Chapter 5: Case Studies in Petrifaction

The Fossil as Provocation

In paleontology, fossils are not simply dead organisms—they are evidence of alternative evolutionary paths. The trilobite tells us that compound eyes once dominated the Cambrian seas. The mammoth tells us that megafauna thrived in Ice Age tundra. Fossils are counterfactuals made material—proof that the present is not inevitable but contingent.

The Petribyte functions similarly. It is a digital fossil whose core function can no longer execute—the ground beneath it has eroded away. But unlike biological extinction, digital petrifaction often results from deliberate design decisions. Features are not lost to entropy; they are murdered by platforms, sacrificed for monetization, deprecated in service of "progress."

As design theorist Anthony Dunne writes, "Design fictions are artifacts from imaginary worlds used to provoke debate about the world we currently inhabit."¹ Petribytes are design fictions—but they come from the past, not the future. They are remnants of a parallel digital world where different values prevailed, different trade-offs were made, different possibilities flourished before being extinguished.

This chapter asks: What can extinct functions teach us about the present? What did we lose when we lost them? And—most critically—what new systems can we forge by resurrecting their underlying principles?

We will examine five Conceptual Petribytes—interface elements and interaction patterns whose core functions are extinct—not to mourn them, but to weaponize their lessons. This is archaeology as activism, petrifaction as pedagogy, the fossil as blueprint for resistance.

I. The Manual Save Button: Intentional Commitment

The Extinct Ground

The Manual Save Button emerged from hardware constraints. RAM was volatile; power failures meant data loss; storage writes were slow and expensive (both in time and disk lifespan). The save operation was ritualized necessity—early word processors like WordStar and WordPerfect trained users to hit Ctrl+S compulsively, every few paragraphs, lest a crash erase hours of work.

But the ritual encoded something profound: the distinction between drafting and committing. Before saving, your work was ephemeral—you could abandon it, revert it, walk away. After saving, it became record. As human-computer interaction researcher Bonnie Nardi notes, "The save button was a threshold—a moment of deliberate transition from process to product."²

The Contemporary Replacement: Auto-Save Surveillance

Modern cloud applications—Google Docs, Notion, Figma—eliminated the save button through automatic continuous persistence. Every keystroke is captured, every change synced instantly. This is sold as liberation: "Never lose work again! Focus on creation, not file management!"

But what was lost?

As critical engineer Danya Glabau argues, "Auto-save is not convenience—it is data extraction infrastructure. Every keystroke becomes behavioral data for training models, optimizing interfaces, monetizing attention."³ The death of the save button is the birth of ambient surveillance.

Blueprint for Intervention: The Commit Culture Model

What if we resurrected the save button's principle (intentional commitment) in modern systems? Consider Git's commit model as applied to creative work:

This is not nostalgia for floppy disks—it is recovery of agency. The Manual Save Button's blueprint teaches: Meaningful persistence requires conscious decision. Modern implementations might include:

• Writing apps with "Ephemeral Mode" (auto-save disabled, red border warning)
• Collaboration platforms with "Draft/Published" states (not instant-live everything)
• Version control for creative work (commit messages for design files, essays, code)

The Petribyte's lesson: Automation should serve human intention, not replace it.

II. Desktop Icons: Spatial Memory as Interface

The Extinct Ground

The desktop metaphor—pioneered at Xerox PARC, popularized by Apple Macintosh—relied on spatial cognition. Humans have evolved powerful spatial memory: we remember where things are more easily than what they're called. Medieval scholars used "memory palaces" (mental spatial layouts) to recall vast amounts of information.⁴

Desktop icons leveraged this: users arranged files spatially to encode organizational logic. A designer's desktop might cluster project files in the center, reference images along the right edge, and archived materials in the bottom-left. Position = metadata. As HCI researcher George Robertson found, "Spatial stability significantly improves information retrieval performance compared to alphabetical or temporal sorting."⁵

The Contemporary Replacement: Search-Dependent Cognition

Mobile OS design (iOS, Android) eliminated user-controlled spatial organization. Apps appear in grids (iOS) or drawers (Android), sorted alphabetically or by usage. macOS and Windows increasingly push users toward Spotlight/Search instead of Finder/Explorer navigation.

The logic: Why organize when you can search? Tagging, metadata, and full-text indexing make spatial arrangement "obsolete."

But what was lost?

As information architect Abigail Sellen notes, "We are losing the ability to think with our environment—to use physical/spatial layout as cognitive scaffolding."⁷ Search is powerful, but it treats information as decontextualized atoms rather than spatially embedded relationships.

Blueprint for Intervention: Hybrid Spatial-Search Interfaces

What if we resurrected spatial organization's principle (location as metadata) in modern systems?

This approach already exists in niche tools (DEVONthink's spatial groups, Tinderbox's map views, researcher John Siracusa's "Desktop as State Machine" workflow). The challenge is making it mainstream.

The Petribyte's lesson: Human cognition is spatial—interfaces that ignore this impoverish thinking.

III. RSS Feeds: User Agency vs. Algorithmic Curation

The Extinct Ground

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) emerged in 1999 as a solution to "website checking fatigue"—manually visiting dozens of sites to see if new content appeared. RSS feeds let users subscribe once and receive updates automatically, aggregated in a single reader (Google Reader, NetNewsWire, Bloglines).

The architecture encoded user sovereignty:

As media scholar danah boyd wrote in 2010, "RSS represented a utopian vision of the web—decentralized, user-controlled, non-commercial."⁸ It was a pull architecture where users went to information, rather than push architecture where platforms delivered information (and ads) to users.

The Death Blow: Google Reader Shutdown (2013)

Google Reader dominated RSS, capturing an estimated 70% of feed reading by 2010. On March 13, 2013, Google announced its shutdown, effective July 1. The rationale: declining usage, shift to social media streams.

But as technology critic Anil Dash argued, "Google didn't kill Reader because it was failing—they killed it because it competed with Google+. RSS represented an open web; social feeds represented platform capture."⁹ The death of Reader was not market failure—it was strategic murder.

The Contemporary Replacement: Algorithmic Feeds

RSS was replaced by platform-controlled algorithmic feeds: Facebook News Feed, Twitter Timeline, TikTok For You Page, Instagram Explore. These push architectures invert the RSS model:

The shift from RSS to algorithmic feeds represents a fundamental loss of information sovereignty. As Ethan Zuckerman writes, "When platforms control what we see, they control what we know—and thus, what we can imagine."¹⁰

Blueprint for Intervention: The Federated Reader Model

RSS is not technically extinct—the protocol still exists, and niche communities (tech workers, academics) still use readers like Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire. But it's culturally dead, unknown to anyone born after 2000.

What if we resurrected RSS's principles (user agency, chronological completeness, open protocols) in modern social platforms?

The Petribyte's lesson: Platforms killed RSS because user agency threatens ad revenue. Resurrecting RSS principles requires non-commercial infrastructure.

IV. The Visible Scroll Bar: Document Awareness

The Extinct Ground

The scroll bar emerged in early GUI systems (Xerox Star, Apple Lisa) as a visual metaphor for document navigation. Its design encoded three pieces of information simultaneously:

As HCI pioneer Jakob Nielsen noted, "The scroll bar is information visualization—it makes document structure legible at a glance."¹¹ A fat thumb near the top meant "short document, just started." A tiny thumb at the bottom meant "long document, almost finished."

The Contemporary Replacement: Infinite Scroll

Mobile interfaces and web feeds adopted auto-hiding scroll bars (iOS 2007) and infinite scroll (Twitter 2011, Facebook News Feed). The scroll bar became vestigial—appearing briefly during scrolling, then vanishing.

Infinite scroll eliminated the scroll bar entirely: there is no document boundary. Content loads endlessly as you scroll, creating what Tristan Harris calls "the bottomless bowl"—users consume without awareness of quantity because there's no visual endpoint.¹²

What was lost?

As media psychologist Larry Rosen found, "Users report higher stress and lower comprehension with infinite scroll compared to paginated content—the lack of boundaries creates cognitive overwhelm."¹³

Blueprint for Intervention: Bounded Contexts

What if we resurrected the scroll bar's principle (document boundaries as cognitive aid) in modern interfaces?

Some apps already implement this: Instapaper shows reading progress, Readwise Reader has "done for today" inbox zero, Arc browser's "Boost" feature can add missing scroll bars to websites.

The Petribyte's lesson: Boundlessness is not freedom—it's imprisonment in eternal present. Boundaries enable completion, and completion enables rest.

V. Offline Status Indicators: Intentional Presence

The Extinct Ground

Instant messaging platforms (AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger) pioneered status indicators—colored icons showing user availability:

Critically, these were user-declared states. You chose when to go Away, when to appear Busy, when to activate Invisible mode. The system didn't automatically infer your state from activity patterns—you performed your availability.

Sociologist Erving Goffman's concept of "presentation of self" applies: online status was a managed performance of availability, not passive surveillance data.¹⁴ As technology scholar Nancy Baym notes, "Manual status indicators honored the social fiction that people have boundaries—that being 'connected' doesn't mean being 'available.'"¹⁵

The Contemporary Replacement: Always-On Surveillance

Modern messaging platforms (WhatsApp, iMessage, Slack, Discord) replaced user-declared status with automated presence inference:

These features are framed as "transparency" and "connection," but they create ambient pressure to be always-available. As sociologist Judy Wajcman argues, "The death of user-declared status represents the triumph of presence-as-surveillance over presence-as-performance. You no longer control how you appear—the platform decides based on your behavior."¹⁶

The Social Cost: Availability Anxiety

Research on "communication overload" shows always-on presence indicators create stress:

Blueprint for Intervention: Presence as Consent

What if we resurrected manual status indicators' principle (presence as intentional performance) in modern platforms?

Some platforms offer partial solutions: Telegram allows disabling "Last Seen," Signal omits typing indicators, Slack lets you "pause notifications." But these are opt-out friction, not default privacy.

The Petribyte's lesson: Always-on presence is not intimacy—it's surveillance. True connection requires the right to disconnect.

VI. From Petrifaction to Intervention: The Anvil Awaits

Common Threads in Petrifaction

Across our five case studies, a pattern emerges. Contemporary platforms systematically killed interface elements that:

These are not coincidental casualties—they are architectural murders. As Shoshana Zuboff argues in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, "User agency is incompatible with data extraction—platforms systematically remove features that let users resist tracking, resist algorithmic manipulation, resist being 'engaged.'"¹⁷

The Petribyte as Blueprint

But petrifaction is not merely loss—it is archaeological evidence of alternatives. Every extinct function proves that digital life could be different. The Petribyte's blueprint lesson:

Carrying Blueprints to The Anvil

The Petribyte's value emerges at The Anvil—the site of generative practice where extinct principles are forged into new systems. This requires:

This is not retro-computing. This is not "bring back the save button." This is design archaeology—excavating lost principles to critique the present and forge better futures.

Conclusion: The Fossil as Resistance

We have studied five Petribytes—the Manual Save Button, Desktop Icons, RSS Feeds, Visible Scroll Bars, Offline Status Indicators—not as objects of nostalgia but as evidence of murder. These functions did not die of natural causes. They were systematically eliminated because they granted users agency, resisted data extraction, and preserved boundaries.

The Petribyte teaches us that petrifaction is political. What becomes extinct reveals what threatens power. Platforms kill features that enable:

• Conscious decision-making (manual save)
• Spatial cognition (desktop layouts)
• Algorithmic transparency (RSS)
• Attentional boundaries (scroll bars)
• Privacy performance (status indicators)

But fossils outlive their murderers. The Petribyte survives as blueprint—encoded memory of how things could work differently. Our task as Archaeobytologists is not preservation of dead interfaces but resurrection of living principles.

As design justice advocate Sasha Costanza-Chock writes, "Every interface is an argument about who has power. Studying extinct interfaces reveals what powerful actors want erased—and therefore, what we must fight to resurrect."¹⁸

The Petribyte is not a relic to be mourned. It is a weapon to be sharpened. Take its blueprint to The Anvil. Forge new systems that honor what was lost. Build the interfaces that surveillance capitalism fears.

"The past is not behind us—it is under us, a foundation we can excavate to build different futures."
— Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology, 2019