Gabriel Moshenska’s „Reverse engineering and the archaeology of the modern world“: a response: Streitraum: Reverse Engineering

Abstract

Moshenska draws a convincing parallel between reverse engineering of obsolete technology and archaeological inference. Interestingly, many of the arcane experts in orphaned software and discontinued machinery themselves recognize this parallel with their cooption of the term ‘archaeology’ (they are ‘digital archaeologists’ and perform ‘software digs’). What is not clear from either their appropriation or from Moshenska’s summary is whether archaeology itself works as ‘tacit knowledge’ of past know-how. Also left unresolved is whether we could take a more ambitious step of inference from ‘how things work’ to ‘how society works.’