Juhana Venäläinen University of East London / CSJC &

University of Eastern Finland, School of Humanities juhana.venalainen@gmail.com

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

{ 1 } Immaterial commons and the “digitalist ideology”

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”)

{ 2 } The case of

2011 Thailand floods

� 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

Bang  Pa-­‐in  

Navanakorn  

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

http://www.techspot.com/guides/494-hard-drive-pricewatch-thai-floods/

� 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?

{ 3 } Shifting understandings

of “storage”

� “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