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Conservation as Version Control will primarily argue for a very different way of thinking about what the conservation of cultural heritage is and how a new understanding based on ‘version control’ in software development can make a significant impact on the way we understand what the production and care of cultural heritage involves. All forms of ‘taking care of things’ are enacted within an assemblage of beliefs about the world and its things, the materials and technologies in that world, and the organisation of that world and its peoples, which together effect particular forms of cognitive praxis in that world. Conservation is tasked with inscribing these various values and abstractions at many different scales and forms whilst at the same time recognising its own origins as a mode of behaviour situated under a particular ‘cosmotechnic’.    The paper will set out the means to re-characterise how conservation can embrace the recursiveness of this double-bind. By drawing parallels between software development and conservation the argument is that conservators act like art-developers in the versioning of the heritage under their care and that this has consequences for notions of authenticity, authorship and ontology, which then impact the predominant values, policies and infrastructures enacted in the care of cultural heritage. The paper will conclude by emphasising the scope the conservation field has for effecting greater understanding around the production, preservation and ontological open-endedness of all cultural heritage.