ATMOSPHERIC COMMONS

This text was jointly composed by the AIR group: Hanna Husberg, Agata Marzecova, Liu Xin, Taru Elfving, Nerea Calvillo, Adam Fish & Nicolas Maigret as part of the Field_Notes BioArt Society Residency, Lapland, September 2019. It features a set of cards we conceived and that were designed by disnovation.org

Air is inherently multiple. Mingling and mixing, air carries particulate matter, allergens, pollution, viruses, messages and signals. Connecting bodies, places and things at interscalar levels, air couples humans and other-than-humans to geospace. We constantly have air both inside and outside of us, and yet, the planetary atmosphere is predominantly an imperceptible and inaccessible phenomena. Because of its vastness and invisibility, our knowledge of the atmosphere is contingent on and mediated through techno-scientific apparatus, epistemologies, and infrastructures enmeshed in contingent histories of capitalism and corporate and military expenditures. This poses  a conundrum: how to engage, think with and care about a medium and element which structures our very existence, but which is predominantly imperceptible to human senses? In other words, how can we, without disregarding the conflicted imaginaries and problematic histories of both the atmosphere and the notion of commons, cultivate a speculative commitment to possible atmospheric commons, which promotes an ethics of air-care and aims to maintain liveable and equitable worlds?

Bringing together activists, practitioners and researchers in art, architecture, ecology, anthropology, and racial and gender studies, the Heavens Field_Notes Laboratory provided us with a unique opportunity not to probe these questions in isolation, but instead engage with them through practices of sharing, co-learning, and living together. Each participant contributed by leading an activity. These included film screenings, drone practice, embodied ways of knowing the air through walks, discussions on how to sense the problematics of air in relation to other coordinates of the land/scape, the colonial legacy of our research methodologies, deep sensing and more. In this way, experience, skills, methodologies and different perspectives relating to the construction of atmospheric imaginaries as well as the politics and poetics of noticing air were shared within the group. As an example, visiting the EISCAT radar facility, we attuned to the technological sensing of the upper atmosphere, while deep sensing experiments during the walks gave us the possibility to practice the unlearning of conventional ways of tasting and sensing the immediate environment. Recognising that taking time to share common space and making the effort to make ourselves understood without disregarding our differences can be difficult and demanding, we still maintain it as indispensable if we are not to resign on the idea of the commons and the possibility of common atmospheres. 

Over the week a number of onto-epistemological approaches, frameworks, and methods for collectively working towards atmospheric commons emerged. Inspired by one of the proposed experimental methodologies, which by popularising concepts and stories aims at nourishing imaginaries of societal and political transitions, we decided to create a collection of cards that depict concepts which we found useful or inspiring. With the intention to complexify the narratives and to ground understandings of pockets of air as well as the global atmosphere, the cards are presented as fragments of an imaginative toolkit for fostering fruitful debates, strategies, and practices that can contribute towards an equitable common atmosphere.

ASPIRATION

Aspiration is a desire, a longing, an aim and an ambition. Aspiration is also the act of breathing into — a resuscitation from a state of neither fully suffocated nor fully breathing. Thinking through aspiration is to call into question the self-evidence of air and the figure of the bounded individual body that breathes. The feeling of choking makes palpable the way in which air is materialized through a specific embodied practice of breathing, a practice, or perhaps a capacity, that is far from guaranteed. One thinks here of the unequally distributed capacity to breathe in China’s “choking smog”. The affluent can afford air purifiers and expensive masks to filter air, and can flee smog-hit areas by taking “lung-cleansing vacations” (as many internet users put it), whereas the underprivileged, who struggle to make a living, cannot not breathe in the toxic air. One also hears Eric Garner’s last utterance “I can’t breathe” that asks not simply about the precarity of life, but about how precarity is differentially induced and about whose life and future can be simply choked off, by whom.

The aspiration to more sustainable and livable life needs to be grounded in its relational condition: “breathing in the breath of the other in order to breathe” (Butler 2018). This entails critical engagement with relations of breathing, with how bodily boundaries become differentially materialized through breathing practices that are situated in specific and changing socio-economic and geopolitical contexts.  How do you breathe? Who and what can breathe? Where and when? Thinking through aspiration is an ethical and political practice of relating as atmospheric commons.

ATMOSPHERIC INFRASTRUCTURES

Infrastructures, such as networks of sensors, information panels, apps and other forms of digital access to data, are increasingly becoming cloud-like and imperceptible to human sensing. In this sense they become atmospheric, not only by making atmospheric phenomena perceptible, but also by reinforcing our sense of elementality — an understanding and experience of the earth afforded not merely through longitudes and latitudes, but also through elements, including the atmosphere as a sphere that affords movement, occupation and suspension. But how does that atmospheric condition black-box or limit our access to the processes of atmospheric knowledge production? Infrastructures are also atmospheric in an affective sense — they dynamically structure and organise possibilities of life, social forms and conceptualisations of the world. Therefore, the effective and affective power of infrastructures is produced through the atmospheric aesthetics they embody, and through the material, technoscientific, laborious, gendered, and environmental elements they entangle.

DEEP SMELLING

Through deepening attentiveness to smell, in varying levels of cross-pollination with other senses, the practice aims at situated sensing of atmospheric phenomena and their transformations. These may range from chemical compositions and pollution particles perhaps even to data. Building upon Deep Listening practice by Pauline Oliveros, while inspired also by Deep Mapping by Brett Bloom and Nuno Sacramento, the practice of deep smelling requires a critical acknowledgement of the complex politics of air with its myriad ethical and ecological implications.  Meanwhile it draws attention to the edges of signification, measure and language, at the porous embodied fault lines of contagion made sensible in the acts of smelling.

Experiments in deep smelling may include, for example, as practiced at Field_notes 2019: Embodied berry-feral approaches to foraging one can learn from other animals in the ecosystem inhabited / engaged with; Heightening atmospheric sensibilities by brewing different assemblages out of the encountered elements such as streams of water and plant life; Sharpening sensitivity to what is usually considered intangible such as radio waves by careful noticing, amongst others, of shifting temperatures and multispecies interactions, or dust and decay, in and around technological apparatuses.

WALK THE TOXIC

Air slips our senses and resists to be known. Although we constantly breathe, air and its pollution are usually considered as being “out there”. Something from which we can be protected by filtered interiors, that keeps the unwanted (dust, virus, germs, and so forth) outside. This belief is at the core of the problem, because there always seems to be a solution — larger enclosures, stronger boundaries — and pollution remains untouched and our bodies have lost their capacity of attuning to environmental conditions. At the same time, technological instruments are the only devices that have been legitimised to produce evidence of air pollution. And yet, that limits what we can know.  

Walking the toxic can be a method to keep our bodies “in” the trouble, as feminist activists have claimed, to recognise the devices or systems that produce pollution, as well as the effects and violence that it creates in other bodies – human or not. This “inbodied” condition of the walk also facilitates our bodies to (re)learn to be affected and to sense not only the air or its pollution, but also contagion amongst the walkers, as a form of transmission by in/direct contact, spreading an idea of practice.

Walking the toxic is also a way of thinking about nature and understanding the scale of toxicity. As recent studies have demonstrated, even in the most remote corners of the planet air carries microplastics and other pollutants. There is no pristine nature. Although pollution and its effects are based in an inequality and not evenly distributed, we live in a toxic planet. So any walk is a walk through the toxic, of course, with varying intensities and affecting different bodies differently.

BROKEN WORLD THINKING

We can see from the air that everything is falling, falling apart, crashing. The flying things — balloons, drones, satellites — we use to make this sense are also failing. Drones crash into everything: oceans, lakes, glaciers, trees, cars, people, buildings, temples, birds, chimpanzees, mountains, windows, boutiques, power poles, trains, boats, canyons, hot air balloons, bridges, prisons, oil refineries, oil pipelines, nuclear power plants, airplanes, helicopters, agricultural fields, stadiums, bicycles, bullets fired from police officers, the White House lawn, Seattle Space Needle, and the Japanese Prime Minister’s residence (Dedrone 2019).

It is not only drones that crash. Seventy-five percent of the earth and 66% of the sea are severely degraded by human activity; this is threatening 1 million species with extinction (Diaz et al. 2019). Sixty-percent of wildlife has disappeared over the past 30 years (World Wildlife Fund 2018). 

Drones provide a means of sensing the earth; witnessing these human impacts, diminishing habitats, and disappearing wild animals. And yet, even when the drone is crashing or has crashed it remains an important object through which to understand the emergent relationship between humans, technologies, and species. We need to better understand relationship through the event of the crashing drone, exploiting a material link shared by crashing drones and collapsing species. This is “broken world thinking,” an ethos that invites us to consider how repair and care governs inter-species co-dependencies. 

In the crash’s aftermath, we must ‘consider what might be salvaged from the wreckage’ (Redrobe, 2010, p. 22). The ‘world-disclosing properties of breakdown’ (Jackson, 2014, p. 230) bring focus away from invention, innovation, and novelty and to the forces of refuse, recycling, and repair. As entropy — the eventual demise of hot and complex formations to cool and simple forms — and the contingencies of atmospheric exploitation erode stability, an ethical role emerges for maintenance. ‘[B]roken world thinking’ (Jackson, 2014, p. 221) provides an ethical framework for approaching the crash’s aftermath. Science and technology scholar Steven Jackson’s ‘ethics of repair’ asks us to commit to care for a world falling apart (2014, p. 232). The crashed drone and the near-extinct species — this is what remains for reworlding through multispecies care. 

The atmospheric author-artists in action.

Link to additional image documentation of experimentations.

References

Bloom., B. & Sacramento, N. (2017) Deep Mapping. Auburn (IN): Breakdown Break Down Press.

Butler, J.  (2018). “Solidarity/Susceptibility.” In Social Text 137, vol 36 (4).

Dedrone (2019). Worldwide Drone Incidents. Retrieved from https://www.dedrone.com/resources/incidents/all

Diaz, S., J. Settele, E. Brondizio. (2019). Summary for policymakers of the global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Retrieved from https://www.ipbes.net/sites/default/files/downloads/spm_unedited_advance_for_posting_htn.pdf

Jackson, S. (2014). Rethinking Repair, in T. Gillespie, P. Boczkowski, and K. Foot, eds. Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality and society. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. 

Oliveros. P. (1988). Deep Listening: A Bridge To Collaboration. Archived:https://web.archive.org/web/20090530145802/http://paulineoliveros.us/site/node/47 

Redrobe, K. (2010). Crash: Cinema and Politics of Speed and Stasis, Durham: Duke University Press.  

World Wildlife Fund. (2018). Living planet report 2018: Aiming higher. Grooten, M. and Almond, R.E.A.(Eds). Gland, Switzerland: WWF.

Adam Fish

Adam Fish is cultural anthropologist, video producer, and Scientia Fellow in the School of Art and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Previously he was a Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He employs ethnographic and creative methods to investigate how media technology and political power interconnect. His book Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) describes his ethnographic research on the politics of internet video in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. His co-authored book After the Internet (Polity, 2017) reimagines the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the margins of political and economic power. His co-authored book Hacker States (MIT Press, 2020) studies the implications for democracy of hacking states. He is presently writing a book and experimental video called Drone Justice (MIT Press, likely 2022) about the political potentials of drones in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, US, Australia, etc.

www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/adam-fish

Source

I was thinking about these experiences on a recent trip in Lapland in northern Finland. Some of us had be saunaing regularly and one friend hadn’t. On a walk past the sauna one day she gestured to the small birch hut and said, “there is the place for your relaxation.” I felt that I had to correct her. Finnish sauna is far from relaxing, its equal parts excruciating (forcing oneself to remain in a scorching 85-degree room with other sweating humans) and exhilarating (jumping into the freezing lake). It got me thinking about why so many cultures do or don’t embark on these communal adventures with hot and cold water. What is the relationship between water infrastructure, participation, and politics?

Let’s briefly examine four communal bathing scenes I’ve witnessed to see if we can flow this theory into experience.

A Native American sweat lodge

Scrubby aspen and tangled elms form a small enclave amongst the sage desert of the Columbia Plateau. Here a tribal large sweat lodge existed, looking more like a pithouse or a Navajo hogan, with its layers of logs and tarps, along a small creek just outside of the Colville tribal headquarters. We are in Nespelem land, a small Columbia River band, and I had been invited for the men’s evening after my work as a tribal archaeologist. The sweat proceeds in three sessions, all deeply participatory—requiring the shuttling of wood, red-hot basalt rocks, the opening of the weighty insulated door, chanting, speaking, sage burning, drumming. Prayers are spoken of commitment to tribe, land, each other. The fire, the creek for cold plunge, the cool autumnal and evening air are all proximal, ready at hand. The women’s day is Tuesday and Thursday but not today and they too have to strike their own fire, load it with heat-conductive rock, and chant their songs. This participatory nature, the proximity to the elements invites an oceanic and transcendental sociality.

An Icelandic laug

Soft sun, faint blue sky, and cool white concrete ring the assorted lounge and swimming pools, hot pots of increasing heat, cold baths, sophisticated steam room systems. We are expected to bath all proximities and intimacies before entering. After that, however, we are free to lay-about with the Icelanders. Everyone is here–locals have their favourites laugs and commit to them for years. We engage in conversation both light and political—the dominance of women in office, the onrush of tourists in the highlands—as children play with grandparents. Here the fire heating the geothermal waters of Vesturbaejarlaug is hidden in deeply dug-in pipes; unlike at Colville we had paid for this communal experience, this water-made public sphere. The infrastructure making play and discourse instead of spiritual sensuality possible.

Finlandic sauna

A fire burns in a stove in a tiny birch pine cabin in a sparse forest of stunted trees on a glacier lake. Soon this sylvan scene is punctuated with the chatter of disrobing men, mixed, for an allotted amount of time, with women. The stove heats a five-gallon jug of water in an antechamber which also holds an equal amount of cold lake water, used for bathing before entering the chamber proper. Three pine benches, each ascending with heat and populated, shoulder to shoulder, with humans chatting between gasps of hot air and bouts of sweating. Three pints of water on the rock coals, three times, followed by three gang-plank walks on an ice-glazed pier to a chest-width hole that had been punctured from the thick frozen lake. We returned a second and third time, carrying with us lake water to splash on the stones; we kindle the fire on the way in, a cacophony of laughter and teeth-sucking sighs and rock sizzles fill the air. Like the Colville sweatlodge, the Finnish sauna’s infrastructure is minimal–lake, smoke, steam, heat, wood. Likewise, it is participatory, requiring mobility across frozen exteriors and burning interiors, necessitating collaboration, communication, conviviality, and dialogue.

Japanese Onsen

It is easy to get lost deep in a massive multi-story shopping complex yet difficult to believe that somewhere in its guts lies an outlet for geothermal waters. But up two floors in a fast moving elevator is a Japanese onsen, one of Tokyo’s public baths. A hall of small lockers invite your shoes off your feet. A robotic gateway with a multilingual voice welcomes you to a reception where you receive a waterproof wrist pass. Another robotic gateway and another reception provides you with a small (for me) bathrobe, slippers, and two towels. A second locker room for your clothes awaits before you enter the onesin complete with a shower room where you squat on short stools for detailed self-care. Three dry saunas of ascending heat—80, 90, 110 degree centigrade and of different wafting sweet aromas, rank brownish and whitish hot waters offering different therapies, and two cold plunges, 15 and 25 degrees Celsius, challenge your discipline. Men walk between pools carrying only their small towel in front of their penises, an ineffective performance of modesty. No women here, I can only imagine they enjoy something similar, maybe identical. Everything is perfectly provided, this ancient bathing community supported by an invisible infrastructure that pumps sulphuric water in and waste water out. Unlike Iceland and its background infrastructure, in this onesin no speaking occurs, no political dialogue, no moans, no groans—the only sounds consist of splashing waters and the hyperactive, hypertextual television programming in the 90 degree dry sauna.

Getting Out

Early hominids got into hot water in East Africa, Indonesia, and wherever volcanoes and ground water mixed. Sometimes these waters were body temperatures. In these instances soaking was a pure pleasure. But these waters are rarely in the goldilocks zone, of not too hot nor too cold. It required not only curiosity but courage and commitment to explore these smouldering or freezing waters. Soaking most of the time requires discipline. With the architecture associated with sedantism and agriculture these waters were funnelled, and with it pre-existing social power was also channelled. Focused waters could be hotter, colder, and mixed; different rooms could be devised for gender segregation. The connections between the political power and control over agricultural water through ditches and aqueducts is consistent throughout the world, from Mesopotamia, to Yucatan, and Bail. Aqua-infrastructure, as an aid to watering crops or cleaning bodies, manifests power but first it establishes the grounds for participation as represented through interactions with things and dialogue with fellow humans.

Elemental infrastructures have an interesting relationship to participation. On the one hand, water infrastructures like the sewer are designed to occlude participation, communalising services in hidden architecture. In Iceland and Japan we saw this. On the other hand, participation can be facilitated through infrastructure designed to create the conditions for collaboration. The Finnish and Colville examples support this. Children’s water parks and outdoor swimmer’s showers are examples. My point is that infrastructure influences sociality; technologies afford and disclose social interaction. The more complex and submerged, less the participation. The more participatory the infrastructure, the more sociality is conditioned by explicit forms of co-creation and discussion.

Adam Fish

Adam Fish is cultural anthropologist, video producer, and Scientia Fellow in the School of Art and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Previously he was a Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He employs ethnographic and creative methods to investigate how media technology and political power interconnect. His book Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) describes his ethnographic research on the politics of internet video in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. His co-authored book After the Internet (Polity, 2017) reimagines the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the margins of political and economic power. His co-authored book Hacker States (MIT Press, 2020) studies the implications for democracy of hacking states. He is presently writing a book and experimental video called Drone Justice (MIT Press, likely 2022) about the political potentials of drones in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, US, Australia, etc.

www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/adam-fish

Source

Lately, when I have the pleasure of walking in the stacks of a regal, well-stocked, old library, and am in a devious mood, I imagine I am an alien roaming the halls of some temple of speciesism. I roll my eyes and mutter, “wow, another book by a human about a human’s perspective on something.” My alien observation describes all of human art, invention, science, and literature. More humans talking about humans and human’s views on other. Trapped in all-too-human languages, sensual orientations, corporeal habits, graphic representations, and data visualizations–can we expect to do more, to ever transcend anthropocentrism?

I’ve been provoked to write about the relationship between networks and “community empowerment” and “human rights” but my and your community–our kin as Donna Haraway would say–does not stop with our species. Humans are infrastructure for non-human networking. Our bodies are homes for trillions of foreign organisms, and we are locked-in to a dependence with millions of other species. 

The consensus in anthropology, media studies, and STS is that technological others have agency but sometimes remain unconvinced about the rights of sentient others. Do animals have rights to communicate? Do they network? Have infrastructure? Must humans facilitate animal communication by subsidizing insect internets, albatros broadband, coral connectivity? What is our ethical position to these others?

The truth is that animals evolved to communicate via chemical, aquatic, terrestrial, atmospheric, and acoustic bioinfrastructure (Puig de la Bellacasa 2013). Cetaceans use reverberating channels to communicate in the sea, pollen and spiders are carried by the wind to distance continents, soils store and transmit information across terrain. We enact a type of cultural misappropriation on the species level when adopting metaphors for human infrastructure without empirical and materialist understanding of how bioinfrastructures–“webs,” “viruses,” and “rhizomes”–function.

The earth, air, and water has long been both inhibitors and activators of human communication. Smoke, flags, mirrors, horses, and humans carried messages. Telegraph wires crisscrossed countries before darting under the seas, connecting continents. Exploitation of the lower range of the electromagnetic spectrum provided atmospheric radio transmission. Today a race is on by SpaceX and others to network the near earth orbits. Thus a stratigraphically-planned privatization of the communicative capabilities of the elements is underway. 

In 2017, we used atmospheric remote sensors to investigate one such human exploitation of the terrestrial and oceanic realms to create an undersea fibre optical cable, and produced the following 18-minute documentary, Points of Presence:

Animals have bioinfrastructures as humans too use the elements to communicate. Humans also network nature, building deeper into the ecologies and bodies of animals information infrastructures. New technologies–wave sensors bob on the on the sea, solar-powered cell-phones in rain forests listen for illegal logging, and conservation drones fly above the canopy counting orang-utans–fill in the missing, yet-documented spaces. Some call this Program Earth (Gabrys 2016), not the internet of things but the internet of nature (Haggerty and Trottier 2015), and planetary-scale computation (Bratton 2015). A suite of remote sensing and actuator technologies make this possible. I am going to dwell on one atmo-infrastructure for networking nature, the conservation drone.

Conservation Drones as a Sovereign Network

Conservation drones are used to identify endangered coral reefs (Hamylton 2017), orcas (Durban et al. 2015), sea turtles (Schofield et al. 2017), penguins (Ratcliffe et al. 2015), rhinoceros (Mulero-Pázmány et al. 2014), and other threatened species (Wich and Koh 2018). Despite these scientists’ claimed benefits, many are not convinced that networking nature with intelligent drones is ultimately beneficial. Others claim that the “vertical” viewpoint has been democratized by drones with empowering results for activism (Walker 2018). Conservation drones have been theorized as problematic for privacy, data security, the fear they might produce in locals (Sandbrook 2015), and the impacts they have on wildlife (Mulero-Pazmany et al. 2017). But we need to ask if these slight human problems are acceptable costs associated with animal network sovereignty?

Let’s be clear. We live in a time of environmental crisis: 75% of the earth and 66% of the sea is severely degraded, threatening 1 million species with extinction (Diaz et al. 2019). By 2050 the ocean ecosystem may collapse (Nagelkerken and Connell 2015). To avert existential disaster, human technological response must occur immediately. However, scholars debate the consequences of creating the computational planet. On the one hand, are scholars who are critical of networking nature. Some argue that this is resulting in “environmentality”–an approach to bureaucratically governing nature (Luke 1995) and the “militarization of conservation” (Duffy et al. 2019). On the other hand, scholars argue that networking nature is necessary for species’ survival: “wildlife has no chance to be conserved and maintained without the helping hand of man” (van den Belt 2007). What becomes of nature in this speculative future?

Today, the orthodoxy in the disciplines of anthropology, media studies, and science and technology studies (STS) is that neither nature nor culture exist independent of each other. These disciplines argue that nature-culture duality is an artifact of an 18th-century humanism that positioned culture and humans as above nature. But now culture and nature are united. We have “naturecultures” (Latimer and Miele 2013), the “humanimal” (Bradoitti 2019), and earlier the “cyborg” (Haraway 1985). Object oriented ontology argues for a “flat ontology” that does not privilege humans. Environmental humanities claims that our “multispecies futures” depend upon non-anthropocentric relationships with other species. Abstractly these theories are correct, humans and other species are interwoven in surprising, complex, and often fatal ways.

In light of this continuing revelation, what is needed are studies that show specifically how instruments, technological practices, social constraints, and species co-create nature-culture interdependencies. This approach will advance our understanding of how and in what manners nature and culture permeate each other. 

Bioinfrastructures function in the absence of human intervention, providing models for truly sustainable media. Networking nature via drones or other elevated, embedded, or miniaturized remote sensors embodies the convergence of nature/culture long articulated by indigenous, feminist, and new materialist scholars. In a world falling apart, the monitoring, management, and ultimately, artificial selection of nature/culture will more deeply fuse nature/culture. But, thankfully, this computationalization of nature will never be complete. Breaks, faults, crashes, collisions, and entropy will create ruptures in any network.

STS scholar Steven Jackson’s “broken world thinking” (2013: 221) provides an apt framework with which to approach the ethics of working on networks of nature and the entanglement of endangered species and uses of drones to stop their extinction. His “ethics of repair” asks us to commit to care for a world falling apart (2013: 232). Imperfect technologies like conservation drones and the damaged environment–this is what remains for our rebuilding. 

Towards understanding the contingencies of infrastructuring nature I produced in 2019 the 45-minute experimental documentary, Crash Theory. It investigates the entanglements of disintegrating ecologies, tumbling drones, and human interventions. It provides a first-person account of drones monitoring erupting volcanoes, palm oil plantations, and coral reefs in Indonesia; marauding elephants in Sri Lanka; starving orcas in the United States; rhinos in the United Kingdom; and internet infrastructure in Iceland. It asks: What is the relationship between life, loss, and survival technologies?

Please view Crash Theory here:

Adam Fish

Adam Fish is cultural anthropologist, video producer, and Scientia Fellow in the School of Art and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Previously he was a Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He employs ethnographic and creative methods to investigate how media technology and political power interconnect. His book Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) describes his ethnographic research on the politics of internet video in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. His co-authored book After the Internet (Polity, 2017) reimagines the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the margins of political and economic power. His co-authored book Hacker States (MIT Press, 2020) studies the implications for democracy of hacking states. He is presently writing a book and experimental video called Drone Justice (MIT Press, likely 2022) about the political potentials of drones in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, US, Australia, etc.

www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/adam-fish

Source

It is a joke.

I agree that the Sokal Squared project is ambitious in its scope to the point of being mean-spirited. Their findings are easy fodder for alt-right assholes. One wonders about their stated beneficent motivation despite a report somewhere claiming that two of the three authors self-identify as the type of left-wing liberal who in other contexts would celebrate the identity politics challenged by the very project. They are trying for reform–they are from Portland for fucks sake–or maybe they are jerks. I don’t know. Or care. Its funny shit.

I think we miss a sarcastic and maybe therapeutic opportunity if we ignore the comic potentials of this faux-scholarship. Extremists in the left and the right take themselves too seriously. Neither the left nor the right can laugh at themselves and the backlash to this proves that the left doesn’t have the funny bone it could have to be able to learn from its excesses. All fundamentalisms are equally dualistic, asinine, and pretentious. And while I think the right’s golden calves are more odorous than the left’s, our inability to objectify our subjectivity—and take the piss out of it—puts us in the equally problematic space as being the righteous arbiters of morality as the right and its conservatism. We are the inventors and champions of moral relativism—at least those of us in anthropology—and we would do well to have a sense of humour about what that might mean if taken to extremes. Sokal Squared reflects back, in an ironic and scopophilic format—in our very own academic platforms so that we cannot look away—what extreme (and fake) versions of identity politics looks like. I am all for the radicalism and because it is so…radical…it can be easily lampooned. I may be sadistic but seen in the satirical traditions of Voltaire, Swift, Tracey Ullman, South Park, and Portlandia, this stuff is pretty funny. The titles are hilarious, the methods laughable, the mistakes made by the presses deliciously cringeworthy.

With George Carlin dead and Bill Maher reviled by the left, show me where the left laughs at itself in a truly dangerous way and I’ll show you the future of the left.

Enough of my humourlessness for now…

Adam Fish

Adam Fish is cultural anthropologist, video producer, and Scientia Fellow in the School of Art and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Previously he was a Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He employs ethnographic and creative methods to investigate how media technology and political power interconnect. His book Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) describes his ethnographic research on the politics of internet video in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. His co-authored book After the Internet (Polity, 2017) reimagines the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the margins of political and economic power. His co-authored book Hacker States (MIT Press, 2020) studies the implications for democracy of hacking states. He is presently writing a book and experimental video called Drone Justice (MIT Press, likely 2022) about the political potentials of drones in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, US, Australia, etc.

www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/adam-fish

Source

This new book, The Rise of Nerd Politics (Pluto Press), is analytically rich and wrestles with the problem of defining and categorizing this transnational field of politically-active technologists. You unify your techpol nerds in terms of the acronym “clamp” which includes those interested in the application of computing, law, art, media, politics. I think you go a great job of mixing the micro-cultural and the macro-universal in developing your theory. But what is the geographical limit of such a “field” based approach?

Thanks Adam, I’m glad you liked it. My first attempt at finding a home for the transnational people I now call “techno-political nerds” (“techpol nerds” for short), that is, those political actors who are passionately interested in the intersection between technology and politics, was the notion of a “space” of nerd politics. This space was subdivided into four main overlapping “fields”, namely digital rights, data activism, social protest and formal politics.

But then I found that calling them “fields” didn’t quite capture the alternation between dispersed (or unfocused) phases in their histories and phases that are focused around a given contention. I call these latter contentions, following the sociologists Fligstein and McAdam (2011), strategic action fields. So these spaces morph into fields and back into spaces over time.

Towards the end of the writing process, I found by chance a classic text by another sociologist, Anselm Strauss (1978) on “social worlds” which fitted very nicely with the nerd materials. So I ended up calling it the nerd politics world and subdividing this world into four porous “spaces” of political action (again, digital rights, data activism, social protest and formal politics), with the understanding that those spaces can sometimes morph into (dynamic) fields and then back to being relatively quiet/dispersed spaces. For instance, for a while in 2013 the Snowden revelations galvanised the whole space of digital rights around the issue of mass surveillance and privacy, turning it into a strategic action field. (Come to think of it, I wish I’d made this point about the alternation between space and field modes clearer in the book!).
More important than the terminology, though, was the fact that once I’d drawn this simple four-cornered map of the nerd politics world I could start linking materials across widely different sites and actions around the globe. For instance, I could now see that one of my Indonesian case studies, the electoral monitoring initiative Kawal Pemilu (Election Guardians) was clearly an example of data activism, whilst another Indonesian case study, a protracted campaign against an unpopular internet law (called UU ITE), was clearly an instance of digital rights activism, comparable to similar campaigns in Spain, Brazil or the US (see Chapter 4).

The lowercase acronym “clamp” is, as you point out, an important part of my argument. I found that not all forms of knowledge are born equal in the world of nerd politics. Five forms in particular (computing, law, art, media and politics, or “clamp” for short) are valued above all others. If you’re launching, say, a digital rights campaign, or a data activism initiative, or a nerdy political party, you’ll be needing not only computing skills but also legal, artistic, media and political skills. In fact, many techpol nerds wouldn’t know how to write a line of code or hack a computer network to save their lives (but are happy to work with people who do). In other words, nerd politics is not so much hacker politics as clamper politics. These nerds are clamping up, so to speak, on corruption, corporate abuses, internet censorship and other perceived political malaises of our age.

As for the geographical limits of the study, in order to research and write the book I “followed the nerds” both through primary materials from Spain and Indonesia, plus a short but intense field trip to the Philippines, and secondary materials – mostly on Tunisia, Iceland, Brazil, Taiwan and the US. I also had some materials from sub-Saharan Africa and other regions but, sadly, for reasons of space they didn’t make the final cut. The ambition was, as one of the blind peer reviewers aptly put it, “methodological globalism”, which is not the same as covering the entire globe. I’m hoping that researchers working in Africa and other parts of the world will find my rough guide useful and help to fill the blanks in the near future.

On hearing what I was attempting to do in the book, an RMIT colleague here in Melbourne, Julian Thomas, who knows the subject well said to me, rather alarmed: “You’re not writing a book, you’re writing an atlas!”. Thanks to the constraints of physical book publishing, though, it’s ended up being a manageable tome in which only the most relevant bits made it through.

It’s always painful to ditch materials, but it was all for a good cause, I hope!

You’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of practice theory through the years—as a student of Sherry Ortner, I am in the same camp but feel the need to find a way to expand beyond practice theory. What is the limit of this particularly theoretical orientation and methodology? What is the best auxiliary to it?

Yes, like you I feel the need to go beyond practice theory. As I argued in the introduction to a volume I co-edited with Birgit Bräuchler titled Theorising Media and Practice (Berghahn Books, 2010), practice theory cannot be a panacea. It’s a very useful approach if you’re studying the repetitive cycles of, say, everyday life, cultural production, or sports training, but on its own it can’t help you much with messy, unscripted, non-recursive phenomena such as a political conflict, a viral video, a hashtag protest, or a moral panic. For these sorts of (micro)historical events, in my own work I have often turned to the Manchester School of Anthropology (Gluckman, Epstein, Turner, etc.).

The Mancunians pioneered not only the study of social networks, but also understood political fields to be mercurial and open-ended, and invented analytical tools such as the notion of “field” itself (well before Bourdieu considered this concept) and “social drama” to reveal the “processual form” of conflicts and other unruly social phenomena. In the concluding chapter of The Rise of Nerd Politics I suggest that to understand any form of political praxis, we must take into account not only people´s regular practices but also their non-regular actions. Both the routine and the non-routine must be included in our analyses. Of course, ethnographers tend to be more interested in ordinary practices, while historians and journalists prefer to focus on extraordinary events. In the book I try to integrate the two.

You chart the history of hacktivists across Spain and other locations and tell the story of Anonymous and WikiLeaks and others actually involved in exfiltration or cracking hacking. But it seems to me, and I detail it in my forthcoming book, State Hackers (MIT Press, 2019, with Luca Follis), that the leading edge of hacking is no long in the grassroots, civil society, and subculture but in the state and the alphabet soup of surveillance agencies across the five eyes. Hacking methods are now state repression and surveillance tools. Have the progressives lost the battle for cyberspace?

I can’t wait to read your book. That’s precisely the kind of volume that I think will complement my own, which is focused on pro-democracy forms of nerd politics rooted in civil society. In other words, I don’t look at state hacking. There’s only so much you can do in a single book, and in mine I focus on pro-democracy hacking – or more precisely, on clamping, as explained earlier. Clamping covers a range of practices and actions, including hacking and leaking, but also things like putting on “data theatre” plays or monitoring an election through publicly available data.

I don’t think there’s a single, final battle being waged at present. We’ve had, and will always have, numerous battles over the internet and, more generally, over digital communications. There will always be leaks and protests and struggles over internet legislation, among other conflicts. Much will depend on the distribution of forces for and against civic freedoms in general at any given point in time within a political system, as well as on the ability of progressive nerds to engage in what I call “strategic part-nerdships” with other political actors – i.e. partnerships in which nerds and non-nerds work together – to defend people’s (digital) freedoms.

For instance, 2014 was a good year for civic hacking in Indonesia: the Kawal Pemilu (Election Guardians) data nerds bolstered liberal democracy in Indonesia when they demonstrated that the presidential vote count had been clean. They weren’t alone: they mobilised over 700 citizens for the task, both nerds and non-nerds. By contrast, 2016 was a poor year for progressives in Indonesia as Islamist forces harnessed social media and other forms of communication to falsely accuse the Christian, ethnic Chinese governor of Jakarta, Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama, of blasphemy. A doctored video in which Ahok appeared to be insulting Islam went viral. As a result, the governor ended up in jail. So we have to look both at the bigger picture within a political culture and at what exactly techpol nerds are up to.

One of the problems with our current obsession with identity politics in the West (and elsewhere) is that we’re losing sight of other forms of politics, such as the kind of state surveillance you are referring to, not to mention the corporate surveillance of the big Silicon Valley and Chinese tech corporations, or indeed the uncivic surveillance by religious mobs and other reactionary forces of progressives and certain minorities.

What is different about left-wing and right-wing techpol nerds?

I think this distinction would muddy things if we applied it to the world of nerd politics. A more apt distinction is that between anti- and pro-authoritarian nerds. In the book I explain that my focus is on pro-democracy nerds, and that I have little to say about techpol nerds working to further the interests of authoritarians like Putin, Xi or Erdoğan, or indeed of tech giants like Google, Apple or Facebook. What exactly they mean by “democracy” varies in interesting ways among individuals, groups and political cultures, e.g. Brazilian pro-democracy nerds generally have a more lefty, “participatory” understanding of democracy than Californian (more libertarian) or Indonesian (more liberal) nerds.

The anti-authoritarian nerds I write about (the sort of people who’d feel at home at a digital rights meeting or at a free-culture hackathon) are internally diverse. They range from pro-state Marxists, liberals and postmodernists (or “postmonerdists”, as I call them) on one side of the fence to anti-state anarchists and libertarians on the other. Uniting them above their differences is a dogged determination to use their interdisciplinary skills to “clamp” our existing political systems so that we can move towards democracies that are able to function effectively and fairly in the digital era. At least that’s the long-term vision. They are also united in the belief that the fates of the internet and of democracy are inextricably entwined.

If you insisted that I had to use the leftist vs. rightist distinction, I’d say that there are not many right-wingers among anti-authoritarian techpol nerds – unless you bring libertarians (in the US, not Spanish, sense of the term) under the right-wing umbrella. By contrast, there are lots of centrists (an often forgotten segment in today’s narratives around polarisation) and quite a few leftists of various stripes operating within the world of nerd politics.

Why do these distinctions among nerds matter? For the same reason they matter in our political cultures more widely. Unless pro-democracy actors of various ideological persuasions get their act together, the autocrats could well win the day not only in China, Singapore, Russia, Turkey, Brazil or Iran, but globally.

You spent a lot of time in the field, six months in Indonesia, a year in Spain and much time elsewhere. But with the Spanish case aside, I was impressed by how little material from the fieldwork makes it into the text. I wanted more detail from Indonesia, to see how that amount of data is filtered and interpreted. This is not a critique. I think many of us internalize our experiences and write from that sense of embodied knowledge as opposed to the laborious work of re-consulting our notes, interviews, translations, etc. What is the right amount or right type of ethnographic experience to put into a book?

I’m not quite sure when it happened, but at some point during the early stages of writing the book I decided to use the best and most relevant materials to hand – regardless of whether they were primary or secondary materials. The idea was to explore the transnational world of nerd politics and build a general argument. As a result, I ended up including a whole set of case studies from countries where I hadn’t done fieldwork, namely Tunisia, Iceland, Taiwan, Brazil and the US. In other words, I didn’t privilege my own primary research. Each chunk of empirical evidence had to pay its own way, as it were.

The right amount of ethnographic experience to put in a book will depend, I think, on what you’re trying to achieve. In my case the aim was to extend the analysis beyond my main two field locales – Barcelona and Jakarta – to test the four-corner model of the nerd politics world across a range of very different political cultures. Having previously written two traditional ethnographic monographs that were geographically circumscribed (to specific areas of Malaysia), this was quite a departure for me. I enjoyed myself immensely imaginatively going places, and I hope I have been able to convey some of that globetrotting joy to the reader. My current project, Runaway Media, has this same cross-cultural ambition, the difference being that I’m now hoping to drop the academic register so as to reach a general readership.

A lot of political activism on campus nowadays, not all of it clicktivism, one meatspace component being “no platforming”—the forceful denial of speakers students disagree with. What do you make if this approach?

I don’t cover this issue in the nerd politics book and my knowledge of it is superficial. Speaking as a citizen and scholar, I side with those who reject this approach because it shuts down debate and reinforces ideological prejudices and political polarisation. We should let our political foes talk both because it’s the right thing to do and because it will give us a better chance to refine our own arguments and evidence.

We live in a devilishly complex world. It’s unlikely that all the answers we’re seeking to the major environmental, political, and economic challenges we’re facing will come from our own favourite filter bubble.

You live in Australia but used to work in the UK? How are these two environments different in terms of quality of life, students, academic culture?

That’s right, I’ve now lived and worked in Melbourne, Australia, for six years. Before that I worked as a senior lecturer in the UK for six years. Prior to that I held two successive postdocs in Germany, and in between I took up a one-year research fellowship in Spain.

I haven’t really got enough of an overview of the respective systems two compare Australia and the UK with any reliability. So what I’m about to say is purely anecdotal. First, in terms of quality of life, Melbourne is, of course, routinely ranked as one of the best places in the world to live. I think this is a fair accolade. It is expensive, though, and becoming more crowded by the year, but for now it’s still great city to live in. Second, in the UK I taught mostly undergrads and PhD students, whilst here in Melbourne I only teach Master’s and PhD students. As far as the PhDs go, there are no distinct patterns I can make out: each project is an gloriously unique as the rest. Third, in the UK the higher education sector is larger, more dynamic and far more entwined with the rest of Europe and with North America than Australia’s. The UK has a more competitive market (you’re often competing for jobs and grants with the whole of Europe and beyond). It’s probably a more meritocratic system, too, than Australia’s more domestic and endogamic system, where who you know seems to matter more than it does in Britain.

You are super productive. You’ve also got a family and an energetic fieldwork agenda. How do you do it? Is it worth it?

If you’d asked me this question 10 or 12 months ago I probably would’ve said ‘Yes, it’s definitely worth it’. I would’ve mentioned the ample rewards of a research career: all the travelling, learning, socialising, reading, teaching, writing, reviewing, and so on, that go into the sort of work that we do.

These days I’m not so sure anymore.

After 18 years in the business – I got my PhD in 2000 – I’ve finally come to realise that I was trying to do too much, including a huge amount of unsung labour (reviews, evaluations, PhD exams, external supervisions, etc) – and probably heading for burnout.

There is such a thing as having too much of a good thing. Taken separately, all those activities I’ve just mentioned are rewarding in their own right. The trouble begins when you cross a reasonable workload threshold and take on too much without even being aware of it. The demands of an academic job these days are ridiculous, and many of us end up working at all hours. Combine that with raising a family and the burden can become intolerable.

There’s also the added problem of the return on investment, especially when it comes to publishing. With the relentless pace of academic publication and other researchers’ busy lives in a globalised, fragmented academic market, it’s hard to see how our texts are advancing a given area of knowledge. I don’t see many Kuhnian paradigms waiting to be overthrown, or Popperian theories on the brink being critically falsified. I don’t know about you, but I don’t often get much feedback on my academic publications once they’ve passed the peer review. Some of them may get cited, yet my overall sense is that there’s a lot of wasted effort.

As if that weren’t enough, most universities these days seem to be run by profit-driven managers and CEOs – some of them earning over a million dollars a year – that rely on a new breed of careerist, CV-obsessed ‘researchers’ seeking fame and fortune at the expense of others.

At the moment I’m trying to figure out, in conversation with other concerned scholars, a ‘slow academia’ alternative to the round-the-clock academia that seems to be the norm today. I’m trying to do less but better. For instance, I no longer work weekends. I’ve managed to reduce my workload quite considerably and hope to continue to do so. I’m also discussing with fellow slow-downers practical alternatives to the current corporate university model, whilst looking at career options outside academia. Spoiler alert: the solution is well known, it’s called well-funded public universities.

Adam Fish

Adam Fish is cultural anthropologist, video producer, and Scientia Fellow in the School of Art and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Previously he was a Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He employs ethnographic and creative methods to investigate how media technology and political power interconnect. His book Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) describes his ethnographic research on the politics of internet video in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. His co-authored book After the Internet (Polity, 2017) reimagines the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the margins of political and economic power. His co-authored book Hacker States (MIT Press, 2020) studies the implications for democracy of hacking states. He is presently writing a book and experimental video called Drone Justice (MIT Press, likely 2022) about the political potentials of drones in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, US, Australia, etc.

www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/adam-fish

Source

On the one hand you can understand this. They have a good idea, a good product and they want to roll it out, people want to use, it may create jobs, for instance with Grab in Indonesia, which has created 10,000 of jobs in delivery.

This approach makes sense perhaps for certain kinds of experimental medical treatment, for instance, that is, if a person wants to experiment on themselves they can.

But that is for an individual. In the city, regulations are there to protect workers, the environment, health and safety. These regulations are there for good reason, I would argue. A city involves a lot of coordination and collaboration between individuals, governments, and business. A city isn’t a computer that can be hacked, when it is, the delicate balance of ethics, morals, and laws can be convoluted.

In the cities where “permissionless innovation” has occurred what you have is city regulation trying to catch up with, for example, Uber and AirBnB to protect pre-existing industries of transport and lodging. The technolibertarians may not like the defence of incumbancy and it may be a result of pre-existing powers of lobbyists over regulators, it may be inherently conservative and not radical and cool, but it is also necessary in some ways.

I am not alone in arguing that what we need more of is regulation of technology companies, the frackas about Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and the Russian hacking of the US election is a result of the lack of regulation of technology companies.

I am of the opinion that if we can have more responsive regulations, the delay in getting approval can be expedited. But this is a problem with the deliberate and time consuming process of democracy. In my opinion, the state—with all its recalcitrance—is better than rule by Silicon Valley tech-bros and technology.

If more regulation means a product or service comes out a year later than the techlibertarians want than they are just going to have to accept that, it would give them more time to work out their bugs in the software and how the platform is going to disrupt democratic functions.

Most importantly, we need a change in the culture of Silicon Valley from one whose mantras are “Move fast and break things” “disruption”, “release early and update often,” and “permissionless innovation” to a slower more deliberate process. You don’t have to be a billionaire by 30.

35 is fine.

Personalised network technologies are now central to our urban lives, as such the companies that makes them need to be more responsible, and that takes time and patience and democratic deliberation.

Adam Fish

Adam Fish is cultural anthropologist, video producer, and Scientia Fellow in the School of Art and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Previously he was a Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He employs ethnographic and creative methods to investigate how media technology and political power interconnect. His book Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) describes his ethnographic research on the politics of internet video in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. His co-authored book After the Internet (Polity, 2017) reimagines the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the margins of political and economic power. His co-authored book Hacker States (MIT Press, 2020) studies the implications for democracy of hacking states. He is presently writing a book and experimental video called Drone Justice (MIT Press, likely 2022) about the political potentials of drones in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, US, Australia, etc.

www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/adam-fish

Source

Seeing the drone through a critique of capitalism, enclosure, and biopolitics, Richardson shows a lack of interest in the UAV as something more than a tool for the expansion of processes that extract wealth from and dominate human bodies and places. Drones in fact have a number of different applications and work in the service of a richly diverse set of applications that a reading of affective capitalism fails to consider. An anthropological approach based on ethnographic encounters with technologies, techniques, and technicians would help diversify interpretations about the uses of flying networked sensors.

A good example comes from one of the all-too rare discussions of non-military applications of drones. He writes that blood drone deliver services “further enfold the biopolitical regime of the modern health care system within the drone enclosure.” In this reading the use of drones in health services—for the humanitarian application of delivering blood and medicine and in times of human catastrophe is actually an effort to control and commodify human beings. This type of cynicism can only come from armchair theorisation instead of empirical work on and with humanitarian applications of drones. I wonder if the human lives that are being saved by humanitarians drones would appreciate this Foucaultian reading of the object that just helped their family survive an actual disaster? Perhaps they would wave off the flying hospital so as to protect their symbolic capital and biopolitical agency…

In a second reference to non-military drone applications, Richardson references drones in agriculture, security, journalism, and video production. Here drones “increasingly restrict the role of the human body.” This is factually inaccurate to anyone who has ever flown a drone or witnessed the flying of a drone from the pilot’s perspective. Not to get too theoretical here—as over-theorisation is clearly part of the problem—but drones extend the human sense of sight. Different payloads extend different senses including touch—through extending mobility, and even smell, including the sensing of diverse atmospheric gases as our recent work on a dangerous volcano in Bali showed. The drone extends and augments the terrestrial senses in atmospheric and vertical domains. This is not drones restricting the body but like telescopes, eyeglasses, and prosthetic limbs adding to the repertoire of sense-abilities.

A more precise manner of discussing spatial enclosure would be to look at geofencing–mandatory restrictions imposed by drone manufacturers through software updates that prohibit flight in certain spaces–airports but also the residencies and work sites of the politically powerful, such as the US president. Geofencing can basically brick a drone that is considered in the wrong place, severely limiting the drone’s application in activism contexts like, for instance, in counter- or souveillance efforts to monitor police brutality during protests like at Standing Rock during the #nodapl protests. This is a manifestation of atmospheric enclosure or drone manufacturer self-regulation for the protection of private property, pro-corporate growth, and political elites; a problematic privatization of space indeed.

A more specific way of thinking about personal biopower enclosure would be drones and VR headsets where the users’ senses are actually enclosed by a mask and augmented by pixelated photons and electrons. But both of these examples would require Richardson to use or at least talk to users of drones. Despite being a scholar of “affect” this is clearly not something Richardson has yet done, or has yet to reveal how this theorization fits with his phenomenological encounters with the technological other. Why get involved in the messy reality of actual socio-technical practice when pure theory is so elegant and convenient? Clearly, such scholars are not there to witness or help in the humanitarian emergency where drones are assisting in delivery, logistics, and crisis mapping. I am not utopian about these possibilities. Drone delivery will be dominated by major privacy infringing technology companies like Amazon. Drones in crisis mapping embody the technofetishing developmentalism that brought out the ill-executed One Laptop Per Child kerfuffle. But at least we are talking about drones, not smart thermostats and high speed trading.

The strangest part of the essay, and indeed its point, is expanding the concept of the “drone” outside of an actual flying networked sensor to include, I assume, everything. His two other “drones” include the Nest home thermostat and high frequency trading (HFT). These are “drones” because they involve sensors and automation. So he says. This is true in only the most superficial sense. And, if correct, than the entirely of the “internet of things” universe is a drone world—which would make the very concept null and dull. For a scholar apparently engaged in studies of “platforms,” I would expect a more rigorous commitment to affordances. At the very least, compare UAVs with other networked sensors that have the qualities of being airborne, mobile, and optical. HFT, it could be argued, is not really about sensors in the sense of the reception of exterior stimuli but rather a recursive collection of inputs internal to the closed financial market. Rumbas, robots, and self-driving cars, maybe, but smart thermostats and high frequency trading networks are not drones.

He writes, “Amazon’s Alexa, for instance, is the dronification of the home.” A host of different substitutions would be more appropriate here, including datafication, mediatisation, or simply networking, rather than dronification. In what ways does Alexa incorporate flying or even moving things? It doesn’t. Referencing Nest or Alexa is just a convenience so that Richardson can discuss home datafication but it has nothing to do with drones in terms of them being platforms with specific affordances. In terms of domestic or home uses of drones, Amazon’s Air Prime home delivery drones would have been a much more fitting example. A look at Amazon Air Prime’s recent copyrights would reveal a host of different domestic privatization concepts attendant to their home drone plans. For example, Amazon has a patent for drones that while they deliver a package they also scan a home for its value and any potential repairs it might sell as a service. That is a real “dronification of the home.”

Finally, the article suffers from the all-too-usual conflation of consumer and military drones. These two have different historical trajectories, widely different developers, applications, markets, etc. The US Air Force’s Reaper and Predator drones are not the irritating DJI drones flying over your picnic in the park. Conflating consumer UAVs and military drones is theoretically useful for a certain kind of domesticated scholar—it gives them much theoretical material to work with as military drone theory-building is extensive while critical thinking about humanitarian, video, mapping, and delivery drones is not. A more rigorous comparative approach would be to define and stick to a platform based on technical and historical specifics. Maybe flying one would be good. Perhaps speaking with drone pilots would be useful.

Am I wrong in expecting this basic threshold of methodological rigor and curiosity about technologies and humans in scholarship about technologies and humans?

Adam Fish

Adam Fish is cultural anthropologist, video producer, and Scientia Fellow in the School of Art and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Previously he was a Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He employs ethnographic and creative methods to investigate how media technology and political power interconnect. His book Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) describes his ethnographic research on the politics of internet video in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. His co-authored book After the Internet (Polity, 2017) reimagines the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the margins of political and economic power. His co-authored book Hacker States (MIT Press, 2020) studies the implications for democracy of hacking states. He is presently writing a book and experimental video called Drone Justice (MIT Press, likely 2022) about the political potentials of drones in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, US, Australia, etc.

www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/adam-fish

Source

Justice drones bear witness in this manner, not only to earthly destruction and inequities, but through their practice to the future of resistance. This is drone disruptive justice, an action which rejects oppression while bearing witness to the rich complex forces of oppression. From above, drones put destruction into perspective, inclusive of oppositional humans, extractive as well as liberatory technologies, and monocultures as well as species within biodiversity. Drones for justice bear witness to the sociotechnical life and multispecies dead, dying, living, and being born in the Anthropocene.

According to Stengers, the Anthropocene is an era of ‘multiple entanglements’, between natural or ‘non-human’ forces and human (in)action, or, as Connolly describes this, of ‘entangled humanism’. I prefer a counter or anti-humanism, the non-human witnessing of death, destruction, and crisis of entangled people, networked systems, and non-human species. What does entangled anti-humanistic, biological witnessing mean in the anthropocene? Withering coral, farmed palms, biologists, activists, carbon dioxide belching volcanoes, and trash eating elephants as seen through automated and roaming drones—and carbonised air, hot and acidified oceans, and poor humans seeking environmental justice with drones—this is the multi-species entanglement of post-human drone justice and its becoming. Here a drone is both an agent within this compromised atmosphere, an optic on to terrestrial colonisation and oceanic biodiversity deletion— as well as a tool for witnessing, mapping, sensing, and hacking Anthropocentric transformations of the global biome. 

Adam Fish

Adam Fish is cultural anthropologist, video producer, and Scientia Fellow in the School of Art and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Previously he was a Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He employs ethnographic and creative methods to investigate how media technology and political power interconnect. His book Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) describes his ethnographic research on the politics of internet video in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. His co-authored book After the Internet (Polity, 2017) reimagines the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the margins of political and economic power. His co-authored book Hacker States (MIT Press, 2020) studies the implications for democracy of hacking states. He is presently writing a book and experimental video called Drone Justice (MIT Press, likely 2022) about the political potentials of drones in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, US, Australia, etc.

www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/adam-fish

Source

I have been empirically testing the disruptive potentials of drone practices through many diverse contexts throughout the world. Between 2015 to just a few days ago I’ve been conducting participatory and ethnographic fieldwork with drone operators, inventors, entrepreneurs, fanatics, artists, and activists in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Australia, the US—including Los Angeles and Native America—and the North Atlantic—Iceland, Scotland, Denmark, and the UK trying to see how this flying Turing machine is used in acts of political and economic discovery. I’ve documented 10 potential candidates for drone justice. They cover the issues of surveillance, privacy, information, humanitarianism, ecological, scientific, mammalian, economic, national, and aesthetic. Here is a quick introduction followed by one key question before a brief conclusion.

Beyond the hype, my question is this: Is the drone practice involved in disruptive justice—actual challenges to capitalist incumbencies, extractive hegemonies, and exploitative inequalities—or is it a discursive and ideological “disruption”—effective but first for capital creation.

The answers to this question provide evidence for or against the legitimacy of drone justice.

10 Types of Drone Justice

Surveillance Justice:

The Dakota Access Pipeline bringing oil from Canada through the United States including several Native American reservations and sensitive environments, including under the Missouri River, and contributing to climate change. In response emerged an alliance of activists, environmentalists, and Native Americans in the making of the effective up to the point of Trump of stopping this pipeline.

In what ways does the drone used by research participant Myron Dewey at the Dakota Access Pipeline protest at Standing Rock constitute a more than discursive use of drones and a form of counter-surveillance? Will the rights of journalists and activists to use drones to counter-surveil continue or will laws be modified to make illegal such counter-surveillance practices?

Privacy Justice:

Stop LAPD Spying Coalition has a No Drones! Project to stop the violent Los Angeles Police Department from acquiring tax-paid drones for activist and ethnic surveillance.

The question here is can continually racially profiled communities reject surveillance and find drone justice through counter-surveillance and non-discursive understandings of drones’ potentials?

Humanitarian Justice:

Indonesian company Aeroterrscan volunteered its time and technology to monitor the Agung volcano and measure volcanic CO2 emissions.

Does this kind of experiment featuring a collaboration between the USGS, a private drone company in Indonesia, and the Indonesian government represent more than an opportunity to test prototypes for later commercialisation? How would this volcanic CO2 data be used in climate change denialism?

Informational Justice:

Facebook Aquila, and Google Loon, are flying internet delivery platforms for internet delivery around the world.

Does Google Loon, Facebook Aquila represent an imperial colonization of national airspace and of electromagnetic spectrum? Does a domestic alternative such as Helion, in Indonesia represent a nationalistic and viable alternative?

Scientific Justice:

Using historical satellite and drone images we have mapped coral bleaching in north Sulawasi, Indonesia.

How does higher resolution images, corroborated with longitudinal satellite imagery and other data signals of coral bleaching, corroborate in public sphere climate change debate and/or denialism?

Aesthetic Justice:

With my friend Sydney Research Fellow Bradley Garrett we tracked with drones the four undersea internet cables connecting Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Shetland Islands, Orkney Islands, Scotland, and into the City of London.

Should the ability to artistically interpret from above be equally distributed? Should counter-surveillance of information infrastructure be democratized? Does seeing equate to affect and result in activism?

Economic Justice:

Former Boeing, Xerox, and Silicon Valley engineer has developed a multi-billion dollar project which he calls the Robotic Air Cargo Network to transform Sri Lanka’s airspace into a series of corridors for drone deliver.

Does this project for high-speed, high-quantity, high-cost good delivery (jewels, luxury goods) in Sri Lanka constitute economic justice or reinforce economic inequalities and extractive industries?

Mammalian Mashup Justice:

The Sri Lanka Wildlife Society is using drones and other air-based platforms—bees, tree houses, airborne citrus scents—to scare away and mitigate the negative consequences of wild elephant and human conflict.

Can there be any other intended result than mere mitigation of collective harm in the ancient entanglement of hydrological infrastructure, elephants, and humans in the Sri Lankan highlands?

National Justice:

Engineers at the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka have developed the nations’ first working drone. However, it remains under-appreciated despite being as effective as competitors.

Does the importation of French drones by the Sri Lankan Survey department instead of buying these domestically invented drones constitute economic justice? How will such importation ultimately influence data and air and space sovereignty?

Ecological Justice:

Illegal Palm oil plantation expansions and erosion in West Papua has been mapped by activist friends with their drones.

Do counter-maps, informed by indigenous senses of space and designed through drone deployment, have a legal standing? As most of these drones are gifts from large US NGOs are drones a form of technoliberal developmentalism—which applies feel-good technologies to solve social problems?

Adam Fish

Adam Fish is cultural anthropologist, video producer, and Scientia Fellow in the School of Art and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Previously he was a Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He employs ethnographic and creative methods to investigate how media technology and political power interconnect. His book Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) describes his ethnographic research on the politics of internet video in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. His co-authored book After the Internet (Polity, 2017) reimagines the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the margins of political and economic power. His co-authored book Hacker States (MIT Press, 2020) studies the implications for democracy of hacking states. He is presently writing a book and experimental video called Drone Justice (MIT Press, likely 2022) about the political potentials of drones in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, US, Australia, etc.

www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/adam-fish

Source

But this has been a fascinating time for a scholar like myself who investigates the use of drones—unmanned and unwomanned aerial vehicles—in social justice, environmental activism, and crisis preparedness.

Amazon drone delivery is developing in the UK, drone blood delivery is happening in Rwanda, while here in Indonesia people are using drones to monitor orangutan populations, map the growth and expansion of palm oil plantations, and to gather information that might help us predict when volcanos such as Agung on the Indonesian island of Bali might again erupt with devastating impact.

In Bali, I have the pleasure of working with a remarkable group of drone professionals, inventors, and hackers that work for Aeroterrascan, a drone company from Bandung, on the island of Java. As part of their corporate social responsibility they have donated their time and technologies to the Balinese emergency and crisis response teams. Its been fascinating to participate in a project that flies remote sensing systems high in the air in order to better understand dangerous forces deep in the Earth.

I’ve been involved in two different drone volcano missions. A third mission will begin in a few days. In the first we used drones to create an extremely accurate 3D map of the size of the volcano—down to 20 cm of accuracy. With this information, we could see if the volcano was actually growing in size—key evidence that it is about to blow up.

The second mission involved flying a carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide smelling sensor through the plume. An increase in these gases can tell us if an eruption looms. There was a high degree of carbon dioxide and that informed the government to raise the threat warning to the highest level.

In the forthcoming third mission, will use drones to see if anyone is still in the exclusion zone so that there eviction can be facilitated.

What is interesting to me as an anthropologist is how scientists and engineers use technologies to better understand distant processes—in the atmosphere, below the earth, from a different other, and at some point in the future. It has been a difficult task, flying a drone 3000 meters to the summit of an erupting volcano. Several different groups have tried and a few expensive drones have been lost—sacrifices to what the Balinese Hindus consider a sacred mountain.

More philosophically, I am interested in better understanding the implications of having sensor systems flying about in the air, swimming under the seas, or positioned volcanic craters—basically everywhere. These tools may help us evacuate people before a crisis, but it also entails transforming organic signals into computer code. We’ve long interpreted nature through technologies that augment our senses, particularly sight. Microscopes, telescopes, and binoculars have been great assets for chemistry, astronomy, and biology. But the sensorification of the elements is something different. This is the computationalisation of Earth, alluded to by Jennifer Gabrys and Benjamin Bratton. We’ve heard a lot about the internet of things but this is the internet of nature. The present proliferation of drones is the latest step in the direction of wiring everything on the planet—in this case the air itself.

These flying sensors, it is hoped, will give Indonesian volcanologists what Stephen Helmreich, thinking through another realm of cosmic possibility, astrobiology, calls abduction, “an argument from the future” (2016: 15) with abductive reasoning being an inference from “premises that may or may not materialize in the future” (2016: 20). Abduction is something, we humans, who have brought upon ourselves and all species longterm planetary calamities for immediate gain—are not very good at. This abductive reasoning requires sensors very much new—only a decade or so old with satellite images but 50 years old—and capable of only partial perspective. We are indeed a species still young in building multigenerational tools, concepts, and their applications.

There is something not fully comprehended—or more ominously not comprehensible—about how flying robots and self-driving cars equipped with remote sensing systems filter the world through big data crunching algorithms capable of generating and responding to their own artificial intelligence. These non-human others react to the world not as ecological, social, or geological processes but as functions and feature-sets in databases. I am concerned with what this software-isation of nature will exclude. As they remake the world in their database images, what will be the implications of those exclusions for planetary sustainability and human autonomy.

In this future world, there may be less of a difference between engineering towards nature and the engineering of nature.

Adam Fish

Adam Fish is cultural anthropologist, video producer, and Scientia Fellow in the School of Art and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Previously he was a Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He employs ethnographic and creative methods to investigate how media technology and political power interconnect. His book Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) describes his ethnographic research on the politics of internet video in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. His co-authored book After the Internet (Polity, 2017) reimagines the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the margins of political and economic power. His co-authored book Hacker States (MIT Press, 2020) studies the implications for democracy of hacking states. He is presently writing a book and experimental video called Drone Justice (MIT Press, likely 2022) about the political potentials of drones in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, US, Australia, etc.

www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/adam-fish

Source