The Esmenger and Hogan readings struck me as introductory material. At this point in the semester, we are familiar with the idea of reintroducing materiality back into the Cloud, so the readings felt like they were summarizing what we've learned rather than pushing us in a new direction. That being said, I tried to focus on the instances when waste cropped up as a motif in these readings.
Most notably, thinking with last week's readings, I noticed there were some insights to be garnered by linking waste with our discussion of labor. When Facebook built a data center in Oregon, labor was brought into being off-site; the construction of the center itself, while providing brief economic stimulation, quickly dissipated. The labor remained visible in the congealed form of the center, while the "waste," the human capital which was discarded after the center was built, comes to be invisible and even ethereal. Hogan quotes a citizen lamenting that the data center has not brought "stimulating, intellectual talent" to bear in the community: the closest the town gets is the ghostly whir of the archive, and they must be content in the knowledge that it is facilitating this labor elsewhere.
More directly concerned with waste was Pasquinelli's treatise on entropy and surplus. He traces the genealogy of the conception of life as fundamentally wasteful; indeed, it is an organism's capacity for surplus which acts as the very pendulum on which it swings back and forth between life and death. That is to say, activity and productivity are themselves actions taken unto death, and the staving off of death is the consumption of order (or negative entropy). In this way, we come to understand Serres's perspective that all life is parasitism, for we must necessarily feast upon the ordered earth that we might direct our inner chaos outward. I'm still thinking about how this philosophical perspective ties into critiquing the ever-popular metaphor of life as code, but I am hopeful.
In thinking waste and labor together, Black Friday and CyberMonday stand out as an interesting example. Amazon and other retailers waste an enormous amount of resources to make all of their deliveries in terms of carbon footprint, etc, but also sees an enormous spike of worker injuries and even deaths as they struggle to keep up with quotas.
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