WATER (Alex, Kam, Miles, Szilvia)

Water

“Nature is thus, in some sense, the ultimate infrastructure.” (Edwards, 9)

Sub-micro level - 

Molecular-level, biopolitics, pharmaceutical level of controlling bodies

Micro level -

What does an individual do with water? - eat, drink, wash - everyday behavior, human need

The basic human right to water vs. water as a commodity.

Traversing between tow levels and different infrastructures

“Put another way, this water infrastructure (see figure 5.5a)—the movement of water performed by Machan women—supports this Internet access (see figure 5.5b)—children in a local private school. Machan water carriers not only support and sustain their families but, in the logic of digital capitalism, their labor is implicitly commandeered to sustain populations on the cusp of becoming new markets for commercial Internet service providers and mobile telephone companies seeking to extend their enterprises into new regions as market saturation peaks in industrialized parts of the world.” (Parks, 123)

Water as a vessel for other forces, cables are run through water.

“Internet infrastructure is quite literally supported by water infrastructure. The digital economy is layered upon the resource economy. “ (Parks, 124)

Meso level - 

Water bottle companies, water companies, 

Dam, levies, canals 

Macro level -

Ocean, erosion, melting, sea level 

“The Roman aqueducts still stand, but most have carried no water for many centuries. The global telegraph network, mainstay of world communications even into the 1960s, has been largely replaced by the telephone. On this long view, time shapes them, rather than the other way round. In geophysical time, cataclysms far larger than anyone now living has experienced have occurred with

monotonous regularity, while even apparently gentle forces, such as continuously dripping water, exceed the capacities of technological control (for example, in the still. unsolved

problem of long-term nuclear waste storage).“ (Edwards, 9)