ISSN 2436-1410
Approaching Digital Anthropocene(s): A Double Vision
edited by James Maguire, Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen, and Rachel Douglas Jones
It is becoming increasingly difficult to address environmental questions without considering how they overlap and intersect with digital concerns. We observe and make our understandings of environments through, for example, digital devices, spreadsheet accounting and carbon calculations. Conversely, we make the digital through the appropriation of environmental forms; crafting metals and plastics into sleek handheld devices, while powering our data use through vast quantities of energy consumption. We have brought epochal shifts into being through rhetoric, disciplines, and geological measures. Yet the ‘we’ of these statements is an unevenly distributed set of actors, whose politics is pressing. While it is evident that the anthropocene is constituted through colonial histories, what this collection foregrounds is how deeply interwoven it is with the tools, devices, and computational logics that are part of such histories. In this special issue, we bring together four anthropology and Science and Technology (STS) scholars, each of whom offers a different empirical instance of approaching digital anthropocenes. Through various modes of sensing, governing, intervening, and speculating, each article reveals a particular colonial legacy that provokes an alternate form of politics (proto, limit, civic, and pre-figurative). What is revealed in each case, we claim, is the legacy of a colonial infrastructure that whilst saturated in forms of technological inequality and injustice also affords a counter political re-imagining through digital mediations.
The special issue contains an introduction, four research papers, and a commentary. The worlds it renders emerge through carefully attuned ethnographic sensitivities to specific locations, while offering insights that work across digital and environmental concerns. Through its double gaze, we learn about remotely sensed archaeological landscapes in Afghanistan, struggles for environmental data justice in Texas, the role of databases in the enactment of climate governance in the Caribbean, and speculative eco-tech prototypes of data gardens and forests in Copenhagen and Berlin.
The authors bring both anthropological and STS perspectives to bear upon digital modes of knowing and making environments, and upon environmental modes of constituting the digital. In situating the production of environments in digital terms, the collection opens up for a range of political questions that breach the boundaries of environmental politics and digital politics as mutually exclusive areas of enquiry.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION. Approaching Digital Anthropocene(s): A Double Vision
James Maguire, Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen and Rachel Douglas-Jones
PDF | Pages: i–ixi
The Limits to Computational Growth: Digital Databases and Climate Change in the Caribbean
Sarah E. Vaughn
PDF | Pages: 1–27
Sensing in and Beyond the Digital Anthropocene Saadia Mirza PDF | Pages: 28–47
Repairing the Anthropocene: Toward Civic Validity for Environmental Data Justice Lourdes Vera PDF | Pages: 48–79
Biotechnology and the Climate Emergency: Speculating with Grow Your Own Cloud
James Maguire, Cyrus Clarke and Monika Seyfried
PDF | Pages: 80–102
AFTERWORD. Digital Anthropocene: Computing an Epoch in the Making
Jennifer Gabrys
PDF | Pages: 103–110