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2014 36: 748 originally published online 2 July 2014Media Culture SocietyAnna Reading

Seeing red: a political economy of digital memory  

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Seeing red: a political economy of digital memory

Anna ReadingKings College, University of London, UK

AbstractThis article intervenes into research on cultural and digital memory by arguing for the significance of the materiality of memory and its underlying political economy. Although cultural and digital memories are characterized as contested, multiple and often involving interplay and conflict between different power dynamics, what remains missing is an understanding of the material basis of digital, globally connective memory or what is termed here ‘globital memory’. In work on memory which addresses social and mobile technologies there is an emphasis on the transition from collective to ‘connective memory’ and the ways in which social media offer possibilities for the articulation of marginalized memories, as well as new forms of archiving. While current concern is signalling a return to the question of the significance of ‘mass media’ in relation to social and mobile media and digital memory, this work does not yet address the political economy of ‘globital’ memory which includes the underlying materiality and technical infrastructure of social media. Using the conceptual metaphor of mining memories, the article will attend to what lies beneath the ‘digital skin’ of memories on social networks such as YouTube. I address the socioeconomic and technical infrastructures that enable the capture, circulation and storage of data that then become the raw material of globital memory.

Keywordsdata mining, digital media, digital memory, digital protest, globital memory field, political economy, social media

Corresponding author:Anna Reading, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK. Email: anna.reading@kcl.ac.uk

532980 MCS0010.1177/0163443714532980Media, Culture & SocietyReadingresearch-article2014

Special Section: Digital Media - Social Memory

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We have three kinds of memory. The first one is organic, which is the memory made of flesh and blood and the one administrated by our brain. The second is mineral, and in this sense mankind [sic] has known two kinds of mineral memory: millennia ago, this was the memory represented by clay tablets and obelisks … this second type is also the electronic memory of today’s computers, based upon silicon. We have also known another kind of memory, the vegetal one, the one represented by the first papyruses … and then on books, made of paper. (Eco, 2003: 1)

As Umberto Eco reminds us, all memory is made up of energy and matter. Digital mem-ory is no exception. This article examines the political economy of the matter and energy of ‘globital’ memory, that mediated memory which is now digitized and unevenly glo-balized. Tracing the materiality of globital memory reveals the often obfuscated environ-mental exploitation and friction between capital and labour that go into these newer forms of mediated memory. Such conflicts are often missed in utopian or technocentric accounts that emphasize the abundance, ubiquity and connectivity of digital memory. As Gaston Bachelard suggested in the 1940s, in the text of images we seek to read there is always a human connection to the physical environment we live in (Bachelard, 2002 [1943]). What is it, for example, that makes the colour red on-screen in the digitized rendition of a 50,000 year old Australian aboriginal rock art painting? Bachelard argued that ‘mineralism’ is crucial to understanding culture and the imagination – and by exten-sion I would argue that it is critical to understanding the taken-for-granted assemblages of globital memory.

There is a need to upturn current conceptualizations of digital and socially networked memory by bringing the commercial rhetoric of ‘the cloud’ back down to earth to unpack its underlying political economy, including its environmental impact and the political tensions that arise from it. This article seeks to offer a much needed critical approach that goes beyond ethically ‘neutral’ perspectives of other work on digital media memory sug-gested by extended mind theorists such as Chalmers and Clark (1998), media archaeolo-gists (Parikka, 2012) and media ecologists. As yet, there is very little work within media memory studies that takes a political economy approach to the materiality of cultural memory and virtually no work as yet that seeks to conceptualize digital memory in terms of commodity chains of environmental impact, human labour, and material processes involved in the various aspects of production and consumption. Although campaigners such as Global Witness and Greenpeace have raised consumer awareness of the links between mobile phones and ‘conflict minerals’ – especially Tantalum and its production within contexts of human rights abuses, the environment, genocide and conflict in Eastern Congo – this has not permeated academic work on connective cultures and digi-tal memory. There is little work even within the environmental movement itself on the frictions involved in the commodity chains necessary for the production of electronics from other parts of the globe such as Australia, Malaysia and China. Some of these fric-tions involve the mining, transportation and processing of elements from the earth to make memory chips and electronic components. For example, 320 tons of gold are used annually according to the World Gold Council (Holliday, 2008) for the connectors, con-tacts and wire bonding that ensure rapid memory connections and recollections via our ipads, laptops and mobile phones. Gold, as an element stays untarnished, and thus it is

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gold that wires the internet. Yet every ton of gold must be extracted from the earth at a cost to human lives and the environment leading to friction between local communities and large mining companies. Europe’s largest open-pit gold mine, for example, proposed by a Canadian company, had to be defended by riot police as protesters sought in September 2013 to save their town, Rosia Montana in Romania. The company wants to use cynanide mining which is known to cause massive environmental damage. The pro-testers claim that the mine will destroy three villages, 2000-year-old Roman remains and four mountain tops. This article also asks what then happens at the other end of the com-modity chain for globital memory? Into what grave do our gadgets go? The presence of gold in each discarded ipod, tablet and mobile phone means it has a value to be extracted through further friction: electronic waste is transported by ship, rail and juggernaunt around the globe, primarily from the US to China. Global e-waste includes all the dis-carded materialities of our globital memory prosthetics: our televisions, monitors, key-boards, mice, processors, printers, scanners, fax machines, and cell phones. Dismantled to extract the valuable gold, the toxins cause embodied frictions and cancer in the bodies of labourers as well as irrevocably changing the environment from one that was rela-tively safe to one that is toxic (Woodell, 2008). This causes further frictions, with Greenpeace holding roof-top demonstrations at Hewlett-Packard, Philips and other major electronic manufacturers, as well as at the largest e-waste site in the world in Guiyu, Guangdong in China.

Although cultural and media memories have for some years been characterized as contested, multiple (Rothberg, 2009), and often involving the interplay and conflict of differential power dynamics (Erll, 2011: 51, 73) what remains absent is an understanding of the political economy of memory and digital memory especially. Work on memory in relation to social and mobile technologies emphasizes the radical nature of the transition from collective (Halbwachs, 1992) to ‘connective memory’ (Hoskins, 2011), and the ways in which social media offer possibilities for the articulation of marginalized memo-ries (Garde-Hansen, 2009) as well as new forms of archiving (Lessard, 2009). Attention needs to be paid to how social media incorporate audiences into markets and make prof-its from users’ data (van Dijck, 2013). We also need to examine the deeper political economy of materials and energy in relation to the technical infrastructure of digital media. This involves questions of capital, power, and labour. The metaphor of mining needs to be taken deeper than the ‘data mining’, which is now used by social media com-panies to make profits from its consumers in order to attend to the materiality of memory beneath the ‘digital skin’ or screen. This article seeks to challenge the current direction of research by arguing for the importance of understanding digital memory in terms of the political economy and the frictions between labour and capital involved in the mem-ory commodity chain.

I begin by briefly outlining my conceptualization of ‘globital memory’ before dis-cussing some of the other dominant theoretical approaches to ‘digital memory’. I then address the hidden technical infrastructure of server farms underlying the metaphor of the ‘cloud’ before unearthing one of the commodity chains necessary to globital mem-ory: this is the commodity chain involved in the industrial mining of rare earths, the new replacement for what in the 1980s and 1990s was silicon to make small, fast, memory chips and other components critical to the electronics industry. Within these are various

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‘frictions’ of labour, local communities and corporate capital involved in the extraction, production and processing of rare earths such Europium, now essential to seeing the colour red in digital displays, as well as state-of-the-art microchip production and the production of hard-drives.

The article extends my conceptualization of the ways in which digitization and glo-balization are synergetic dynamics: by critically attending to the political economy of digital memory it addresses key questions of mnemonic agency and power. The article draws on a pilot study of ‘Mining Memories’ conducted in Australia in 2012, funded by the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney. The study involved the scoping of mining sites in relation to the rare earths associated with the computer industry and the tracing of the beginning of the commodity chain involved in rare earth mining from Australia to Malaysia.

From digital memory to globital memory

My previous work has analysed how mediated memory is changing in association with processes of digitization and globalization. The present account of the kinds of mediated remembering produced under the conditions of digitization and globalization is based on the analysis and explanation of empirical data over five years from a number of key case studies. These included the examination of the mobile phone witnessing of the 2005 London bombings (Reading, 2009); the mobile and social witnessing of the shooting of Neda Agha Soltan shortly after the elections in Iran in 2009 (Reading, 2011a); the online memories of the Roma Porajmos of the Nazi Holocaust (Reading, 2013); and the uses of Twitter and Tumblr by citizens and journalists after the controlled absence of images of the shooting by US security services of Osama Bin Laden (Reading, 2014). The com-parative evidence of these various digital cultural studies suggests that digitization is synergetically interlinked with globalization into what is more accurately described as ‘globital memory’. The concept of globital memory, which terminologically deliberately mixes together the word ‘global’ with the computer term ‘bit’, conceives of unevenly distributed digital memories as gendered assemblages mobilized by agents of memory such as museum curators, journalists, state and interstate actors, corporations and protest groups working to secure them within an uneven field of struggle. Analysis of the globi-tal memory field may include conventional qualitative and quantitative methodologies and forms of analysis, but, it is best conducted through approaches that seek to trace the political economy of energetic and material transformations of the globital memory across six trajectories summarized as (trans) mediality, velocity, extensity, modality, valency and viscosity (Reading, 2011b, 2012, 2014).

The concept of globital memory, which emphasizes the combined action of globaliza-tion and digitization in contemporary modes of memory, builds on but departs from established theoretical approaches to digital memory derived from a number of disci-plines and fields that include history, computer science, memory studies and media stud-ies. Within media studies, it has been suggested that digital media and the internet create a ‘digital unconscious’ (Monk, 1998) with a merging or extension of the human mind through digital media to become a ‘humamachine’ (Poster, 2006). At the same time, some scholars have been wary of ascribing to digital media a wholesale revolution in

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human communication and memory, stressing instead the importance of intermediation between the analogue and the digital (Hayles, 2005) and the way in which the changes wrought through digital media are more of a phase shift than a revolution (De Landa, 1997). What is useful is the way in which digital media studies recognize a digital divide and the enduring relevance of political economy to understanding digital media.

Digital media research has shown that there is an economy underlying the cultural power of the algorithm perpetuated by large corporations such as Google (Jeanneney, 2007). Work by scholars on cultural globalization shows how the spread and distribu-tion of media technologies is characterized by inequalities and unevenness deriving from the concentration of ownership of cultural resources. YouTube appears to democ-ratize communication and the micro social networking platform Twitter has been dubbed ‘the microphone of the masses’ (Murthy, 2011). Yet social media have a politi-cal economy (Wasko, 2009) that includes user-generated content as part of an exploita-tive labour process (Terranova, 2000). Social networks are also increasingly institutionalized, serving to concentrate cultural power further, with platforms such as YouTube dominated by commercial and professionally generated content (Kim, 2012). Yet establishing the extent of the globalization of ICTs is difficult because there are a range of communication and media flows that have different velocities and extensities (Hopper, 2007). Particular questions around connectivity, such as how much internet traffic is generated in relation to a particular story, are hard to answer in terms of meas-urement and data since the data set would vary in terms of how we frame internet traffic for example which might be in terms of voice traffic, ownership, or use (Hopper, 2007). Although Hopper barely mentions memory in relation to digital cultures, his work sug-gests that we should attend to the commercial imperatives of memory in digital cultures, including the infrastructures that allow digital assemblages to flow and get stuck, the corporate ownership of digital domains, and of server farms, rather than over-inflating the new possibilities that seem to be offered for the construction of memories by new kinds of memory agents. Within the field of media memory studies, work on digital memory has emerged from a long-standing concern with the relationship between tech-nology and memory (van House, 2008). This work often addresses the tension between the ways in which digital memory seems to enable the vernacular voice to be heard, while re-articulating older media forms that allow for the same voices to dominate (Cohen, 2004 ). However, this has long since moved on from a view that digital media are instrumentally and deterministically changing memory. As media converge they are increasingly understood to be closely linked to the human environment: ‘Telecommunications and information technology have modified the process of access-ing and storing data, and consequently, they have also modified our relationship toward knowledge and memory’ (Casalegno, 2004: 313–14). From this has been proposed a view of digital/social memory that draws on ‘an ecological approach’: this sees digital memory as a living process in which we relate in new ways to connect to each other and our environment through networked communication technologies that create new kinds of communal memories (Casalegno, 2004: 314–16).

Conversely, media archaeologists have developed an emphasis on how digital mem-ory is constituted through micro memory processes rather than in situ and in immersive digital media connections (Ernst, 2013). Ernst contends that in order to understand the

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significance of digital memory we need to examine the operations of digital memory without being trapped by what he calls ‘the imaginary’ and to analyse the processes and meaning of digital technology without social and historical context. He argues that we are now ‘living in the archive’ in which the technologies of memory, its hardware, logic and codes are dynamic across time with multiple levels of digital memory at work. The very operation of social networks Ernst argues always involves the usually hidden delay of micro archival processes or the necessity for continual micro-memories of bytes of data to process computer algorithms (Ernst, 2013). Ernst’s work alerts us to the micro-memories involved beneath the digital skin or screen of memory. As well as making us address the historicity of computer hardware, he usefully draws our attention to elemen-tarism, the atomization of memory and the importance of ferros – minerals essential to the hardware of digital memory.

A number of media theorists, then, provide a perspective on social/digital memory that suggests the importance of digital labour to memory. Media theorist van Dijck argues that social networking sites make memory social in ways that extend the com-mercial imperative further into our sense of self and our identities: ‘Facebook is like a Tupperware party from the 1970s – you never know if a friend is a friend or is trying to sell you something’ (van Dijck, 2013). Social networking platforms are primarily data-mining companies which channel users to register and develop one identity that can then be tracked, traced and commodified. This runs counter to what sociologists such as Erving Goffman saw as the need for human beings to be able to perform multiple identi-ties with multiple autobiographical narratives (van Dijck, 2007). However, this recogni-tion of the importance of digital labour and the commercial imperative needs to go further. The analysis here remains only on the surface level of the skin or screen of digital memory, on the labour of consumers using social network platforms and how big com-panies are effectively stealing our data and moulding our identities though archiving a singular past. There is much more beneath the skin of globital memory in terms of its material political economy, including a struggle between the acquisition and use of the material resources required for globital memory which are different from those required for earlier or other kinds of cultural and social memory.

The political economy of the cloud and the farm

In the early part of the 21st century the commercial rhetoric of electronic memory moved beyond the metaphor of the network to the metaphor of memory as a cloud, suggestive of how memory through digital means is accessible from anywhere on the move, and, like the early rhetoric on nuclear power, is characterized as cheap, convenient, ubiqui-tous and abundant. This metaphor obscures a politics of mobility or what Kaufman (2008) in relation to mediated mobilities terms ‘motility’ or the uneven memory capital resources different agents may have to mobilize and securitize globital memory. Under the conditions of globalization and digitization memory agents will have differential access, skills and competences as well as forms of appropriation. Within this ‘each inter-secting mobility presupposes “a system” (in fact many systems)’ (Urry, 2011: 7).This refers to the systems of IP addresses, of packet switching, of email and web addresses that allow us to anticipate that digital data will go to where we want it to. Further, these in turn are dependent on the immobility of particular technical infrastructures that allow

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media content and data to be mobile (Urry, 2007). The fixity of particular elements of connective infrastructure is critical to the portability, wearability and mobility of digital/social memory. In turn, the motility of the cloud is underpinned by a deeper political economic infrastructure of server farms that enable the capturing, circulation and storage of data which are mobilized as globital memory through digital social networks: when we upload a photo to our Facebook profile recording our daughter’s seventh birthday, the data stored as bits and bytes can be retrieved and reassembled as part of her story.

The metaphor of the cloud is also part of a wider globalized post-industrial rhetoric of globital memory further amplified by the 21st-century corporate branding of data centres as ‘server farms’. The linguistic mixing of ‘server’ and ‘farm’ is contradictory: it sug-gests memory is industrially produced to feed infinite data storage and retrieval needs while also suggesting that this is from a farm – not a factory – suggesting with connota-tions that this is green and from the countryside not the city. Yet, the political economy underlying these ‘farms’ is very different. Google’s own mapping and imaging of its eight largest server farms in the US, Finland and Belgium, reveal that server farms are vast industrial complexes that are a far cry from the rural idyll suggested in the term. Server farms, or globital memory factories, have certainly sprung up in rural areas and smaller towns and cities because they require a lot of land. These industrial complexes support the cloud infrastructure and applications through electronic memory storage and back-up for large memory-hungry social media platforms such as Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter (Glanz, 2012). Some ‘farms’ are so huge in terms of cheap, land-grab territory that corporations provide bicycles for employees to move around on (Prigg, 2012). These memory factories require enormous non-renewable energy resources including vast amounts of electricity and water to function. Worldwide they are ‘gob-bling up power and flexing muscle’ (Glanz, 2012). Along with what are termed colloca-tion data centres and large enterprise data centres, usually located in metropolitan areas, these provide network interconnection points around the world for the journeys of data and micro-storage processes essential to ‘social networks’ memory.

The commercial rhetoric of the industries involved in the production of globital mem-ory is the opposite of their commercial practice. Their rhetoric suggests that, unlike past industrial processes, these are clean, green, discrete industries with low environmental impact. Yet, where these globital memory factories are set up ‘they can feel a bit more like old-time manufacturing than modern magic’ (Glanz, 2012). Diesel emissions in Silicon Valley’s Microsoft site in Santa Clara, California, caught the attention of regula-tors for the potential damage that was being caused to workers at the site. At the site of Quincy in California, the factory operations of Microsoft and Yahoo used up electricity four times greater than all residential and commercial accounts in Quincy put together, with 9.5 million watts for residential and small commercial accounts and 41.8 million watts for Microsoft and Yahoo in 2011(Glanz, 2012). Powering the ‘cloud’ of memory is a storm of electricity and water.

The material frictions of memory

Globital memory also requires raw and processed materials and minerals. The materials that go into the ‘cloud’ must be wrested from the earth with machines and human labour

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to then be processed, graded, sorted and recombined to become the micro-chips, the computer screens, the mobile devices of everyday memory. The elements that constitute the manufacture and assembly of the hardware necessary for the electronics industry are made in ‘the friction of the commodity chain’ (Tsing, 2004: 51). One such chain is that which begins with the industrial mining of silicon and rare earths. Rare earths include a wide variety of minerals that are mined from under the earth’s crust and extracted with difficulty from other minerals, before being shipped and processed ready for use in the electronics industry.

It is therefore no coincidence that the first ‘home’ of globital memory was Silicon Valley in Northern California. Colin Harvey (2009), in his study of memory and the video game industry, makes the connection between the place, the land and the mineral resources in the earth, which, in the course of the 20th century facilitated the manufac-ture and emergence of the dominance of silicon chip manufacture and use in the region. Harvey argues that following the Second World War, after Stanford University leased a proportion of its property to high-tech businesses, the US company Bell Laboratories financed an investigation into the semiconductor properties of copper oxide, germa-nium and silicon. The company found that silicon was the most conducive to the cheap and efficient mass manufacture of micro-chips through photolithography and offered far better processing power than that offered by the existing valve technology (Harvey, 2009). Stanford’s establishment of an industrial park for high-tech industries led to the transformation of the Valley of the Heart’s Desire into Silicon Valley, the name coined in 1971 as a result of the preponderance of silicon chip manufacturers in the region (Harvey, 2009).

This mining and manufacture of silicon for earlier versions of what were then termed silicon chips essential to globital memory was not without friction. The Valley of the Heart’s Desire is still home to the Ohlone tribe of Native American Indians indigenous to the Northern California region (Harvey, 2009). Mining of silicon has caused huge envi-ronmental destruction and the destruction of Ohlone sacred memorial sites of ancient historical and spiritual significance (Pellow and Sun-Hee Park, 2002). Yet, this element of friction in the globital memory commodity chain, while present in the digital disquiet of protest videos and digital witnessing by the Othlone people, is silenced in the corpo-rate and collective memory of Silicon Valley. The Silicon Valley Museum, built to tell the story of computing and electronic memory, makes no reference to the memory of the indigenous owners of the land with its spiritual and historic significance going back many tens of thousands of years.

Globital memory increasingly involves additional frictions in more extensive glo-balized commodity chains developing with ‘the cloud’ and its socially networked mobile articulations. For example, a beautiful red digitized memory of a sacred Australian abo-riginal rock painting downloadable in milliseconds on-screen is an assemblage derived from the frictions of a commodity chain that includes the coaxing and coercion of Europium. One major mining site exploited and managed by the mining company Lynas is situated at Mount Weld, near Laverton in Western Australia. There, rare earths are extracted out of the landscape; the ore is taken to a concentration plant, processed and trucked to the port of Freemantle where it is loaded in containers onto ships for the port of Kuantan in Pahang, Malasia. In Pahang production began in 2013 for Lynas Advanced

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Materials Plant (LAMP) to process the rare earths to produce a range of products for the electronics industry. The site is a special economic zone subject to its own protocols and legal system.

This extraction, production and processing of rare earths is now essential to seeing the colour red in digital displays, state-of-the-art microchip production, and the production of hard-drives, involves new frictions. One such friction involves protests by local peo-ple in Kuantan in Malaysia against LAMP. Their fear is that LAMP will cause huge radioactive pollution ruining local historic communities and long-term livelihoods, including polluting the river system and fish stocks, which could threaten the genetic future for the next generation. Yet to reach audiences beyond a local polity, to extend their witnessing of this beyond the dominance of the corporate power of Lynas, protest-ers are using forms of digitized witnessing and online social network memory, such as YouTube songs and Twitter.

Concurrently, the starting point of the rare earth mining commodity chain that is mobilized within the globital memory assemblage involves other frictions with the destruction of far older forms of memory. Mining in Australia is destroying ancient heritage sites in the form of irreplaceable rock art that dates back tens of thousands of years (Jopson, 2013). In 2012 The Australian newspaper reported that the State Auditor-General for Western Australia found that the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, which is supposed to provide oversight for rock art heritage sights, had failed to prop-erly to monitor mining companies and had taken no action when companies had not complied with legislation to protect ancient sites. The report also said that the producer of rare earths, Fortescue Metals Group, admitted destroying sites that it claimed had been ‘declassified’(Laurie, 2012).

Finally, in the emphasis on globital memory’s commercial abundance there is the question of waste. This is not only the reusing of trails of data waste to mine people’s identities, or the mining of rare earths, once discarded as mining waste products, for electronics, but the discarding and dumping of the material ‘things’ themselves: mobile phones, memory sticks, outmoded PCs. One estimate suggests around 50 million tons of electronic waste is produced each year (Sthiannopkao 2012). The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that around 80 per cent is dumped, crushed and buried back in the earth as polluting landfill, with the rest of our e-waste, or what is termed in inter-national protocol as Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment (WEEE), bought up and shipped in containers to yet another part of the globe in the globital memory commodity chain (US Environmental Protection Agency, 2012). Many memory gadgets often end up on sites located within developing economies, where cheap human labour is used to strip it and clean it for its internal metals, minerals and recyclable elements (Zehle, 2009). In Rossiter’s insightful empirical analysis of the electronic waste industry in Ningbo China, the junk men and women:

move about neighbour-hoods on a bicycle equipped with a flat tray for the transport of waste. Situated among those at the bottom of the supply chain of electronic waste industries (others working in particularly toxic conditions include children who dissemble electronic products, stripping copper from plastic casings while inhaling poisonous fumes from incineration), the junkmen are among the most transient in the economy of e-waste. (2009: 38)

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At the apparent end of the globital memory commodity chain, at the point where we forget our discarded gadgets, there is another beginning: the exploitation of human labour, including child labour, of those in the waste industries that scour and salvage the materials from and for our globital memories at the expense of their own environment and their own lives.

The materiality of memory and the knowledge economy

This analysis of the political economy of memory under the synergetically linked condi-tions of digitization and globalization has sought to intervene in research approaches and corporate discourse that assumes that digitized and socially connective memory comes without any material cost. Instead I argue that we need to dig beneath the nodes of a con-nective network, and interrogate the metaphor of the cloud. We need to go beyond the analysis of the use of shadow data of producers for commercial purposes, or the seem-ingly ‘democratic’ struggles of Twitter texts and Wiki sites. The trajectories of analysis suggested by my earlier studies of globital memory that focused on mobile witnessing of terror and atrocity is built on and extended here to suggest that these trajectories are not just involved at the surface level of the screen or the infrastructural level of the network, or even the micro level of human networked labour, but involve the trajectories and transformations of the material political economy of capital and labour. The transmedial-ity of the globital memory of an image of Australian aboriginal rock art includes media transformations and distributed stories not only from rock art to photographic image to newspaper article to website, but also includes the trans-mediality, the transformations and distributed stories involved in the journey from rare earth to on-screen image. The rapid velocity with which I can capture and share the red-coloured image of rock art also involves the longer temporalities involved in the labour of industrial mining, processing, transportation, chip production, mobile device selling, and then e-waste recycling. The minerals critical to globital memory are part of a digital assemblage that is never rela-tively localized as it involves the friction of many global journeys not only of data but also of material resources and labour. Similarly the valency, the points of stickiness, bonds or links of globital assemblage with other assemblages include particular material resources and labour that involve valencies with other industrial processes. The viscosity of globital memory also then refers to the degree to which a memory assemblage involves the transformations of minerals and other resources in this process through states that are more or less static. Finally the modality of a digital assemblage involves transformations that include industrial codes and conventions that give value to and transform something that was once waste, rare earths, into what is now crucial to our electronic gadgets and globital memory. This conceptualization of the globital memory field in terms of the synergetic dynamics or trajectories of digitization and globalization seeks to unearth its political economy.

As an academic and an intellectual, the political economic trajectories of the globital memory field are implicated in my own work and practices. As academics we are all now deeply invested in a knowledge economy that includes regular involvement in globital memory production, processing, and consumption. Personally, I am struggling to produce new knowledge and understanding of mediated memory within an increasingly neoliberal

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university that would rather not focus on the materiality and political economy of our knowledge production. Yet globital memory is not abundant, cheap or clean. Like all memory it involves particular materials produced and commodified using human and machine labour, as well as non-renewable energy sources. Each memory assemblage involves a commodity chain that is both recording and destroying local environments and far older sacred cultural memories that also come from the coloured minerals of the earth. In the very production of this article I am an agent in the production and articulation of globital memory, yet held at the end of a chain. I no longer walk to libraries to read books, by magic they come to me. But, this new magic is ancient: for memory produced under the interconnected conditions of globalization and digitization is in part mineral memory. It comes from the core of the earth not from the clouds. I am seeing red on my screen knowing that my digitally remembered red rock painting is far, far from green.

Acknowledgements

The article draws on a paper at London South Bank University on Digital Memory in July 2012, a paper for and a conference co-organized with Ned Rossiter, ‘Data, Memory and Territory’ at the University of Western Sydney in November 2012 and work presented at ‘Digital/Social Media and Memory: The Symposium’ by Glasgow Memory Group in April 2013. I would like to thank col-leagues at all of those events for their questions, comments and generous feedback on those papers. I would especially like to thank Dr Tanya Notley for sharing some of her data with me from inter-views that she conducted in December 2012 with activists in Malaysia. I would also like to thank Professor Ned Rossiter, Professor Brett Nielson and Dr Colin. B. Harvey all at the University of Western Sydney; Dr Daniel Franks from the Centre for Sustainable Mining at the University of Queensland, and Dr Jussi Parikka at Winchester College of Arts. This article would not have emerged in the way that it did without their inspiring conversations. Finally, I would like to thank the editors of this themed section, especially Professor Philip Schlesinger for his very thoughtful editing of my work.

Funding

I am very grateful to a small grant for a pilot project entitled ‘Mining Memories’ from the Heritage themed group and Contingency Fund of the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney in 2012. In addition, the research received support from the Digital Media Initiative in the School of Communication at the University of Western Sydney in the same year.

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