[Hamsini - Core post 5] The Material Base

 

I kept hearing echoes of Beller while reading Ensmenger and Hogan. Their framings of the environmental materiality of digital technologies both rely on notions of the subterranean, the invisible (and often actively hidden), the repressed: a kind of unconscious. This can be read as a kind of base/superstructure model, where the material base is concealed by metaphors of immateriality. In Ensmenger’s case, this comes from his discussion of the geographically layered infrastructures upon which digital technologies rely: the power grid, layered on transportation and navigation systems. From the STS perspective articulated by Star (who he cites), infrastructures are invisible and only become invisible upon breakdown (at least in Western “developed” contexts). It also emerges in his discussion of the erasure of global labor in the production of technologies and e-waste; the production, use, and disposal of digital devices are all environmental in ways that require excavation. (Though they are, perhaps, far less hidden to the people engaged in mining and manufacturing, and who live among toxic waste—though not always, as his discussion of Silicon Valley Superfund sites suggests.) There is a conceptual separation maintained between technology and environment, even as they shape one another.

In Hogan’s discussion of Facebook as archive, the company’s reliance on data centers is described as the material “underbelly.” Hogan brilliantly connects users’ self-archiving behavior to the company’s physical imprint via discussion of Facebook’s model of data collection:

The problem with this archive is that aggregation says more about us than we consciously know we are making available. Tracking at all these levels demonstrates the extent to which the social network itself generates a parallel archive, of movement, recording the interactions of the network itself, as a simultaneous—but exponentially bigger—living archive. (p. 10)

Users are thus doubly unconscious of how they are being tracked and the material basis of that tracking, even as Facebook collects and stores vast quantities of data in very physical spaces. Hogan thus draws links between content (user behavior) and its material base (data storage).  

Parikka’s conceptualization of medianatures (elaborating on Haraway’s naturecultures) seeks to perform a similar move to Hogan’s piece. In his introduction to Medianatures, Parikka discusses Serres’s “two regimes of pollution, where the hard pollution is the destruction of nature, while the soft pollution involves the destruction of the world of signs.” Parikka seeks to link the two: “the ‘hard’ regime of entropic energy consumption and production of not just things, but also of material waste; and the immaterial regime of semiotics and signs – what we usually call media.” In this, he is bridging not only the software/hardware binary but also situating both in their broader material context.