If a lion could talk . . .

This is how eco-horror enters the dialogue, by asserting that the exclusion of the green world from democratic politics destroys the claims of every democracy to universality. Asserting meanings which, in their non-human origins, appear as horrifying, they assert the broken nature of any claim to universality derived from an exclusion. While the Deep Ecology movement's use of direct action is alluring, in the same way that contemporary Hollywood is deeply tied up with narratives of revenge, revenge too has the feeling of a politics which has no part for dialogue, and to that extent is no politics at all. In later writings, Wittgenstein argued 'If a lion could talk, we would not understand him' (Wittgenstein 1968: II, xi, p. 223). The world not only speaks but roars in our ears, in a tempest of storms, collapsing glaciers, forest fires, mudslides . . . and yet we do not understand. Wittgenstein's point concerned the incommensurable nature of different modes of language. That this is integral to public life is clear from the example of politicians unwilling to engage in debate, and devoted instead to persuasion, to communicating a policy, to raising awareness: effectively to solipsism. While linguistic philosophy might hold this as a permanent and universal condition, political philosophy cannot. It must undertake to find ways to bring the human and the lion into dialogue.

From a chapter submitted to ECO-TRAUMA CINEMA: Technology, Nature, and the End of the World ed Neil Narine

Cultural Identity

On the one hand, indigenous and migrant cinemas point towards the significance of cultural identities, especially in settler nations like Aotearoa and Australia. On the other, it is in general cultural identity which must bear the brunt of the question as to why films from one culture are so frequentl;y difficult to export to people of another. Sadly, it appears that increasing levels of communication – in terms of both access and sheer numbers of images – enabled by the growth of internet communications and digital film equipment have not made our cultural diets more varied. On the contrary, the evidence is that self-reinforcing groups consisting of users who generate content for other users like themselves are producing homogeous but mutually discrete cells of lifestyle demographics which, while they pass for culture, more frequently act as the targets for marketers who can micro-target advertising for the in-group. While cultural identities survive beyond the communicative capitalism of the 21st century, within it, that is within the domains of digital film, they have been supplanted by IDs, the expression in a database economy of indioviduals and their groups as aggregations of data (age, postcode, gender, shopping and browsing preferences . . . ). The database economics of a fundamentally arithmetic recording of both media and audiences drives towards a mass market for hypercapitalist cultural goods, and micro-markets for specialised consumers. In such conditions, cultural identity is at once a spicy addition to the cultural mix, and a desperately needed addition of novelty from outside the self-reproducing system of a market capitalism no longer capable of generating its own invention.

From a piece submitted to the digital issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema

Internet as Factory and Playground

Tthe draft of my paper for the Internet as Factory and Playground conference is onlie at Trebor Scholz's invitation. The slides are available, and so is the talk itself. (The version on Slideshare was an earlier draft version of the talk but I've left it there for the moment).

It is rather different from the abstract, but that is a result of the discussions on iDC list, which have been searching and challenging and all other good things

It now looks at the question of identity as human identity, arguing from rancière's discussion of the origins of politics in the forced inclusion of excluded others, that human identity, as the universal principle governing both Cartesian subjectivity and group identification, is prey to non-identicality. This non--identicality can be understood as a contradiction driving towards a new polity in which the excluded nonhuman actors - critically technological and 'natural' – have the potential to rejuvenate a self-enclosed system of political economy.

Interview

In the course of recording interviews for the Genealogies of Digital Light project, I got interviewed myself. Terry Flaxton included a two-part interview in his Verbatim History of High Definition Technology and Aesthetics. Seeing Terry's artworks in hi-def was a real highlight of the trip: see the Somerset Carnivals and Glastonbury Portraits documentation on his site, and check his blog, High Definition - No Mercy, listed on the right.

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.