Tanushree Core Post #3 (Waste)

I found many continuities between our module on labour and the one on waste. Particularly in the authors’ engagement with the idea of the “invisibility”, first of digital labour, and then of digital waste. Questions of materiality and the digital have long dogged scholars of new media. And I was struck by the parallels between the excavation of the materiality of the digital image and its relation to the body, and the authors’ excavation of the invisible geographies and materials of information technology and computation.

Ensmenger, for instance, argues that if we only consider the consumption of digital technology, and don’t probe the circumstances of their production, we risk losing sight of its connection to older modes of production. He contends that the ostensible immateriality of the digital comes from a deliberate obfuscation of the circumstances of its labour, its geography, and its raw materials. Materiality then was never lost, and ideas of information technology as heralding an era of “clean” production without large material and environmental costs, were inherently flawed. 

Hogan’s ideas regarding Facebook and the “invisibilities of the archive” tie in with this quite neatly, the “cloud” and discourses of ephemerality that surround it, only serve to invisibilize the massive amounts of energy, resources and labour that goes into their creation, functioning and upkeep. 

If the “places and processes used to produce virtual commodities are very similar to those in traditional forms of manufacturing” - a more serious link could be forged between neo-liberal capitalism, the production of information technology, older forms of infrastructure, and older structures of power. Ensmenger, notes that sites for Bitcoin mining clustered around the power grid and nuclear power plants, which themselves built parallel to (and perhaps even in service of) railroad networks. This layering of infrastructures which challenges the idea of a the digital as a “break” of sorts from older infrastructures and production processes, also brings to light the question the idea of a layering of a politics of extraction, as countries in South America and South East Asia grapple with human rights violations and environmental degradation, in the tussle for rare earth minerals.