The Wrong Amazon is Burning...

In considering this week’s readings on waste I was really drawn to Nathan Ensmenger’s “The Environmental History of Computing”. Ensmenger attempt to do just want his title suggests in telling the environmental history of computing through its close ties to geography and material resources. What I appreciate about Ensemnger’s article is the focus on geography over articulating waste as a by product of global capitalism extractive capacity (which it certainly is). By focusing on geography Ensmenger allows to better understand the histories of information technologies as they are tied directly to a need to understand, manage, map, deplete, steal, and claim land for its extractive value. This shift opens up the politics of the materials used to power digital infrastructure but also expands the time of this space showing the nested building on internet infrastructure on top of power grid infrastructure on top of telegraph infrastructure on top of railroad infrastructure on top of American Manifest Destiny, chattel slavery, and settler colonialism.

Ensmenger continues by elaborating on the material consequences of what it means for a society to think of itself as digital. As he details the extraction of lithium on Bolivia, and rare earth metals in Indonesia and China I was thinking about Stephna Graham’s concept “glocal” in his text Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition with Simon Marvin. In their text they use the term glocal to refer to places that house key components for global infrastructure and aid in connectivity but at the local level are mired in the politics of extraction and a lack of access to the very technologies that their labor supports. This kind of uneven development at the fatal coupling of power and difference connects directly to the present practices of extraction build on colonial baggage that Ensmenger describes.  This creates a powerful analysis of the ways that the ethereal rhetoric that comes from tech companies masks both the material extraction needed and the neocolonial armature that it is often build on. Or but far more eloquently by the internet gods themselves, “The wrong Amazon is burning, the wrong ice is melting”.