Capture and Drift in the Orbital Imaginary

In response to widespread corporate gambits to build orbital data centres, this presentation asks what potential counter-imaginaries might resist the “orbital database’s” connotations of predictability, structure, and control. I examine orbital fictions whose depictions of space stations and technocapitalist data collection are attenuated by figures of fallout and disorganization. I argue for an aesthetics of drift, where fantasies of frictionless expansion are countered by f(r)ictional encounters with clutter and decay. Drift becomes a way of thinking about the unassimilable affects and accidents that complicate the intended trajectories of “orbit,” imagining forms of planetary computation that are inextricable from debris.