks trying to recover a lost forum's fragments, or do you focus on archiving a living platform that could die tomorrow?

4. Petribyte: The Monumentally Preserved

Definition

A Petribyte is a digital artifact that:

The term combines petri- (stone, rock—from Latin petra) with byte. Petribytes are digital monuments—artifacts that have achieved the stability of ancient stone tablets, preserved and curated by institutions.

Characteristics

Temporality: Petribytes are historical. They're old enough that they're studied as artifacts of past eras, not current culture.

Accessibility: They're often highly accessible—digitized, exhibited, documented. Museums and libraries make them available.

Curation: Petribytes receive institutional care—metadata, contextualization, conservation. They're not just stored; they're curated.

Monumentality: They've achieved cultural recognition. Scholars write about them. Museums exhibit them. They're canonized.

Examples

The WELL (1985-present)

Colossal Cave Adventure (1976)

ARPANET (1969-1990)

Hypercard Stacks (1987-2004)

Early Email Archives (various)

Preservation Needs

Petribytes need curatorial maintenance:

  1. Format migration: Periodically transferring to new storage media
  2. Emulation updates: Keeping emulators functional as operating systems evolve
  3. Metadata enrichment: Adding scholarly annotations, historical context
  4. Access infrastructure: Maintaining websites, databases, and discovery systems
  5. Legal protection: Ensuring copyright and ownership issues are resolved

Unlike Vivibytes (which need urgent rescue) or Umbrabytes (which are in danger of vanishing), Petribytes are institutionally secure. But they're not invulnerable—institutions can fail, budgets can be cut, and storage media can degrade.

Ethical Considerations

Canonization: Which artifacts become Petribytes? The selection is often biased toward:

Meanwhile, artifacts from marginalized communities or underfunded projects often remain Umbrabytes—lost and unmourned.

Access vs. Preservation: Museums often prioritize preservation over access (artifacts locked in temperature-controlled vaults). Is this ethical? Should Petribytes be freely accessible, or is controlled access necessary for preservation?

Ownership: Who owns Petribytes? Original creators? Institutions? The public? Disputes over ownership can restrict access or lead to artifacts being removed from public view.

Triage Priority: Low (but not zero)

Petribytes are the least urgent:

But they're not safe forever:

Triage priority increases if:

The Taxonomy in Practice: Case Study Analysis

Let's apply the taxonomy to a complex case: LiveJournal.

LiveJournal: A Multi-Category Artifact

LiveJournal (founded 1999) was a blogging and social networking platform. Over its history, different parts of it occupy different taxonomic categories:

Vivibyte (1999-2017)

Transition Period (2017-present)

Archaeobyte (partial)

Umbrabyte (partial)

Petribyte (emerging)

Taxonomic Insight: LiveJournal doesn't fit neatly into one category. Different parts of it occupy different states simultaneously. This is common with large platforms.

Taxonomy as Triage Tool

The Archaeobyte Taxonomy isn't just academic—it's a practical triage tool. When deciding where to focus preservation efforts, ask:

Question 1: What mortality state is this artifact in?

Question 2: Is there redundancy?

Question 3: What's the cultural significance?

Question 4: What's the technical difficulty?

Question 5: Are there ethical concerns?

Transitions Between States

Artifacts don't stay in one taxonomic category forever. They transition:

Common Transitions

Vivibyte → Archaeobyte (Successful Preservation)

Vivibyte → Umbrabyte (Failed Preservation)

Umbrabyte → Archaeobyte (Successful Rescue)

Umbrabyte → Permanent Loss (Failed Rescue)

Archaeobyte → Petribyte (Institutional Recognition)

Petribyte → Archaeobyte (Institutional Failure)

Undesirable Transitions (Preservation Failures)

Archaeobyte → Umbrabyte (Bit Rot)

Petribyte → Archaeobyte (De-curation)

Critiques and Limitations of the Taxonomy

Critique 1: Binary Thinking

The taxonomy implies clean categories, but reality is messy. Many artifacts are partially preserved (some Archaeobyte, some Umbrabyte). LiveJournal is alive and dead depending on which part you're looking at.

Response: The taxonomy is a heuristic, not a rigid classification. Use it to clarify thinking, not to force artifacts into boxes.

Critique 2: Cultural Bias

Who decides what becomes a Petribyte? The taxonomy risks reinforcing canonical hierarchies—famous people's work gets monumentalized, marginalized communities' work stays in limbo.

Response: This is a real problem. Archaeobytologists must actively work to diversify what gets elevated to Petribyte status. Triage should account for representational gaps.

Critique 3: Ignores Context

An artifact's category depends on where you are. A GeoCities site is an Archaeobyte if you know about the Archive Team torrent, but an Umbrabyte to someone who doesn't.

Response: True. The taxonomy describes artifacts relative to preservation infrastructure. As infrastructure improves, Umbrabytes can become Archaeobytes.

Critique 4: No Category for "Never Existed"

What about artifacts that could have been preserved but never were? The tweets that were never archived, the Snapchat videos designed to disappear?

Response: These are pre-Umbrabytes—artifacts that will become ghosts if not captured. The Vivibyte category should include them as endangered.

Expanding the Taxonomy: Proposed Sub-Categories

Some practitioners propose additional categories:

Necrobyte (The Undead)

Artifacts that were dead but have been resurrected:

These are technically Archaeobytes that have been given "undead life"—functional but not native to the current era.

Cryobyte (Frozen and Waiting)

Artifacts that are intentionally preserved in suspended animation:

These are Archaeobytes with a temporal lock—Petribytes-in-waiting.

Xenobyte (Alien and Incomprehensible)

Artifacts so old or so alien that they're unintelligible without extensive interpretation:

These are Archaeobytes on the verge of becoming permanently opaque.

Practical Application: Building a Triage Matrix

Use the taxonomy to create a triage decision matrix:

Artifact Taxonomy Redundancy Significance Difficulty Ethics Priority
Twitter archive Vivibyte High (IA + LOC) High Medium Some concerns Medium
Small Discord server Vivibyte None Low Medium Privacy issues Low
MySpace fragments Umbrabyte Low Medium Very high Consent unclear Low-Medium
Flash games Archaeobyte Medium (Flashpoint) Medium High (emulation) Mostly clear Medium
ARPANET docs Petribyte High High Low (already done) Clear Low (maintain)

This matrix helps you:

Conclusion: Naming the Dead

The Archaeobyte Taxonomy gives us language for digital mortality. Before we can save artifacts, we must be able to name their states:

Language matters because it shapes action. When we name an artifact a Vivibyte, we acknowledge its life and its peril. When we call something an Umbrabyte, we admit it's dying and may not be saved. When we elevate something to Petribyte, we commit institutional resources to its long-term survival.

The taxonomy isn't just descriptive—it's diagnostic. It tells us where to look, what to save, and how to act.

In the next chapter, we'll explore the Archive and the Anvil—the dual practices of preservation and creation that define Archaeobytology. For now, practice identifying artifacts in the wild. Look at your own digital life. What category is your Instagram account? Your childhood blog? Your email archive?

Learn to see the world through taxonomic eyes. Because once you can name the dead, you can begin to save them.

Discussion Questions

  1. On Categories: Choose three digital artifacts from your own life (social media profiles, old websites, photos, etc.). Classify each using the Archaeobyte Taxonomy. What does this reveal about your digital mortality?
  2. On Transitions: Describe a platform you used that transitioned from Vivibyte to Archaeobyte (or to Umbrabyte). What was that experience like? Did you try to preserve your content?
  3. On Ethics: Should we preserve Umbrabytes even when original creators might not want them resurrected? Where's the line between historical preservation and violation of privacy?
  4. On Canonization: Why do some artifacts become Petribytes (monumentally preserved) while others remain Umbrabytes (lost and forgotten)? What biases shape this selection?
  5. On Liminal States: Can you think of an artifact that exists in multiple taxonomic states simultaneously? How does that complcomplicate preservation decisions?
  6. On Your Own Mortality: If you died tomorrow, what would happen to your digital artifacts? Would they become Archaeobytes (preserved), Umbrabytes (fragments), or simply vanish?

Exercise: Taxonomic Field Work

Part 1: Identify and Classify

Find five digital artifacts (from your own life or the wider web) and classify each:

  1. Artifact name and URL (if applicable)
  2. Taxonomy category (Vivibyte, Archaeobyte, Umbrabyte, Petribyte)
  3. Justification (Why does it fit this category?)
  4. Transition risk (Could it move to a different category? How soon?)
  5. Preservation status (Is anyone archiving it? Where?)

Part 2: Create a Triage Matrix

Build a simple triage matrix for your five artifacts using these criteria:

Part 3: Make Triage Decisions

Based on your matrix:

Part 4: Reflection

Write 500 words reflecting on:

Further Reading

On Digital Mortality and Preservation

On Platform Death

On Taxonomies and Classification

On Specific Cases

End of Chapter 2