«Dystopian Lake Filled by the World’s Tech Lust.»
74
Hird, «Waste, Landfills, and an Environmental Ethics of Vulnerability,» 105.
75
Abraham, Elements of Power, 175.
76
Abraham, 176.
77
Simpson, «Deadly Tin Inside Your Smartphone.»
78
Hodal, «Death Metal.»
79
Hodal.
80
Tully, «Victorian Ecological Disaster.»
81
Starosielski, Undersea Network, 34.
82
See Couldry and Mejías, Costs of Connection, 46.
83
Couldry and Mejías, 574.
84
For a superb account of the history of undersea cables, see Starosielski, Undersea Network.
85
Dryer, «Designing Certainty,» 45.
86
Dryer, 46.
87
Dryer, 266-68.
88
More people are now drawing attention to this problem – including researchers at AI Now. See Dobbe and Whittaker, «AI and Climate Change.»
89
See, as an example of early scholarship in this area, Ensmenger, «Computation, Materiality, and the Global Environment.»
90
Hu, Prehistory of the Cloud, 146.
91
Jones, «How to Stop Data Centres from Gobbling Up the World’s Electricity.» Some progress has been made toward mitigating these concerns through greater energy efficiency practices, but significant long-term challenges remain. Masanet et al., «Recalibrating Global Data Center Energy – Use Estimates.»
92
Belkhir and Elmeligi, «Assessing ICT Global Emissions Footprint»; Andrae and Edler, «On Global Electricity Usage.»
93
Strubell, Ganesh, and McCallum, «Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP.»
94
Strubell, Ganesh, and McCallum.
95
Sutton, «Bitter Lesson.»
96
«AI and Compute.»
97
Cook et al., Clicking Clean.
98
Ghaffary, «More Than 1,000 Google Employees Signed a Letter.» See also «Apple Commits to Be 100 Percent Carbon Neutral»; Harrabin, «Google Says Its Carbon Footprint Is Now Zero»; Smith, «Microsoft Will Be Carbon Negative by 2030.»
99
«Powering the Cloud.»
100
«Powering the Cloud.»
101
«Powering the Cloud.»
102
Hogan, «Data Flows and Water Woes.»
103
«Off Now.»
104
Carlisle, «Shutting Off NSA’s Water Gains Support.»
105
Materiality is a complex concept, and there is a lengthy literature that contends with it in such fields as STS, anthropology, and media studies. In one sense, materiality refers to what Leah Lievrouw describes as «the physical character and existence of objects and artifacts that makes them useful and usable for certain purposes under particular conditions.» Lievrouw quoted in Gillespie, Boczkowski, and Foot, Media Technologies, 25. But as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost write, «Materiality is always something more than ‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unproductive.» Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 9.
106
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Review of Maritime Transport, 2017.
107
George, Ninety Percent of Everything, 4.
108
Schlanger, «If Shipping Were a Country.»
109
Vidal, «Health Risks of Shipping Pollution.»
110
«Containers Lost at Sea–2017 Update.»
111
Adams, «Lost at Sea.»
112
Mumford, Myth of the Machine.
113
Labban, «Deterritorializing Extraction.» For an expansion on this idea, see Arboleda, Planetary Mine.
114
Ananny and Crawford, «Seeing without Knowing.»
115
Wilson, «Amazon and Target Race.»
116
Lingel and Crawford, «Alexa, Tell Me about Your Mother.»
117
Federici, Wages against Housework; Gregg, Counterproductive.
118
In The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber details the sense of loss experienced by white-collar workers who now have to enter data into the decision-making systems that have replaced specialist administrative support staff in most professional workplaces.
119
Smith, Wealth of Nations, 4–5.
120
Marx and Engels, Marx-Engels Reader,