Image credit: Still from “Deep Down Tidal” by Tabita Rezaire. mirafestival.com
This week, on the first solar eclipse of 2021, which took place in the communication-oriented sign of Gemini, the writer and astrologer Alice Sparkly Kat tweeted, “I WANT YOU TO REMEMBER…COMMUNICATION IS NOT CHEAP. COMMUNICATION IS PAID FOR BY EXTRACTION—OF LAND, WATER, AND HUMANITY.” It feels easy to think of communication as an obvious good, a practice somehow magically connected to clarity and honesty. An abstracted set of codes, a thing every self-respecting adult should know how to do. But even when we communicate kindly and well, we seldom do so without the use of communications technology. And the kinds of technologies we so often take for granted—email, text message, phone calls, voice messages, Facetime, DMs—all come at a price to the earth, all function as parts of vast networks of mining and labor exploitation that shape the soil beneath our feet and the air we breathe. What if we approached communication and its sibling, “Communications,” not as inherently beneficial abstractions but as the historically fraught and extractive processes they actually are? What if with every hurried message and random facetime, we took the time to acknowledge the (somatic, material, planetary) expenses of attempting digital connection under racial capitalism and its terrors?
In her video piece “Deep Down Tidal,” artist Tabita Rezaire meditates on the sea as a site of historical and ongoing extraction, locating communications networks within a layered oceanic landscape of imperial violence. It was from Tabita’s work that I first learned the fibre optic cables which bring us Internet service follow the same paths as colonial shipping routes. That it is possible to map the undersea echoes between the Middle Passage and the corporations that run the modern Internet. One of the exhibition notes for the video asks, “Could the violence of the Internet lie in its physical architecture?” Is it possible that the project of the Internet as we know it is historically doomed, the lineage of violations embedded within its very material structure?
In The Undersea Network, Nicole Starosielski describes how the routes of fibre-optic networks are shaped by the context of political geography, by the realities of war and statecraft and resource extraction. On an accompanying website/online game called Surfacing, you can pretend to be a signal traveling across the globe between cable network nodes. You can stop at Nasugbu, a town in the province of Batangas, Philippines. From the website text, you learn that this town has a strategic location in the South China Sea, is the country’s largest network hub, and was recently devastated by a typhoon. You can continue on to Colombo, Sri Lanka, a historic Indian Ocean trading port occupied at various times by the Portugese, the Dutch, and the British. And on and on, viewing the buildings and outposts that power our everyday technology. Behind these locational and technical details are layered histories of empire, of the costs of global economies and the ocean and island territories that make them possible. Of the call center workers, the miners, the factory and shipping center workers, the cargo ship sailors who make up this vast coastal and oceanic network of colonized labor and colonized land.
I don’t think we can truly account for the expenses of our communications technologies. But I wonder about the cumulative cost of such extraction, the bloody histories woven among and between the words we exchange with each other. For the companies that power the global communications landscape, recognition of such histories is often absent, at most accidental, ironic, inadequate. (I’m thinking here of a recent undersea network from Portugal to South Africa that Google named after the Nigerian slave and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano). It’s obvious that we can’t look to the architects of the Internet for remembrance or repair. But tracing and locating the materiality of the Internet feels like an urgent step in reckoning with the costs of how we live. The sea and its vast network of digital infrastructure cables isn’t neutral. The messages we send to each other don’t effortlessly travel through the atmosphere between our devices, no matter how much it may feel that way. The ways we connect and build intimacy with each other online can be beautiful, and they are also made possible by long histories of colonial violence and degradation of the land. Don’t let the ads for $10/month mobile plans and limitless data fool you: communication isn’t cheap.
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Cover image is from “Deep Down Tidal” by Tabita Rezaire.