Machine-Created Culture

Book excerpt: Archaeology can be weird and fun, especially the digital kind. Readers of archaeology, media studies, and game studies are introduced to the wild-and-wooly side of digital archaeology: artifacts, sites, and landscapes contained within—and supporting—interactive digital built environments. Follow your guide, the reluctant digital archaeologist Charlie, to disappear into the weeds of post-landscapes, non-place cultural spaces, persistent digital spaces, software citizenship, machine-created culture, digital drift, technofossils, quantum archaeology, archaeological time, singularities, complexity and retrocausality, noise, and more. These bite-sized chapters offer new ways of interpreting humanity’s blossoming digitalia, an archaeology done at the source of creation, use, and abandonment of our electronic selves.