Archeotechnology

A Tu-141 drone on launch platform. Obsolete drones and dronified aircraft like these are used by both sides of the Russo-Ukrainian War as disposable radar decoys, reconnaissance and cruise missiles in place of production-model equivalents.

Archeotechnology refers to an existing technology whose premises of production (material or intellectual or both) have been lost in history, which means more instances cannot be produced or reproduced. Consequently the loss of a technology does not equate to it's practical obsolencence.

Here are some mnemonic aids:

• The Russo-Ukrainian War has seen extensive use of soviet archeotechnology on the battlefield
• The Warhammer 40k franchise popularised the concept of archeotechnology with the fictional Imperium of Man
• Kantbot from the Wydna Group has claimed that XML Topic Maps are an archeotechnology

Part of the archeotechnology phenomenon is archival-based loss of technology by which bad encyclopedic management of public domain technical information continuously pushes useful technologies into disuse before obsolecence because their exposure in public technical discourse is sapped by the funnelling of attention towards hyped-up prototypes that are preferred for ideological reasons unrelated to the relevant technical domain and thus arbitrary.