Archival Time as a New Natural Resource
Sachin Benny argues that AI modernity is reorganizing our relationship to the past the way industrial capitalism reorganized our relationship to the future, coining 'Archival Time' as a condition where traces of prior events become retrievable without recreating the event. He contrasts this with Bakhtin's 'Carnival Time,' bounded periods where accumulated traces lose authority and things get unmade and remade, drawing on William Sewell's eventfulness framework (path dependency, temporal heterogeneity, contingency) to argue eventful history requires a mix of both archival inheritance and carnivalesque rupture.
Sachin Benny
