Max Berwald – Core Post #5

Ensmenger maps contemporary digital infrastructure onto earlier infrastructural formations, and even beyond them onto colonial extractive regimes like the Potosi mines (2018, 521), finding them geographically similar. There’s something particularly strange about the origins of computation being anchored in (and I don’t know how mainstream a historical trajectory this is) the Royal British Navy’s search for an improved technology of self-location: the convenient and rapid calculation of longitude. On the one hand, maritime navigation was obviously, in this context, a component of an imperial war machine. But it was also, at another scale, about naval personnel locating themselves in space. This is a great illustration (in our final week) of one continuing concern of this course: the particular world produced by quantitative knowledge forms (and locating code in that history). From a certain perspective, one always knows where one is. From another, celestial navigation is sufficient for traveling huge distances at sea. There’s also the compass, sextant, astrolabe. There were an array of technologies available during the period, and it’s hard not to see the drive for precision and efficiency (latitude and longitude, and the tables that eventually solved this problem of rapidly calculating longitude) at this specific juncture as somehow militarist, given the historical context.

Thinking more of empire and colonialism than of militarism, the trajectory sketched between the Potosi mines and contemporary struggles over lithium, cobalt and tin work similarly. As we’ve covered extensively over the course of the semester, the social and the technological shape each other, and that means that infrastructures have their own inertia across time. An extractive regime like the Potosi mine represents an intersection between cultural (indigenous and colonial), technological (technologies implicated in prospecting, estimating, extracting, purifying and smelting), and geography. Changes to any of these factors will effect the others, but the disappearance of one (the end of a specific extractive regime or colonial process) does not mean the others instantly lose their power. This is probably more intuitively clear to us when it comes to geography (the mountains, more or less, remain) but the chapter argues persuasively for technological infrastructure as something that accretes over surprisingly long timescales. One also thinks, on a much shorter timescale, of the water towers repurposed for advertising and internet infrastructure that Lisa Parks writes about in Signal Traffic.

In light of all this, the discussion of e-waste really calls to mind Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism (2021). Liboiron’s work is also concerned with how pollution, as both concept and phenomenon, is a form of bad relation with Land not only characteristic of, but essential to the functioning of, colonialism. The environmental cost of the internet’s material infrastructure, the accumulation of material e-waste: these are not necessarily best conceptualized as the new costs of new technologies, while they are that. They are also historically contingent, and arise out of specific relational forms, specific configurations of power, specific geographies, etc.  

Returning to the idea of locating oneself through computation, how does this history sit next to the server farms prominent in both the Hogan and the Ensmenger? In the same way we might say, easily, that quantitative ways of knowing have implications for culture, politics, for how the earth is understood, perhaps computation more specifically– the forms of computation that could be plausibly posited as the basis for what came after, for the personal computer and the internet– have particular implications for sociality? I can’t stop thinking about this movement from innovative new computational tables that allow Royal Navy personnel to locate themselves, and server farms that have to be invisibilized and hidden to be sustainable. I don’t know what point I’m trying to make.

When it comes to thinking of Facebook as an archive, as Hogan asks us to, what strikes me most is that the politics of access to this archive are hardly even subject to politics. It is a corporate archive. To say that this information is all being “preserved” or “archived” is fine and well, but the fact that much of that archive is unavailable to the public and is held by a private corporation (often extremely cooperative with law enforcement) seems to suggest that a surveillance framework might be more useful. Of course, I agree that we need to find a way to stop this mindless archiving process, which reifies a vision of superficial first-world convenience as more valuable than the future of the planet or the lives of people across the Global South. In fact, when you consider the type of “convenience” that the Facebook archive supposedly provides us with, one has to wonder whether this is a convenience or a compulsion. Page 7 is particularly instructive here, with the discussion of Facebook as “bandwidth hog,” taking up more space and using more processing power than strictly necessary in order to facilitate more instantaneous recall and “increase its ad presentations.” (Hogan 2015, 7, quoting Higginbotham 2015)