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

Recently, I was at the doctor’s office (I’m fine, thanks) and I started sifting through all the magazines. You know, all the magazines that you don’t usually read that suddenly look slightly more appealing when there’s no other choice. Yes, those. And then I saw one of the covers. It was Sunset magazine’s August 2018 issue. I saw the picture and it just seemed familiar. I didn’t look too closely, but it reminded me of the Cape region of Baja California Sur, which is where I have been working since 2009.

Probably just a chance resemblance, right?

So then I opened it up and started reading the issue’s introduction by the editor-in-chief, Irene Edwards.  Her piece is titled “The Case for Wanderlust.” She opens with the acknowledgement that the kind of work she does is a privilege. She recounts her earlier days, when she worked for a travel magazine in New York, and the travel itineraries featured “cost considerably more than [her] annual salary.” In those days, she writes, “my work felt like a portal into another existence, one of lavish hotel suites and town cars that whisked you to and from the airport.”

Edwards makes a case for the value of travel, of seeing other places and people. “[A]t every budget,” she writes, “the benefit of travel is universal–its ability to bring you outside your comfort zone and teach you about landscapes and lives beyond your own.”

As Edwards winds toward her conclusion, she gets philosophical about travel as a form of personal growth. It is Sunset magazine, after all. She quotes the late Anthony Bourdain, who once said “The journey changes you; it should change you.” He’s probably right. But, she admits, the journey also “changes the destination itself.” On this point, Edwards is probably right too.

And then she mentions her visit to “Costa Palmas” and the “East Cape of Baja California,” and the familiarity of the cover image suddenly makes sense. It looks familiar, because I know that place. Edwards tells us why her visit to Costa Palmas was so bittersweet:

Years from now, if I’m lucky enough to return, I will gaze at the superyachts in the marina and remember the serene and empty shore I set foot on, the moon rising on a beach with not a single other person in sight. But this is the magazine editor in me–I can’t help myself. When I see something this special, I want to share it with you all.

So here’s the thing. “Costa Palmas,” which is currently being promoted and branded as a new, exclusive, elite destination on the East Cape, is located in the small coastal town of La Ribera, home to a few thousand people who have lived there for a long time. This is not some empty terra nullius. It is a coastal community full of homes, histories, and lives. It is not an unknown, untouched place without history…despite the images being portrayed in tourist media.

Costa Palmas is the latest iteration of a development project on the East Cape of Baja California Sur, Mexico. The project began about a decade ago, and involved a lot of talk about money, investment, and of course jobs. For various reasons, the project has lingered, stalled, and stumbled its way forward. The original project, once known as “Cabo Riviera,” has been rebranded as Costa Palmas. And tourism media does some of the work of this rebranding, helping to transform this place into a destination.

This very magazine is an artifact and agent of that change. This is the kind of “worlding” that Spivak points us to, in which already existing places are represented as if they are “uninscribed territory” (Spivak 1990:1).[1] Edwards makes it sound like not a soul has ever stepped foot in this place, except for the folks who created Costa Palmas out of the mystical ethers of paradise…and the few magazine editors who managed to locate this marvel of time and space. Luckily, all of us, as readers and travelers, get to share in this rare jewel of a place just by reading along. And, if the news gets out, floods of tourists will indeed go seek out this supposedly untouched place. The underlying message, of course, is that we should get down there while the getting is good. This is how “paradise” is produced, packaged, sold, and ultimately overrun.

I have been watching the reconstruction of this place for about a decade. As Paige West (2014:426) argues:

Tourism, with its constant production of new illusions of the ‘further beyond’–sites and frontiers that are not ruined by tourism–is a never-ending form of accumulation by dispossession. It is relentless in its search for new images and new destinations; however, these newly discovered places are not really very new at all.[2]

Tourism discourses help to bury not only the histories of places, but also the claims and land rights that come with them. In La Ribera, these erasures have been ongoing for several years. In 2013 I wrote a short piece about this development site for Anthropology of Work Review. Back then, the project was called “Cabo Riviera,” and it was slated to be yet another golf course-marina-hotel destination with about 5,000 or so rooms. The Cabo Riviera development resulted in extensive change along the coast, including the removal of wetlands during the construction of a marina. These changes were not without controversy, and the project had its share of local resistance and protest.[3] The long story short, though, is that the Cabo Riviera project faltered, leaving a semi-developed site to linger on the landscape for several years. Costa Palmas is the latest attempt to pull this project from the ashes and re-brand La Ribera as an exclusive destination, waiting to be discovered. Tourism media helps lay the groundwork for all of this. Check out this coverage over at Forbes, which reads more like a real estate investment ad than journalism:

Surrounded by organic orchards and farms and including a stunning 250 slip deep-water marina, the area will be home to an all-new Four Seasons Resort and Private Residences Los Cabos, a Robert Trent Jones II 18-hole golf course, and the Costa Palmas Beach & Yacht Club with space for superyachts up to 250 feet. This will ultimately become one of the more exclusive billionaire retreats, considering the current popularity of neighboring La Paz, which hosted a dozen of the wealthiest families and their superyachts over New Year’s Eve.

Through such narratives, “new” destinations are made. The material changes and transformations of place, such as using heavy equipment to literally reshape the land, are just one part of the process. Another key component is changing the discourse of place–the ideas, beliefs, and knowledge that shapes perceptions of destinations. And this is where (tourism and real estate) media comes into the picture. A place needs to be produced in more ways than one in order to wrest it away from its (already populated, historical) past and turn it into the next desirable, exclusive, and empty paradise. This is dispossession by media saturation.

What is most striking to me, reading through some of this media about Costa Palmas, is that the town of La Ribera often receives little mention. For many who come, the little town may end up being a curious, quaint, secondary footnote to Costa Palmas. And this is how erasure and accumulation by dispossession work. One image, one ad, one brief editor’s note at a time.

[1] Spivak, Gayatri. 1990. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Sarah Harasym, ed. New York and London: Routledge.

[2] West, Paige. 2014. “Such a Site for Play, This Edge”: Surfing, Tourism, and Modernist Fantasy in Papua New Guinea. The Contemporary Pacific, Volume 26(2):411-432.

[3] See this video from 2009 by filmmaker Carmina Valiente: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hd0AeTGuisA and this video from the Colectivo Pericú in 2011: https://colectivopericu.net/tag/la-ribera-baja-california-sur/

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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