Jackson, Mukherjee, Lally et al., and Ensmenger all emphasize the embeddedness of information technology systems in their respective texts. Whether by calling attention to how progress and innovation are layered upon invisible processes of repair or by highlighting the physical and environmental costs associated with housing Bitcoin miners, these texts underscore the material realities of contemporary technological advances. As these readings render visible the physical infrastructures undergirding today’s digital business ventures, they situate these digital advancements in the larger environmental and political landscape of the world—far away from idealized imaginings of the Cloud as essentially free and easily available. Doing so shifts focus to the material costs of the digital age. Not only is the planet heating up faster (if the Cloud was a country it would be the sixth largest electricity consumer on Earth) but the computers and devices required to make use of the Cloud are dependent on mining rare minerals in politically contested regions. It seems impossible then to separate the internet and any businesses that depend on it from the environments in which they are situated. Interrogating these current advancements in terms of their material effects is therefore necessary for any scholarship that engages with these technologies.
Question One: In “Rethinking Repair” Steven J. Jackson gives us the term “broken world thinking” to understand the problems facing new media technologies scholarship. Given the accelerated pace of current technological advancements, are we as scholars in need of new terms to interrogate and explain the shifting digital landscape? Can we realistically keep up with the ethical, environmental, and political questions brought about by these ever-changing technologies?
Question Two: The exploitative practices of cryptocurrency miners described as “infrastructural parasites” by Lally et al. is at odds with how the public views them. The environmental and infrastructural costs needed to support such practices are absent from cultural understandings of this profession. What does the narrative surrounding the internet in a broader sense and cryptocurrency in a more specific one tell us about the reasons why the material costs of these practices remain largely invisible?
Question Three: According to Ensmenger in “The Cloud is a Factory” industrialization and subsequent advances in technology meant that “new machines did not replace human workers; they created new forms of work that required (or at least enabled) the mobilization of new types and categories of labor. Whether it was the new machines that drove the search for new labor or the availability of new labor that encouraged the development of new machines is not relevant. The elements of the new industrial order were dependent on one another. That is what industrialization meant: the recombination of new machines, new organizational forms, and new forms of labor” (39). How might this reasoning help us understand AI now? Can we view advances in this technology form as being driven by the forces of a postindustrial society?
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