29 November 2025

We often describe software obsolescence as though it were the inevitable by-product of technological progress—an unfortunate side-effect of “innovation.” It isn’t. The cycle of updates that renders yesterday’s files unreadable is not accidental. It is a commercial strategy.

As I prepare for my SAHANZ presentation next week, I’ve been revisiting the deeper structural patterns that underpin this phenomenon. Over the past two decades, architects have slowly outsourced their technical memory. Like many creative professionals, they rely on corporations whose business models depend on planned obsolescence. This dynamic is similar to what Nick Srnicek explains in Platform Capitalism.[i] Economic models now profit by capturing and controlling digital infrastructures instead of improving the tools themselves.

In this environment, access replaces ownership as the commodity. Subscriptions replace licenses. Continuity becomes a cost rather than an asset.

This is why Jussi Parikka’s term “zombie media” is so apt.[ii] It describes technologies that ‘appear’ to persist. These are files that still exist on a hard drive or server. However, they can no longer perform the functions for which they were created. As data, they remain visible; as working artefacts, they are dead. Architecture is increasingly haunted by these undead files. These include models, drawings, scripts, and renders. They sit inert in digital storage and are unopenable without the long-gone software environments that created them.

A recent experience underscored this point very clearly. I tried to open a set of 2004 Autodesk files. These files were created with fully licensed software. They were meant to be opened in that same software. It displayed a “fatal error”—not something you want to see your computer. I contacted Autodesk support to ask why I couldn’t access the files in their own archival formats. The reply was: “We apologize for the inconvenience”.

No legacy viewer. No compatibility mode. No sanctioned pathway for recovering older work.

This was not a matter of technical impossibility. As Wendy Chun argues in Programmed Visions,[iii] digital systems are not inherently ephemeral. Infrastructures and policies that govern them make them ephemeral. The issue is not that we cannot support backwards access—it’s that the business logic surrounding software discourages it.

It is what McKenzie Wark, in describing the vectoralist class,[iv] identifies as a system. In this system, value arises from controlling access to information instead of producing it. The result is a disciplinary memory governed not by architects, archivists, or educators, but by corporate licensing cycles.

In this sense, digital obsolescence is a revenue model, and the cost is our collective intellectual labour. Architectural drawings, models, BIM files, and visualisations are the core materials through which we design, teach, and research. They become inaccessible the moment a platform deprioritises the past.

For architecture, a field grounded in documentation, lineage, and precedent, this should be recognised as an existential threat. If we cannot open our own digital history, we cannot study it, critique it, or preserve it.

This will be the core argument of my SAHANZ talk next week. Digital architectural memory is being quietly reshaped by economic logics. These logics privilege monetisation over preservation. Our discipline must take digital custodianship seriously if we want the cultural record of the digital turn to survive.

We must confront these systems directly—contractually, professionally, and institutionally. Otherwise, our heritage will continue to erode. This will happen one corporate “We apologize for the inconvenience” at a time.

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[i] Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, Reprinted, Theory Redux (Polity, 2019).

[ii] Parikka, Jussi, “Zombie Media in Leonardo,” Machinology, September 5, 2012, https://jussiparikka.net/2012/09/05/zombie-media-in-leonardo/.

[iii] Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (The MIT Press, 2011), https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262015424.001.0001.

[iv] McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, Paperback edition (Verso, 2021).