Ubiquitous Media, Rare Earths

At a talk at the Pervasive Media Studio, University of the West of England, I mentioned a statement attributed to Thomas Huxley, doyen of Victorian science, that the oceans were effectively inexhaustible, and that we might throw into them and take from them as much as we please, and they would still feed us endlessly. I made the comparison with contemporary beliefs that the internet and digital communications can grow without limit. But of course, both the oceans – as we know to our cost – and the internet – as we will have to learn – are finite resources. But when I checked, the Huxley quote wasn't quite so mad: the more measured actual statement can be found in his Inaugural Address to the Fisheries Exhibition, London (1883) courtesy of The Huxley File.

Even without the "ta-da" moment that my misquotation provided, the point is still valid, I think: we act as if computing and network resources were unbounded. But materials, manufacture, use and recycling put boundaries round the materiality of internet and convergent media. The squalor and penury associated with extracting metals, building computers and recycling mobiles, TVs and digital devices are one half of a story which includes toxic waste, toxic working conditions, human waste from the maquilladoras, atnospheric and water pollution in the recycling villages of Africa and China, species and habitat loss . . .

Like any other form of organisation, maintaining the negentropy of the internet requires vast amounts of energy, physical and human. It also requires materials that are becoming more strategic and costly by the minute.

here are a few links that got me started:

Basel Action Network (2002), Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia, http://www.ban.org/E-waste/technotrashfinalcomp.pdf
Basel Action Network, The Digital Dump: Exporting High-Tech Re-use and Abuse to Africa, http://www.ban.org/BANreports/10-24-05/index.htm, 2005
Boccaletti, Giulio, Markus Löffler, and Jeremy M. Oppenheim (2008), 'How IT can cut carbon emissions', Mckinsey Quarterly, October, http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/How_IT_can_cut_carbon_emissions_2221
Cap Gemini (2008), 'Green IT Report 2008 The Computer Equipment Lifecycle Survey', http://www.capgemini.com/resources/thought_leadership/executive_summary_green_it_report_2008/
The Climate Group (2008), SMART 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age, http://www.theclimategroup.org/assets/resources/publications/ mart2020Report.pdf
Climate Savers Computing http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org
Duffy, Rosaleen (2005), 'Criminalisation and the politics of governance: illicit gem sapphire mining in Madagascar', Paper originally prepared for: ‘Redesigning the state? Political corruption in development policy and practice’ conference at IDPM, Manchester University, 25 November.
Gantz John (project director) (2008), The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe, IDC White Paper, IDC, Framingham MA, March. http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/diverse-exploding-digital-universe.pdf
ITU (2007), ITU-T Technology Watch Report #3: ICTs and Climate Change, International Telecommunications Union, Geneva, December, http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/23/.../T23010000030002PDFE.pdf
Koomey, Jonathan G. (2007), ‘Estimating Power Consumption by Servers in the US and the World', Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, February. http://enterprise.amd.com/Downloads/svrpwrusecompletefinal.pdf
Lyman, Peter and Hal R Varian (2003), How Much Information?, University of California, Berkeley. http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/index.htm
Stewart, Emma and John Kennedy (2009), 'The Sustainability Potential of Cloud Computing: Smarter Design', in Environmental Leader, Juy 20, http://www.environmentalleader.com/2009/07/20/the-sustainability-potential-of-cloud-computing-smarter-design/
Weber, Christopher L., Jonathan G. Koomey, and H. Scott Matthews (2009), 'The Energy and Climate Change Impacts of Different Music Delivery Methods' Final report to Microsoft Corporation and Intel Corporation, August 17, http://download.intel.com/pressroom/pdf/CDsvsdownloadsrelease.pdf

Zoomorphism

We risk zoomorphism when we say a medium "wants" to depict, narrate, be flat etcetera. Zoomorphism (not anthropomorphism) because it is an ascription of instinct, not desire. We do not permit our technologies their tragic mirror phase, their Oedipal revolt. (This is the point of Asimov's 3 laws of robotics). That media appear to have instinctive tendencies towards specific kinds of performances is evidence of their persistent lack of autonomy.

Rich media sustainability

Perhaps the most intriguing, even ominous aspect of near-future scenarios is 'ubicomp', ubiquitous computing, combining the 'internet of things' with the increasing integration of mobile wireless and internet media. RFID tags (Hayles 2009), biochips (Thacker 2004) and a variety of wireless devices can be installed in anything from fridges to mousetraps, immigration controls to pets, creating a vast demand for new storage and communication services. Meanwhile the convergence of both technologies and companies in hardware like Google's G3 competitor to Apple's iPhone, software like Google's Android mobile operating system, and applications like Google Voice indicate that advanced small screen technology, integration of services including social networking, the arrival of portable formats for books, games, music and feature films, and the inclusion of respectable cameras and recording technologies in handheld devices will increase both the quantity and the traffic in data over the foreseeable future. That increase has been measured in a number of ways (see for example Lyman and Varian 2003). One remarkable finding is that 'the amount of information created, captured, or replicated exceeded available storage for the first time in 2007. Not all information created and transmitted gets stored, but by 2011, almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home' (Gantz 2008). Estimating the current size of the digital universe at close to 300 billion gigabytes, Gantz's team at consultants IDC do not make extravagant claims for growth. But as television, for example, moves towards both high definition and on-demand network delivery, the quality as well as quantity of media involved in net traffic os likely to expand with no clear end in sight. The question is whether this is a sustainable future.

Ninety-nine

How nice: this blog is included in Top 100 Film Studies Blogs. At number 99, so I won't get too big headed.

ship shape

High point of an excellent conference in Bristol on cinema and colour, , Steve Neale discusses mise en scene and skin tones in the race discourse of Sirk's Imitation of Life. The freeze on the white roses in the funeral scene - which I have never managed to watch without weeping - as the central argument over race in the film. Steve as ever persuasive, innovative and precise.

evil

"Not only is there no contradiction in principle between evil and politics, but evil, as such, is from a certain point of view always political"
Roberto Esposito, 1993, Nove pensieri sulla politica, Il Mulino, Bologna, p.183

further notes on the database economy

Free cooperation, collaboration (the term preferred, for its echo of illegitimacy, by Florian Schneider 2006), organised networks (Rossiter 2006) are offered as alternatives to the existing order and the existing economy. In an early essay on the theme of the new economics of networks Richard Barbrook (1998) pointed out the existence off two parallel economies, one based on the exchange of gifts, the other on exchange of money and contracts. The gift economy is a quality of peer-to-peer projects, of which Linux and Wikipedia are the most cited examples, along with Project Gutenberg and (although it's origins are often forgotten) the first Web manifestation of the Internet Movie Database. In the latter case commercialisation was a function of success, as measured in throughput of data. In the case of Linux, service providers like Red Hat and Ubuntu have found business models appropriate to the FLOSS ethos, even though somewhat controversial. What is notable about these projects is that they emerge from existing communities, that is from loose networks with shared interests; that therefore community-building, where it occurs, is a by-product, not a goal; and that the central activity is to provide a service which the donors want and are prepared to contribute their labour to,

But where the gift of labour has been commercialised, as it has in social networking, the surveillant functions of the database economy serve not only to target but to average, as Foucault was anxious to demonstrate in the late lectures (2003, 2004, 2007). Here the virtual nature of the crowd, its power to act, is removed by a process of forecasting how much deviance is tolerable in a population. The challenge then is to challenge the auto-archiving of network activity with an extension. This might well be inspired by Adorno's insistence throughout his late lectures on negative dialectics (2008) that what is essential is not the actual, nor identity, but precisely non-identity: the non-identical nature of the world to which Western thought perpetually ascribes identity. In an extension of the same argument, Adorno argues that there can be no greater good as long as one person must suffer, or one person sacrifice their native demand for happiness (2000).

The challenge is to drive the logic of individualism to its far side; to turn the compulsory choice of consumerism into actual freedom.