Juhana Venäläinen University of East London / CSJC &
University of Eastern Finland, School of Humanities [email protected]
Commons Convivium / University of East London / Centre for Social Justice and Change / 29th Apr 2015
� Prospective post-doc research project: “Political ecologies of the immaterial economy”
� Intermeshing of the material (natural) and immaterial (constructed) commons in contemporary capitalism
� Cases: digital waste, e-waste, energy efficiency, technological and financial aspects of the telecommunications
� Theoretical underpinnings: commons, immaterial and affective labour, critical political economy, new materialism(s), digital humanities
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/data-centre/world-could-run-out-of-storage-capacity-within-2-years-warns-seagate-vp-1278040
Annual data production estimates 2015–2020:
from 3.5 to 44 zettabytes (= 44 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes)
(= ca. 2.5 million iPhone photos per capita, globally)
1. Building a factory capacity to meet the ‘stratospheric demand’ would be financially unrealistic.
2. It is becoming technically difficult to squeeze larger amount of information into the physical data containers (hard drives) because of the ‘molecular’ limits.
� Moore’s law: every two years, microprocessor speeds have doubled
� As applied to storage: every two years, hard drives have doubled in capacity, halved in price, and retained the same physical size
http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update
$2,999 / 10 MB = $300,000 / 1 GB
$99.99 / 3 TB = $0.03 / 1 GB
1. Decreasing price of data storage (and communications)
2. Decreasing transaction costs of the information economy
3. A new socio-economic form based on ‘costless’ sharing
� Planetary commons of Earth (metals, oil, other sources of energy) as shaping the limits of the digitally networked production
� Digital ‘infosphere’ of Internet as a commons, produced in social collaboration, metaphorically analogical to the biosphere and the natural environment
� E. g. open source, P2P, Creative Commons, GNU/Linux, Wikipedia
� Yochai Benkler: commons-based peer production as a revolutionary social form
� The tragedy of the commons (Garrett Hardin) vs. the comedy of the commons (Carol Rose)
Digitalism? “Economically, digitalism states that this almost energy-free production of data can affect energy-expensive material production, eventually taking it
over and triggering social change. […]
Ecologically, digitalism promotes itself as an environmentally friendly and zero-emission machine against the pollution of older Fordist modes of
industrial production, and yet it is estimated that an avatar on Second Life consumes more electricity that the average Brazilian.”
(Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits, pp. 72–73)
Material – Immaterial
Natural – Social
Ecological – Economic (cf. Latour: “the modern Constitution”; or Whitehead: “bifurcation of nature”)
� Three competing firms: Seagate, Western Digital
� Thailand: #2 in hard drive production (after China), accounting for ¼ of global supply
� Western Digital: Leading manufacturer (along with Seagate), with ca. 60 % of production in Thailand (in 2011)
� Shut down 14 000 factories, flooded hundreds of homes, put more than 660,000 out of work (ZDnet 2011)
� One of the costliest natural disasters with losses of US$45bn (World Bank 2012)
� 2/3 of the country affected
Monsuun rainfall starts
May 2011
Heavy raining continues. Almost all lower central
provinces affected
August–September
2011
24 July 2011 Tropical storm Nock-ten hits
Thailand, causing flash flooding
October 2011 Most dams
already near- or over-capacity. Flooding in Ayutthaya
worsens and forces
evacuations.
WD signals problems in
production due to flooding
12 Oct 2011
Flood defenses breaching also in Navanakorn; WD
suspends production in
Thailand.
17 Oct 2011
15 Oct 2011 Bang Pa-in facilities
submerged in six feet of water
18 Oct 2011 Hard drive prices spiking; Apple CEO warns of
supply shortages
� The materialities of the ‘immaterial’ production only manifest themselves in the event of a disruption. � Western Digital’s flooded factory made 25 % of world’s supply
of “sliders” � The major supplier (70 %) for hard drive motors, Nidec, was
also in the flooded area
� Anthropocene: “a unique geo-historical period, in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth” (Zylinska 2014)
� Not only a severe crisis of the natural environment but also a crisis in how to think about it critically
� à What kind of understandings of ‘storage’ and the Anthropocene does the story of the 2011 Thai floods enact?
� “As valuable as oil and just as difficult to mine, model and manage, data is swiftly becoming a vital asset to businesses the world over.” (Mark Whitby, Seagate, in Techradar)
à From ‘transaction costs’ to valuable factors of production (in big data and cloud computing environments)
� “Our reluctance to throw away anything has made our storage infrastructure into something approximating the kitchen junk drawer. […] Instead of focusing narrowly on capacity allocation efficiency […] planners need to consider capacity utilization efficiency.” (SearchStorage n.d.)
� Digital waste = pollution of the information commons and the natural commons
� “Think before you save”: degrowth, downsizing
� “Are we going to keep facing economic disaster as a result of natural disasters, or will global supply chains have to adapt to a more dangerous, post-climate change world?” (Greg Lindsay, in Co.Exist 2011)
� “Surely one of the inevitable impacts of this is that never again will so much be concentrated in so few places.” (John Monroe / Gartner, in NYT 2011)
� “This is bigger than climate change. Disasters happen. They just do.” (Co.Exist 2011, comments)
� Understanding of digital commons as ‘immaterial’ – one of the detrimental illusions in the commons debate
� Similarly, understanding them only as material would be an underestimate of their potential
à cf. Latour (2013): “…the back and forth movement between, on the one hand, the ‘social construction of nature’ and, on the other, the reductionist view of humans made of carbon and water…” à Instead, the focus could be on the intermeshing of ‘the ecologies of mind’ (Bateson; Guattari) and the ecologies of nature
� Sources & literature � Co.Exist. 2011. “The Economics of Disaster: Fragile Supply Chains Tossed By The Storm.” Co.Exist. October 11. http://
www.fastcoexist.com/1678794/the-economics-of-disaster-fragile-supply-chains-tossed-by-the-storm. � Latour, Bruno. 2013. “Telling Friends from Foes at the Time of the Anthropocene Application/pdf Icon.” presented at the
EHESS-Centre Koyré- Sciences Po symposium “Thinking the Anthropocene,” Paris, November 14. � NYT. 2011. “Pervasive Thailand Flooding Cripples Hard-Drive Suppliers.” The New York Times, November 6. http://
www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/business/global/07iht-floods07.html. � Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2008. Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers / Institute of Network
Cultures. � SearchStorage. 2015. “Curbing Data Storage Capacity Demand.” SearchStorage. Accessed May 6. http://
searchstorage.techtarget.com/essentialguide/Curbing-data-storage-capacity-demand. � Techradar. 2014. “World Could ‘Run out of Storage Capacity’ within Two Years Warns Seagate.” TechRadar. December 22.
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/data-centre/world-could-run-out-of-storage-capacity-within-2-years-warns-seagate-vp-1278040.
� World Bank. 2012. Thai Flood 2011. Rapid Assessment for Resilient Recovery and Reconstruction Planning. http://www.gfdrr.org/sites/gfdrr.org/files/publication/Thai_Flood_2011_2.pdf.
� ZDnet. 2011. “Thailand Floods to Lead to Hard Drive Shortages for Months.” ZDNet. October 23. http://www.zdnet.com/article/thailand-floods-to-lead-to-hard-drive-shortages-for-months/.
� Zylinska, Joanna. 2014. Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene. Open Humanities Press. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.12917741.0001.001.
� Image credits: creativity103 / Deviantart, Scan Computers UK, M5 Photography, Google Maps, U.S. Marine Corps, ConstructorGrp / Wikimedia Commons
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