“But fantasy can’t be garbaged in the same way that
governmental infrastructures have been: for the state’s legitimacy to continue
appearing sovereign and performative, the state finds it still imperative for
citizens and denizens not only to appear to consent to the law, the police, and
the tax code, but also to harbor the sentimental collective memories of
suffering and optimism that maintain the fantasy of the common that still
floats the nation form’s promise, even as its material presence, sold off to
the highest private bidders, disappoints, defunds, and deserts the mass of the
people who rely on it.”
The readings this week brought to mind earlier imaginaries
of urban infrastructures as natural-cultural constructions scientifically designed
to mediate and manage flows (i.e. of
water, waste, electricity, energy, people, ideologies, and information/data) (e.g. Gandy 2006)). As Mitchell notes, the
material capability of oil to flow where coal refuses, forcefully reverberates throughout neoimperialist networks of
energy production. While the transportation of coal was dependent on railways,
which were easier to destroy (and thus more effectively utilized in acts of
collective disobedience and political mobilization for laborer’s rights (see
also (Fredericks 2014)) and which maintained greater
insularity between distant energy markets, thus avoiding issues of over-supply,
oil networks are a multi-headed hydra. As a consequence of oil’s viscosity and
injection through higher throughput and more stable and redundant conduits,
i.e. “obligatory passage points”, carbon became increasingly dendritic and
cheap to produce, at the same time that it insinuated itself as a particularly
vital material (with the invention of the internal combustion engine). Where
the vulnerability of transportation networks of coal kept its privatization in
some degree of check, oil was particularly amenable to processes of privatization
which unfolded through iterative negotiations and agglutinations of European
and U.S. managed oil syndicates convened to systematically under-develop Middle
East, and in particular Iraqi oil fields as a mechanism of scarcity
manipulation.
Where Mitchell thoroughly documents the geopolitical
processes by which an entity like oil locked as it is in commons deep within
geologic strata is then rapidly expropriated, privatized, and used to
reconstitute conditions of marginalization like one giant, grotesque (Bakhtin 1984), and smoldering Rube Goldberg
machine, Mains’ article paints a more complex representation of the narratives
bound up within networks of energy flow. He shows how residents of Jimma, while
deeply cynical of public-private dam-building partnerships predicated on
patron-client relationships and their failure to materialize fantastic promises
of energy excess, that many of them continue to express faith in the eventuality
of “progress” with regard to (still only partially) state-led development of roads,
to, as Berlant states, hold fast to that “fantasy of the common that still
floats the nation form’s promise”. However, it is important to remember that at
least for Mains’ interlocutors, the road becomes a site for transforming
relationships vis-à-vis the state and subsequently with the class system
(2012:19).
This critical insight is shaping how I want to examine
emergent conceptual and infrastructural reconstitutions of information/data as a
commons. Phone phreakers in the early days of telephonic communication would
feed precisely modulated sound waves back into phone receivers to make free
phone calls. Hacktivists collectively gather under the provocative claim that
“information wants to be free”, deploying
tactics of sabotage to ensure that the “desires” of information are met – Aaron
Schwartz committed suicide in 2013 under prosecutorial pressure from the FBI
after he stole thousands of publically funded research articles from an online
repository and vowed to release them to the masses.
I’m currently trying to think more critically about the
notion of information/data as “commons”: to complicate configurations of data
as neither exclusively private, nor exclusively commons, but somewhere in between.
In particular, I’m thinking of ways to map the connections by which the
so-called “sharing-economy” (which I think might have articulations with Open
Science) is dependent upon an increasingly dendritic information infrastructure
(the allure of Uber/Lyft is predicated on instant communication with
“ride-sharers”), which, as we’ve already discussed, exist by “re-purposing”
realities of precarity as marketing tools at the same time as they reconstitute
precarity through flexible labor forms (though thinking with Mains’ (2012:21)
article pushes me to second-guess my impulse to assign Neoliberalism as the
culprit, and to attune toward “correlations between specific practices”). This leads me to think of how data is
increasingly mediated through constantly circulating feedback loops sustained
through “ubiquitous computing” in pursuit of fantastic visions of neo-utopian
“smart-cities” (Halpern et al. 2013).
Thinking more deeply with scarcity (Mitchell 2011) and seepage
(Mains 2012), how might their
respective technosocial manipulations in digital data distribution appear? I
also think that reading Mitchell alongside Berlant invites us to also think
deeper about how scarcity and excess are often entwined, negotiated and
unevenly mediated, refracted and subsequently obfuscated through collective fantasies
of the “free hand of the market”. How to begin to chart these negotiations
within the context of information infrastructure? While the tendency of the
hybridization of information infrastructure with the “sharing-economy” to
reproduce inequalities through finance capital accumulation is increasingly
well documented, what might the consideration of information/data within more
radical, vibrant, and responsive processes of “commoning” configured through modes of governance (Berlant 2011:8) lend
toward more egalitarian flows, not just of data, but potentially of capital (in
its myriad forms), goods, and services?
References
Bakhtin, M. M. 1984. Rabelais and His
World. 1st Midland book ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Fredericks,
R. 2014. “Vital Infrastructures of Trash in Dakar.” Comparative Studies of
South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34 (3): 532–48.
doi:10.1215/1089201X-2826085.
Gandy,
Matthew. 2006. “The Bacteriological City and Its Discontents.” Historical
Geography 34: 14–25.
Halpern,
Orit, Jesse LeCavalier, Nerea Calvillo, and Wolfgang Pietsch. 2013. “Test-Bed
Urbanism.” Public Culture 25 (2 70): 272–306.
doi:10.1215/08992363-2020602.
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