History and Philosophy of Media 2012 Seminar 9

1. MECM90015 History and Philosophy of Media 2012
9. Ecocritique
http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/ozone_maps/movies/OZONE_D1979-12%25P1Y_G%5E720X486.LSH.mpg
"If a lion could talk, we would not understand him"
(Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, II, xi, p. 223)

4. Every living being is connected intimately, and from this
intimacy follows the capacity of identification and as its
natural consequences, practice of non-violence .. Now
is the time to share with all life on our maltreated
earth through the deepening identification with life
forms and the greater units, the ecosystems, and Gaia,
the fabulous, old planet of ours. (Arne Naess)
http://www.arnenaess.com/

5. “The non-alignment of media with message
seems terribly ironic at a time when there is
such an intense awareness of environmental re-
sponsibility and all things “green. Businesses in
North America spend $65+ billion per year on
print media advertising. The average office work-
er generates 2 pounds of paper waste per day.
Paper and printing related expenditures typically
represent 15 to 30 percent of every corporate
dollar spent, exclusive of labor, according to the
Institute for Sustainable Communication. Adding
websites, email blasts, direct mail and events to
the mix and the size of this communication ac-
tivity is significant. However, few enterprises to-
day can tell you the footprint of their marketing
communication, print or digital. That is about to
change.”
Lisa Wellman, CEO SustainCommWorld.
http://www.businessofgreenmedia.com/

6. The problem (1) Extracting materials
some basic digital materials:
indium
gallium
arsenic
germanium
sapphire
copper
aluminum
lead
gold
zinc
nickel
tin
silver
....
Sebastiao Salgado, Serra Pelada gold mine, Brazil, 1986

7. The problem (2): manufacturing
The number of toxic materials needed to make the 220 bil-
lion silicon chips manufactured annually is staggering: highly
corrosive hydrochloric acid; metals such as arsenic, cadmium,
and lead; volatile solvents like methyl chloroform, benzene,
acetone, and trichloroethylene (TCE); and a number of su-
per toxic gases.
“The materials are just part of the problem,” pointed out
JoLani Hironaka, director of the San Jose, California-based
Santa Clara Center for Occupational Health (SCCOSH),
which works on behalf of computer chip industry workers
in Santa Clara County, where Silicon Valley is located. “There
has been a tremendous growth in the number of industries
manufacturing chemicals and other materials used at com-
puter chip plants and in the amount of waste generated in
the production process.”
According to Graydon Laraby of Texas Instruments, the
manufacture of just one batch of chips requires on average
27 pounds of chemicals, 29 cubic feet of hazardous gases,
"Under NAFTA, maquiladora employment increased by 54% in Ciudad Juárez, nine pounds of hazardous waste, and 3,787 gallons of water,
spurring significant population growth.Yet Juárez still has no waste treatment
which requires extensive chemical treatment.
facility to treat sewage produced by the 1.3 million people who now live
there."
http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/154/57/
(NAFTA at 5, Global Trade Watch)

8. The problem (3) consumption
Aggregate electricity use for servers doubled over the pe-
riod 2000 to 2005 both in the U.S. and worldwide. Almost
all of this growth was the result of growth in the number
of the least expensive servers, with only a small part of that
growth being attributable to growth in the power use per
unit.
Total power used by servers represented about 0.6% of to-
tal U.S. electricity consumption in 2005. When cooling and
auxiliary infrastructure are included, that number grows to
1.2%, an amount comparable to that for color televisions.
The total power demand in 2005 (including associated in-
frastructure) is equivalent (in capacity terms) to about five
1000 MW power plants for the U.S. and 14 such plants for
the world. The total electricity bill for operating those serv-
ers and associated infrastructure in 2005 was about $2.7 B
and $7.2 B for the U.S. and the world, respectively.(Koomey,
Jonathan G. (2007), ‘Estimating Power Consumption by
Servers in the US and the World, Lawrence Berkeley Na-
tional Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, February. )
We found that total direct power use by office and net-
work equipment is about 74 TWh per year, which is about
2% of total electricity use in the U.S. When el ectricity
used by telecommunications equipment and electronics
manufacturing is included, that figure rises to 3% of all elec-
tricity use (Koomey 2000). More than 70% of the 74 TWh/
year is dedicated to office equipment for commercial use.
(Kawamoto, Kaoru,et al (2001), Electricity Used by Office
Equipment and Network Equipment in the U.S Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California
Berkeley, February

9. The problem (4) recycling
In Lagos, while there is a legitimate robust market and abil-
ity to repair and refurbish old electronic equipment includ-
ing computers, monitors, TVs and cell phones, the local ex-
perts complain that of the estimated 500 40-foot containers
shipped to Lagos each month, as much as 75% of the imports
are “junk” and are not economically repairable or market-
able. Consequently, this e-waste, which is legally a hazardous
waste is being discarded and routinely burned in what the
environmentalists call yet “another“cyber-age nightmare now
landing on the shores of developing countries.”
The Digital Dump: Exporting Re-Use and Abuse to Africa, Basel Action
network, 2005
http://www.ban.org/BANreports/10-24-05/
The phosphors and other potentially toxic dusts must be removed from
the CRT cullet and managed responsibly in developed countries, and
The ‘competent authority’ of the importing country must formally consent
to accept the cleaned cullet as a non-waste because it essentially meets
http://it.truveo.com/The-Digital-Dump-Exporting-HighTech-ReUse-and/id/2654447730 specifications to be used as a direct replacement feedstock in a primary
manufacturing process to create new consumer products without further
processing, other than quality control – that is, it is not going to a recycling
destination and no further cleaning or processing is needed prior to enter-
ing into primary manufacturing.(Basel Convention)
– Recently, the Malaysian government decided to no longer accept any
CRT glass from the United States, as of December 31, 2008.

10. . . . the division between nature and politics, humans and non-
humans, has had detrimental effects upon not only how we see
ourselves in relation to nature, but also on democratic politics
and contemporary green political thought and practice. I argue
that political theory needs to put aside the distinction between
humans and the nonhuman world and build a democratic poli-
tics based on a new ontology that incorporates the messy hy-
brid entities of human and nonhuman, natural and social.
Michael Nordquist, The End of Nature and Society: Bruno Latour and the Nonhuman in Politics
Prepared for presentation at Western Political Science Association Annual Meeting March 16-
18, 2006 Albuquerque

11. Behaviour can no longer be localised in indi-
The Greek prefix epi- in epige-
netics implies features that are
viduals conceived as preformed homunculi;
“on top of” or “in addition to”
genetics; thus epigenetic traits
but has to be treated epigenetically as a func-
exist on top of or in addition to tion of complex material systems which cut
the traditional molecular basis
for inheritance across individuals (assemblages) and which
transverse phyletic lineages and organismic
boundaries (rhizomes). This requires the
articulation of a distributed conception of
agency. The challenge is to show that nature
consists of a field of multiplicities, assemblages
of heterogeneous components (human, ani-
mal, viral, molecular, etc.) in which ‘creative
evolution’ can be shown to involve blocks of
becoming. (Ansell Pearson, K. (1999) Ger-
minal Life: The Difference and Repetition of
Deleuze. London: Routledge.: 171)

12. it is not enough to talk about nature and politics; we also
have to talk about science. But here is where the shoe pinch-
es: ecologism cannot be simply the introduction of nature
into politics, since not only the idea of nature but also the
idea of politics, by contrast, both depend on a certain con-
ception of science. Thus we have to reconsider three con-
cepts at once: polis, logos, and phusis.
CHAPTER 1: Why must political ecology let go of nature?
. Because nature is not a particular sphere of reality but the
result of a political division, of a Constitution that separates
what is objective and indisputable from what is subjective
and disputable. To do political ecology, then, we must first
of all come out of the Cave, by distinguishing Science from
the practical work of the sciences. This distinction allows
us to make another one, between the official philosophy of
ecologism on the one hand and its burgeoning practice on
the other. Whereas ecology is assimilated to questions con-
cerning nature, in practice it focuses on imbroglios involving
sciences, moralities, law, and politics. As a result, ecologism
bears not on crises of nature but on crises of objectivity). If
nature* is a particular way of totalizing the members who
share the same common world instead of and in place of
politics, we understand easily why ecologism marks the end
of nature in politics and why we cannot accept the traditional
term “nature,” which was invented in order to reduce public http://www.bruno-latour.fr/virtual/index.html#
life to a rump parliament. To be sure, the idea that the Western notion of nature with it. Thanks to the sociology of the sciences, to the practice of ecologism,
is a historically situated social representation has become a commonplace. to anthropology, we can thus understand that nature is only one of the two
But we cannot settle for it without maintaining the politics of the Cave, since houses of a collective instituted to paralyze democracy. The key question of
doing so would amount to distancing ourselves still further from the reality of political ecology can now be formulated: can we find a successor to the collec-
things themselves left intact in the hands of Science. tive with two houses: nature and society?
To give political ecology its place, we must then avoid the shoals of repre-
sentations of nature and accept the risk of metaphysics. Fortunately, for this
task we can profit from the fragile aid of comparative anthropology. Indeed, Summary of the argument (for readers in a hurry . . .) (extract) from Bruno
no culture except that of the West has used nature to organize its political life. Latour, Politics of Nature, Harvard UP, 2004 (translation Catherine Porter)
Traditional societies do not live in harmony with nature; they are unacquainted http://www.bruno-latour.fr/livres/ix_chap5.html

13. Within the romantic imagination the global we need to look somewhere between the anciently
is told as something very, very large, as interred traces of microbial promiscuity and the all-
something very, very complex, but also as too-recent flourishing of electronic miscegenation. It
something that may be grasped and held as is in the city – at the hubs of human movement and
a whole. Left to its own devices, romantic habitation – that we find a long but still relatively
complexity leads to the holism of grand nar- accessible history of socially accelerated flows and
rative. But there is an alternative: one can in- fusions, here that we might uncover a succession
stead go looking for the global as something of culturally mediated human encounters with the
that is broken, poorly formed, and comes in aliens within and without. Before the Internet could
patches; as something that is very small, and be constituted as a luxuriating ecology of life-like
pretty elusive. entities, I would suggest, it was first necessary to the
construe the city as a mesh of heterogeneous ele-
John Law (2002) And if the Global Were Small and Non-
Coherent? Method, Complexity and the Baroque ments, to experience the variegated life secreted in
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/research/resalph.htm les passages and le paysage des grandes villes; if not
literally, then at least metaphorically. To a far greater
degree than during its recent enmeshing with new
electronic media, the human body in the metropolis
has been open to diverse flows, has entertained new
forms, has participated in a ‘baroque sociability’ with
all its invited and uninvited guests.
Clark, Nigel (2000), ‘”Botanizing the Asphalt”? The Complex Life of
Cosmopolitan Bodies’, Body & Society 6(3/4), 12-33.

14. 1. Do you understand the language I am using?
2. Do you understand that you are being given an order?
3.You do not understand what I am saying and you don’t need
to. Just do as I say
4.You are incapable of understanding. I do the understanding
(of the situation) and you do the understanding (of my order)
5.You understand language, I speak it
1. I understand that you are giving me an order
2. I understand that you are speaking and that you expect me
to understand but you don’t expect me to follow your reasons
3. I understand that you are telling me we don’t speak the
same language, or that you speak and I can only understand
4. Nonetheless I do understand you are giving me an order
5. So I also understand that you are lying when you tell me
that I am incapable of language
Do you understand? Rancière, Jacques (1999), Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans
Julie Rose, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

15. INSTRUMENTALITY MATTER-ENERGY
PRODUCTION
TECHNE PHYSIS
MEMORY AUTONOMY SPACE-TIME EMERGENCE-ENTROPY
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Sean Cubitt Dec 2011
Public
MARKET NETWORK
CONSUMER-PROSUMER MIGRANT-NATIVE