The Materiality of the Digital: Petro-Enlightenment and the Aesthetics of Invisibility

Carolyn Elerding (bio)
The Ohio State University

Abstract

This essay interprets digital petroculture’s aesthetic of invisibility in two ways. First, the ubiquitous intangibility of software simulation in everyday life is framed in terms of the Marxist concept of “realization” in circulation. Second, the “cloud’s” remote storage and processing of data is understood as a system of rents. These two processes reinforce the invisibility of the vast material resources consumed in order to perpetuate digital culture. After discussing the roots of this invisibility in enlightenment techno-science and its perpetuation through education, the essay argues that attempts to address social inequalities through cultural design should also engage with environmental issues.

Software, computation, code, and data now permeate nearly all sociocultural production, as demonstrated by not only the digitally augmented financial crisis and the ubiquity of cloud computing, but also the online empowerment of historically marginalized groups through the relative accessibility of social media and other digital tools.¹ Though currents in digital studies undergo constant negotiation, many researchers and theorists across the humanities and social sciences agree on the importance of the aesthetic dimensions of computing as an expression of cultural value. While emphasizing computation’s unique medial specificity, for example, theorists have nevertheless compared it aesthetically with language, narrative, theatre, cinema, and architecture, among other arts and media.² Many cultural theorists of media technology further insist that processes hidden from view require as much investigation as, for instance, images onscreen. Software, like any technology, is a cultural object with both direct (i.e., visual, aural, and gestural) as well as less sensuous aesthetic properties that, like the obfuscatory principle of invisibility on which this essay focuses, express cultural values at least as powerfully.³ Software provides such diverse affordances that concrete limitations, such as digital culture’s reliance upon electricity and therefore carbon combustion, recede from awareness, and, as David Berry points out, this ubiquitous and polymorphous cultural effect is quickly naturalized.⁴ In this way, software culture both exemplifies and obscures petroculture: by appearing to volatilize or virtualize materiality, abstracting it into a simulation that, because less or differently tactile, visceral, or sensory, seems—but is not—less embodied and situated. The argument of this essay is that the remarkable aesthetic of invisibility and immateriality characterizing carbon-based energy consumption in general is also expressed through two fundamental aspects particular to computational culture, both linked complexly to the principle of modularity in digital engineering: 1) the fluid ubiquity of software and simulation in everyday activity, which exemplifies Marx’s discussion of “realization” in circulation, and 2) the remote storage and processing of data in the networked “cloud” infrastructure, a material system that, I argue, is based in large part on rents.⁵ My purpose is to explore ways in which the stubborn invisibility of material relations subtended by carbon fuel combustion is supported by the nonsensuous expressiveness of computing, an aesthetic rooted in enlightenment techno-science and reproduced socially through schooling.⁶ Despite its palpable material infrastructure and the often negative consequences of digitalization, especially for vulnerable populations, the software bodies of computing and the cloud are also camouflaged by spuriously “values-free” aesthetics characterizing techno-science, education, and all other “discourses of sobriety,” as Bill Nichols has aptly categorized them (3).

Revealing harmonies and unisons emerge in the counterpoint produced by reading petroculture and the digital together socioeconomically. Accounting for the cultural force of computation requires us first to expose the strange concealment of everyday contemporary life and capital’s basis in cheap carbon fuels, and this is true in two senses: not only does computing require electricity, but digital culture is also closely related to petroculture aesthetically. Petroculture is naturalized and ubiquitous to the point of invisibility: “petromodernity has enveloped the Euro-American imagination to the extent that ‘oil’ has become implicitly synonymous with the world” (LeMenager 60–61). The cloud and other forms of digital technoculture also recede from perception, remaining hidden in plain view. Both analog and digital petrocultures take on ontological significance. The centrality of energy to governmentality necessitates an expansion of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics, as Imre Szeman proposes (“Conclusion: On Energopolitics” 455).⁷ Digital code has become as important as language in human activity, assuming the cosmological role of “lingua franca of nature” (Hayles). Recent conceptualizations of the “Anthropocene” link humanity’s inscription in the geological record through air, soil, and water pollution inseparably to petromodernity as well as to globalizing enlightenment humanism (Szeman, “Conclusion” 458–59).⁸ However, these critiques have only begun to explore the role of digital technology and media in petromodernity as a specifically energopolitical issue. Although new materialist approaches, particularly Jussi Parikka’s work on media and the Anthropocene, attend to the pollution and social inequality generated by the manufacture and disposal of digital technology, they address energy consumption only glancingly, if at all. The same is true of many politically incisive analyses of media technology and social difference produced by postcolonial feminist theorists.⁹ Energopolitics remain largely under erasure.

Digital culture and petroculture participate together in what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling,” a shared—if less than conscious—belief system (128–35). Peter Hitchcock has described oil as “deeply embedded in the ways a society represents itself to itself” (81). Like oil, to extend Hitchcock’s claim, the digital remains strangely invisible, though it pervasively shapes contemporary life and representation.¹⁰ Hitchcock argues that imagining and working towards a world without oil requires comprehension of “oil ontology,” oil’s obscured manner of articulating modernity (81). Imre Szeman meanwhile insists that the issue is relatively unsubtle, a case of denial or complacency (“Literature” 324). I would add, as Nick Dyer-Witheford argues, that “greenwashing,” or the well-known practice of using corporate publicity to portray environmentally harmful products or processes as ecologically sound, also subverts critiques of oil, coal, and digital electricity consumption (113). While each of these factors contributes a layer of obfuscation to the invisibility of petroculture and of its role as the basis of digital culture, what sets Hitchcock’s insight apart and demands further elucidation is the involuntary quality of oil’s constitutive “encounter as missed encounter” with the social world, its aspect as the unstable ground of advantaged Western subjectivities and as a traumatic and therefore unnamed condition for possibility (97). Computational culture shares oil’s black-boxed ontology, its constitutive encapsulation from view, on the basis of structurally parallel relationships with techno-scientific practice, a primary site of social construction and erasure in industrial culture.¹¹ For instance, a black box encloses unresolved (if esoteric) disagreement over oil’s geologic origins, controversy attributed to modern experimentation’s version of a hermeneutic circle. The proper comportment of a test can only be evaluated based on the researcher’s advance projections of what the correct outcome should be, with predictions often fueled by corporate sponsorship and various unacknowledged ideologies more than by values conventionally attributed to enlightenment techno-science, such as rationality or provision for the public good (Collins and Pinch, The Golem at Large 76–92; Cole). However, to many a layperson as well as to most scientists this process of social construction remains screened from view.¹² Similarly, as I will explain, cultural values informing early computer programming practices were hard-wired into computation’s obfuscatory ontology in the name of science and technological progress. Petroculture and the digital are linked by a vast and robust structure of feeling rooted in techno-science and related progress narratives, as well as by a close material relationship based on the world of code’s reliance upon electricity commonly derived from carbon combustion.

The Material Shadow of the Cloud

As Daniel Tanuro writes, Marxist theory has tended to overlook the crucial distinction between renewable and non-renewable energy sources. Since in Marx’s day industrial capitalism was in its infancy, the environmental consequences of choosing particular energy sources were largely indiscernible (Tanuro 95). Contemporary Marxist theorists have nevertheless been among the few clear-sighted critics of the effects of digital political economy on the environment. Writing in 1999 (with great fidelity to Marx), Dyer-Witheford proffers a lucid analysis of the scope of the impact of digital technology on the environment and of the cynicism of industrial greenwashing campaigns, the ferocity of which indexes the considerable threat environmentalist movements pose to capital (Cyber-Marx 113).¹³ The oxymoronic corporate image of digital technology thus remains one of impossibly non-polluting capitalist expansion in which unregulated competition appears as the sole means of general survival. Dyer-Witheford goes on to explain how the project to increase energy efficiency, ostensibly in response to challenges from environmentalists, actually serves as a corporate pretext for increasing profits and more effectively exploiting natural resources (114)—nor, as I explain in more detail below, does it reduce pollution. Environmental crises are quickly and easily masked by notions of necessity and progress, both under the banner of techno-scientific capitalism. The result is technological development (or merely planned obsolescence) without structural progress toward social equality.

However, without arguing that simulation is inauthentic or inherently undesirable, I am more interested in the technologically mediated “remodeling” of nature that Dyer-Witheford critiques: “shifting from stripping nature to synthesizing it, recreating a world of artificially generated resources to substitute for the gutted planet left in the aftermath of industrialism” (113). Immersion in the ubiquitous processes of digital abstraction hides approaching destruction from view. The thorough digitalization of culture makes an ontology out of simulation, a process Lev Manovich has called, in a much more cheerful key than Dyer-Witheford’s critique, “softwarization” (Software). More soberly, Chun contemplates software’s invisible regulation of representation, and Wark, writing in the 1990s, sees the digital as producing a “third nature.”¹⁴ Katherine Hayles, meanwhile, describes ubiquitous computation as cyclically and cumulatively reinforced and compounded through expectations of more complete digitalization (30). Increasingly energy-intensive means of exploring possible futures using immersive Internet communications technologies and digital media produce impressions of immateriality in the present.

The mythology of the “cloud”—the infrastructure for selling space or collecting rents on hard drives pooled and accessed remotely, indispensable to the streaming and sharing of audio and video—handily perpetuates this ideology of immateriality.¹⁵ Quentin Hardy writes that the cloud provides and encourages expectations of unprecedented levels of instantaneity, ubiquity, and immersive multimedia realism through scaling and—most importantly—sharing processing capability, though the cloud is commercial or proprietary and will soon be owned, controlled, and designed by a small number of companies. Nevertheless, since, as Hardy explains, anyone who can afford to do so may lease cloud storage or, with a computer and Internet service, gain access free of charge, the cloud is experienced, particularly by the advantaged, as public or open.¹⁶ It is crucial to understand that the cloud is not public in a material sense of being socially owned and democratically operated, though its public availability to users and its accompanying rhetoric of openness and freeness (along with confusion caused by the erosion of public institutions and services, and hence over meanings of the term “public”) perpetuate an impression of democracy. The projection of an image of immateriality is pivotal here. As Andrew Blum illustrates, by representing data as non-physical, the cloud metaphor permits companies to perform openness and yet avoid sharing specific information about where and how particular data is stored, and the duplication and storage of data in multiple locations (in order to minimize loss and the cost of bandwidth due to distance) both contribute to a sense of placeless immateriality as well (240). The cloud, however, is fundamentally physical and machinic, comprised of a network of “massive warehouses” that are basically “huge hard-drives” (Blum 255).

Conventional usage of terms like “ecology” and “ecosystem” in media theory to describe media “environments” begins to seem cynical in light of the consumer and industrial energy expenditure required to experience digital technology as weightless. While cloud service providers have expanded the availability and efficiency of flexible remote storage in addition to preventing the negative effects of network demand surges, they require coal- and oil-based electricity in far greater quantities than most users realize (Hardy). Astra Taylor has consolidated research on the pollution produced by digital technology manufacturing in a comprehensive and sobering analysis of the aggregate energy costs of cloud computing (178–183). Among most individual users in general, however, there is little sense of the spatial and energy requirements of data. Oddly, even Blum brushes past the issue of fuel consumption, despite the otherwise detailed texture of his book-length account of visiting and touring data storage centers in the US (227–62). Marxist categories, however, help to elucidate this point. Not only are Internet profits extracted from unpaid user labor, but also the entire process is fueled by extravagant amounts of carbon combustion.¹⁷ Thus, in addition to rendering social media and the Internet more genuinely social—that is, publicly owned and operated—both should be reconfigured and regulated to minimize environmental harm.

David Harvey argues that Marx, particularly in Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, provides previously overlooked but significant points of departure for materialist analysis of digital economy. Harvey figures indirect value extraction online in terms of Marx’s space- and land-based notion of rents (Harvey, Glaeser, and Pinsky). Like Terranova, Harvey proposes that user labor is fundamental to the valorization of companies such as Google. He focuses principally on the extraction of rent from intellectual property, much of which is user-generated content or tracking information, as it is monetized through sales of information to marketing agencies by corporate owners who retain indefinite rights to it, a process, I would add, facilitated by controlling physical storage. Harvey reinforces the close analogy with land by describing Google’s institutional configuration and economic process, as well as similar practices associated with other services, as “economies of dispossession,” invoking the traumatic displacement of serfs during the historical transition from agrarian feudalism to the formation of towns in medieval Europe during the mercantilist period in the history of capitalism.¹⁸

The analogy of the digital with the geographic is reinforced by another aspect of data’s materiality: By deriving such extensive profits from its unpaid laborers, who greatly exceed its paid workforce in number, and through such frictionless circulation, Google makes an unprecedented contribution to social stratification. In Volume II of Capital, when Marx critiques Ricardo and to a greater extent Smith for not exposing the social relationships surrounding the three “original sources of all revenue” (wages, profit, and rent), he theorizes land as the basis of private property, and writes that once all the land in a country has become private property, the basis for capitalism is in place (439–49). If online spaces are analogous to geographical ones in the manner Harvey proposes, the consequences are clear: Google and similar companies secure or enclose (and here one might envision another black box) as much virtual property as they can while users produce and belabor it for free, generating vast corporate profits.¹⁹

Waste, Modularity, and Realization

Many of the millions of data centers now located throughout the world constitute gigantic facilities occupying hundreds of thousands of square feet, containing astronomical numbers of servers (hard drives), and requiring almost unthinkable amounts of energy for computing and cooling and for charging backup battery systems (to prevent centers from slowing or crashing, which can happen in a fraction of a second), as well as to compensate for the normal dissipation of electricity from the necessarily extensive wiring involved (Blum, 227–262; Glanz; Hardy). In the US as of 2012, data centers were responsible for two percent of all electricity consumed. Presently, many of the servers do little more than burn electricity derived from coal and oil, consuming as much as thirty times more energy than needed for the services they intermittently provide. The data center is a nexus of wastefulness due to the infrastructural redundancy required to meet contemporary users’ expectations—or anticipated expectations.²⁰ Though, overall, corporations using their own private cloud architectures and local data centers currently account for most of the energy usage in question, some data companies estimate that three quarters of the data they store is produced by individual consumers whose Internet usage, at work or leisure, requires extensive processing. Users habituated to instantaneous access have quickly become unwilling to settle for less. Likewise, business concerns rely on the same convenience in order to function competitively. In both cases, the perceived threshold of necessity rises incessantly. In order to meet these expectations, online companies run servers at full capacity at all hours.

Maintaining constant readiness requires a great deal of energy—equivalent to the output of about thirty nuclear power plants as of 2012. Typically, “utilization” rates remain between six and twelve percent, meaning that servers in data centers tend to use only this small fraction of their computing potential when they are functioning—this in addition to merely idling most of the time in preparation for a potentially overwhelming surge in Internet traffic. In addition, software applications (or, as is often the case, obsolete versions of them) are frequently left running indefinitely without regard for demand, let alone material ramifications. Data centers’ reliance upon auxiliary energy sources is mirrored in their function as a “backup service” for large energy utilities, which prize their patronage because data centers require a steady supply of power at all times, including at night when other customers use little, thus permitting utilities to avoid risk and purchase resources in advance more frugally.

Modularity, a central principle in software and hardware design, is highly valued as a source of efficiency but is nevertheless directly related to the issue of poor processing utilization in data center hard drives. It also, I argue, building upon Tara McPherson’s work on software modularity in relation to social inequalities, establishes and reinforces the previously noted perceptual gap subtending the invisibility of digital petroculture. Modularity, a principle for managing complexity by “chunking” programming into relatively independent, interchangeable, and yet interconnected parts, was at first a matter of necessity in computer engineering. It soon became an aesthetic value that promoted simplicity and “invisibility” on behalf of users (McPherson, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?” 146).²¹ As is well known, early operating systems were easily overwhelmed, tending to crash when tasked with multiple applications or even simply when turned on or off. Operating a minimum of applications on each continuously running server thus remains an entrenched practice even when it is no longer necessary. Though technological development, like art, is frequently presented as operating autonomously from other cultural and socioeconomic contexts, in cultural studies of science and technology its relation with society is recognized as complexly dialectical, a matter of co-construction. McPherson investigates the way that the aesthetics of the UNIX operating systems that so extensively shaped today’s digital socio-technological systems, including Windows and the Internet, reflect significant transformations in cultural perceptions of both race and computing that were under negotiation during the period of UNIX’s development (“U.S. Operating Systems” 21–37). I wish to demonstrate a similar relationship between digital design and environmental consciousness.

UNIX was conceived as a modular array of utilities to be used together in a variety of configurations connected efficiently, but also cleanly separated, by uncluttered and streamlined interfaces—hence the strong emphasis in its widely influential design philosophy on limiting each program to performing a single task. This elegant principle has led, perhaps paradoxically, to what I am identifying as the excesses of cloud ubiquity, connectivity, and supposed immateriality. McPherson explains how the frequent recurrence and high estimation of this early conception of the principle of modularity in discourse related to UNIX’s development served as a main impetus behind UNIX’s eventual omnipresence in contemporary computing. It also functioned as a systematic “privileging of the discrete, the local, and the specific” (25). McPherson argues that computational culture’s modular sense of elegance and efficiency shared conditions of possibility with two related but mutually antagonistic broad social movements. On the one hand, during the period of UNIX’s initial design in the late 1960s, anti-inequality activism ignited throughout the world. These efforts included the anti-colonial, feminist, Marxist, and anti-racist movements. On the other hand, here focusing particularly on racial inequality in the US, McPherson notes the emergence during this period of an attempted colorblindness that has been criticized for facilitating covert racism (24). Comparing this form of modularity with the “lenticular logics” of 3-D postcards from that period that display a different image upon rotation, as well as to early UNIX engineering, McPherson identifies a central organizing principle of the technological milieu of the postwar era: its “logic of the fragment or the chunk, a way of seeing the world as discrete modules or nodes, a mode that suppresses relation and context. As such, the lenticular also manages and controls complexity” (25).²² Before McPherson’s comparative interpretation of UNIX and its early cultural context, these social and techno-social movements had never been studied together, despite the proliferation of interdisciplinary research. This, McPherson explains, is an effect of the cultural modularity wrought by UNIX aesthetics and through the permeation of daily life by computing. Another lenticular logic of modularity is revealed as McPherson connects “the deeply siloed departments that categorize our universities” as well as broader epistemological phenomena with the modularity of UNIX-derived computation, noting a tendency toward compartmentalization that has intensified—again, counter-intuitively, given the placeless and timeless ideology of immateriality characterizing the cloud—with the expansion of digital culture (“U.S. Operating Systems” 23–24).

If digital form subtly obfuscates racism and other forms of inequality, it also operates culturally to divert awareness away from the closely related issue of environmental devastation, the effects of which are far more severe for those already enduring the material consequences of the colonial legacy of inequality. McPherson, unsurprisingly in light of the cultural phenomenon of petro-invisibility in media studies, does not mention environmental movements, but nevertheless discusses a relationship between the modularity of digital technology and a structure of cultural blindness (25). The commonly accepted rules guiding programming today still reflect the values that emerged in and surrounding UNIX and, it should be added, also mirror the values of techno-science more generally as a discourse of sobriety. These aesthetic and functional values include simplicity, cleanliness, clarity, minimalism, extensibility, and most pertinently for the purposes of social critique, modularity or composition based on flexible and connectible parts: “These rules implicitly translate into computational terms … an approach which separates object from context, cause from effect” (“U.S. Operating Systems” 26–27). Like the absent presence of oil, the digital’s self-presentation hides, but also reveals, symptomatically.

Modularity corresponds precisely to the misrecognition pervading, and preventing critical awareness of, digital culture as petroculture. It participates in the partitioning separating experiences of, on the one hand, deregulated and virtually unlimited consumer, corporate, and institutional access to processing, away from, on the other hand, the significant contribution to climate change made by data storage centers. As with black-boxing, the goal of this logic of encapsulation is to manage complexity by hiding it from view, placing it out of the reach of the average, nonexpert user-consumer. As Anne Balsamo argues, the relationship between culture and technology is itself black-boxed, with prior contributing events removed from visibility as though they never took place, creating a “persistent blind spot” to the cultural ramifications of technology (4). Perceptions of technology as entirely separate from material sociocultural processes enable a widespread and dangerously naive faith in the deterministic power of technology to ensure social progress. A more accurate, if hopeful, perspective on the historical relation between technology and society would be that those who design technology help to shape the future (Balsamo 5–6), potentially, I would add, including genuinely sustainable infrastructure and equipment. In the meantime, a seamless web of simulations of users’ actions dominates perception, safely insulated from any indication of dirtiness or guilt, coal and oil, or blood. The user’s self is represented with a difference, with different consequences and, perhaps, in the immediate future, fewer of them. An avatar brings one closer to a world of powerfully flexible, constructed simulations. In the case of Internet connectivity, it also draws near the personas of other users with the privileges of access. However, it simultaneously distances one from the material, embodied, embedded underpinnings of the processes one engages in.

What is to be done? Clearly, from the point of view of capital, potential energy savings do not outweigh the risk of profit loss from an interruption in instantaneous access. Meanwhile, the demand for more processing and storage keeps pace with the drive to streamline overhead costs with cheap petro-electricity in a top-speed race downhill from the peak of oil production. Remembering the eruption of previous market bubbles leads some to fear the precarious unsustainability of this level of energy consumption (Glanz). Solutions are, in many cases, ready-to-hand, but a competitive industrial culture of risk aversion and, especially, secrecy—related in part to the discretion required for handling others’ data—renders environmentally oriented improvements slow to arrive and difficult to negotiate. Though some of the largest consumers of energy for data centers, such as Google and Facebook, have attempted to design more energy-efficient systems within their storage operations (and Amazon, for instance, has begun building its own private wind farms), it is unclear to what extent these strategies have yielded energy conservation. All the while, data markets expand in tandem with the Internet’s rapid saturation of global territory. Alternative approaches to data center management and design, though not widely in use, have demonstrated eighty percent improvements in processing utilization (and therefore energy efficiency) by scheduling large tasks in advance, and other options exist for protecting servers against the risk of interrupted service due to powering down while not in use (Glanz).

Here, again, the material social effects of digital technology become salient. Techniques intended to conserve energy amount to consciously regulating the use of collectivized resources, rather than relying on automatic equilibration, as in free-market economics. The data storage industry is largely ungoverned, so much so that the US federal government, for instance, has reported its inability to ascertain how much energy it uses in its own data centers (Glanz). All the while, the demand for energy grows. According to some predictions, within six years cloud-related technology will comprise nearly ninety percent of the purchases in the Internet communciations technology market (Hardy). Thus, cloud computing, though a form of collectivization—in theory an efficient means of pooling data storage and power usage—is transposed by the unregulated market dynamics of neoliberal global capitalism into an almost unimaginably wasteful sociotechnical juggernaut accruing irreversible momentum and lubricated by the aesthetic legacy of petroculture. What Glanz describes as the “settled expectations” of corporate and individual consumers for anything, anywhere, anytime could, as I hope that my discussion makes clear, help to determine the unfortunate fate of the biosphere.

As Hitchcock argues with respect to oil ontology, the primary task for a response to digital petroculture’s sublime wastefulness is adequate representation (81). Marx’s notion of “realization” offers traction for conceptualizing digital political economy, especially in thinking through the costs of social media and other apparently free online services.²³ In this regard, Marx’s unfinished work in Volume II of Capital usefully articulates the distinction between production and consumption that theorizations of “prosumption” have blurred in response to economies of user-generated content for social media platforms. Marx concentrates on the junctures at which capital, more or less continuously, metamorphizes from one into another of its various forms: money, means of production, commodity, and so forth. As Harvey’s reading emphasizes, the flow of capital through its cycle of metamorphosis can be blocked—these are the points, I would add, at which the cloud, suddenly no longer everything, everywhere, and all the time, can fall back to earth, re-spatialized and -materialized. Harvey summarizes that value and profit under capitalism can only be “realized,” can only exist in any meaningful way, through a purchase, without which circulation ceases (62–63). Whereas in Volume I of Capital, Marx depicts capitalism as a smoothly functioning process for the purpose of demonstrating the labour theory of value, in Volume II he presents the flow of capital as a precarious and highly particularized ongoing series of simultaneous and transient events. Costly interruptions in circulation can be caused by shortages of effective demand (demand plus ability to pay), by a severe shortage of or price increase in labor or, most salient for the focus of the present essay, by shortages of resources such as energy. Web 2.0 social media’s so-called prosumption in the cloud, increasingly the “business model” of privatized, digitalized education as much as in other sectors (NMC), shapes capital by effectively aggregating its various phases and by distributing it ubiquitously. This renders the notion of market “liquidity” almost inadequate—“vaporization” would be a more suitable metaphor. Yet, the cloud’s material shadow remains, despite its cultural invisibility.

Petroschooling and the Digital

Modern culture relies on carbon combustion for the expansion and replication of its governmental, economic, and sociocultural forms, and one of petro-enlightenment’s most characteristic manifestations is in digitalized schooling. Distance education and online classes completed on campus have conventionally provided important services to students with limited access or scheduling constraints, but in recent years the aggressive expansion of online education has rightfully become controversial, not least because of its often close relationship with privatization. Formal online education, with its ambiguously material apparatuses based on social media designs (and the often overlooked fine print bundled into their user agreements), seems to offer students and institutions simple and inexpensive solutions to a wide range of problems.²⁴ With the development of Web 2.0’s most celebrated characteristics—interactivity, customizability, and economies of user-generated content—online pedagogy increasingly emulates and employs social media, in itself no bad thing. However, the social reproduction of the ideological milieu of the cloud through the schooling industry is as dangerous to institutions as it is to the environment.²⁵ Increasingly, academic decision-makers look to Silicon Valley for answers to administrative questions. Successful digital technology enterprises are now often viewed as archetypes that the so-called business models of historically non-profit academic institutions should emulate. Furthermore, the aesthetics of online education, particularly in some of its more “cutting” or “bleeding” edge manifestations,²⁶ are increasingly indistinguishable from entertainment media—unsurprisingly, given that education in general is already greatly commodified under neoliberal privatization. As a result, leisure-time consumerism, commodity entertainment, and corporate-sponsored socializing are seen as the new basis for techniques and practices of learning and teaching. While this pedagogical emphasis on popular culture as opposed to elite humanism is in many ways long overdue, it often reflects market dynamics. As with social media, in the context of “e-learning” (fully online pedagogy as well as the use of digital communications devices in physical classrooms) many different forms of value are derived through processes of virtualization via the technological reproduction of an existing social already influenced by mainstream commodity culture. These processes of extraction operate both directly as rent (tuitions, subscriptions, and other fees), as well as through private purchase of equipment or personal devices for infrastructure, and less directly by more subtle means, including data exchange for advertising and surveillance purposes. The process of value extraction in academic sectors reinforces class stratification by marshaling massive quantities of value into the corporate domain via accelerated and intensified realization.

Digital programming or simulation enables automation of what was previously done, supposedly more expensively, by living, and often skilled, labor. In this sense also, the democratization of automation in the form of free digital media technology serves to reinforce inequality, in contradistinction to the project of enlightenment as commonly understood in the west since the eighteenth century.²⁷ Furthermore, the greater visual and procedural sophistication of image-rich and customizable online services (such as the popular educational presentation tools, Prezi and PowToon) require considerable amounts of energy. While innovation and cycles of competition may, despite streamlining workflow, lead to a greater demand for labor, at least initially, such does not seem to be the case in e-learning. Some institutions have begun experimenting with online approaches to reduce overhead costs such as instructional labor (University 29–32). Therefore, critiques of labor displacement and energopolitics should become central in digital humanities and other critical pedagogies that would explore new potentials for digitally mediated interactivity that all participants, instructors as well as students, could experience as meaningful and intentional.

Despite unresolved disagreement over the significance of digitalization and regardless of growing campus movements demanding divestment from carbon-based electricity, the resource politics of institutional learning are hardly mentioned in critical university and education studies, let alone in literature on e-learning. However, David Blacker devotes several pages of intensive critique to the subject, proposing the term “petroschooling” in response to John Bellamy Foster’s work on Marx’s conceptualization of the metabolic relation between human life and the rest of the natural world (38–51). In short, Blacker contextualizes learning materially as well as socioculturally, placing his strongest accent on ecology: “the material infrastructure that makes possible our current school system rests, like so much else, on the alarmingly precarious basis of cheap and abundant fossil fuels” (45). Though Blacker focuses on primary and secondary schooling in the US, the implications of his analysis are equally sobering when applied to higher education in the US and in countries with comparable postsecondary systems. Summarizing the societal and educational consequences of resource depletion, Blacker emphasizes the school system’s dependency on the elaborate petroleum-based transportation system as a means of transporting staff, faculty, students, and supplies (44). Blacker also notes the energy inefficiency of the architecture of many school buildings as well as the role that industrialized agriculture, with its fuel-consuming machines and fertilizers derived from petroleum, has played in releasing children from the burden of farm labor and thus enabling them to attend factory-style schooling (44–47). By inference, the stakes are potentially even higher for postsecondary education, which depends on publishing industries, frequent travel for conferences and research, a wider geographic draw, and more, all reliant upon communication and mobility fueled largely by carbon combustion.

Unlike most decision-makers as well as pundits, Blacker does not seek salvation in the digital cloud, and hardly mentions the e-learning bubble, though he proposes that the Taylorist face-to-face institutional form will soon be replaced with other configurations, particularly in rural areas (and, one might add, in failed urban school districts) (45). As the timely formulation of an adequate response to large-scale crisis is unlikely, Blacker predicts that the already compromised tradition of universal petroschooling will become untenable. Higher levels of education, in particular, require more energy on every level and, from administrative and governmental points of view, now represent a poor investment as less expertise and skill is needed due to intensified mechanization (46–50). Here, Blacker’s critique adjoins those of cultural theorists of media. The introduction of new technology is often paramount to the proletarianization of those most vulnerable, whose access is attenuated or narrowly circumscribed to their extreme disadvantage, and whose consequent “critical ambivalence” towards digital technology deserves recognition as a pivotal form of expertise, though it is frequently dismissed as an indication of obtuseness (Eubanks, 10–11, 99).²⁸ Digital petroschooling often becomes enlightenment humanism on life support—humanities, perhaps without humans, but still reproducing humanism, including its well-known flaws.

Meanwhile, “magical thinking” (Eubanks) about digital immateriality assumes a variety of sometimes contradictory forms shaped by those who benefit from uncomplicated access. Internet communications technologies and digital media evoke freedom, choice, convenience, openness, cleanliness, costlessness, and innocence. Not just online, but in any technologically mediated classroom (which, increasingly, describes nearly all of them, at least to some degree), these values are reproduced through pedagogy, not only through the instructors’ interaction with students and pupils’ relations with one another, but also by means of the often obscure aesthetics of digital petroculture. The drive to virtualize schooling, even by merely rewiring the conventional “bricks and mortar” classroom, controls perceptions of new possibilities and promotes optimistic technological determinism.

Conclusion: Ecocultural Digital Design for and as Education

The process of technological innovation involves complex social negotiations through which meaning as well as the matter of the world are created, invoked, constituted, and made intelligible by design participants: it is a place where discourse and materiality meet, where the limits of each are constituted, tested, refined, expanded, and reified. As such, it is the place where the technological imagination is most fully engaged in the praxis of technocultural reproduction. (Balsamo 16)

If some of the aesthetic politics of digital petroculture and their stakes in education have been made clear in this essay, it should also be emphasized that online petroschooling presents possibilities for energopolitical and economic resistance, just as it has become a promising zone in which to explore and value oppressed and marginalized identities through critical pedagogies. A different and differently technologically mediated politics of knowing is possible, and its aesthetics should occupy pride of place in design and in design education, alongside rigorous exposure to critical humanities and social sciences.

In designing for culture, as Balsamo has influentially conceived it, the specific outcomes are not projected beforehand; rather, the goal is to implement from the first moment a collaborative process that promotes inclusion and equality through practical engagement in technological design combined with cultural critique (7).²⁹ Similarly, I wish to contend that integrating detailed environmental awareness into the design process might achieve beneficial results: “Through the practices of designing, cultural beliefs are materially reproduced, identities are established, and social relations are codified. Culture is both a resource for, and an outcome of, the designing process” (Balsamo 11). First steps might involve imagining what environmentally astute cultural design of digital technology, and what designing beyond the obscured petroculture subtending digitalization, could yield. Some problems for ecocultural digital design to consider include how the benefits of “peak” digital mediation might be extended without using carbon electricity (and this would require using far less energy than is used now), and what “designing for difference” to include differing abilities and postcolonial and gender critiques would look like from an environmentalist point of view, and vice versa. The digital must be recognized as a false transition away from oil, one that erases, in multiple ways, the need for a plan to protect the world’s most vulnerable from the climate and resource disasters that are likely to arrive and, in fact, for many have already begun. As things stand, digital design and practice, including petroschooling, remain among Western enlightenment humanism’s misfirings, covering up and even catalyzing much of the inequality integral to the capitalism upon which it has always relied, capitalism based largely on the consumption of carbon fuels.

Footnotes

My thanks to the editors. To the growing number of scholars elaborating the fields of petrocultural critique and environmental humanities, my solidarity.

1. For a comprehensive analysis of the global sociopolitical significance of digital technology, see Dyer-Witheford’s Cyber-Proletariat.

2. Manovich argues for software’s medial specificity. In addition, Manovich joins Berry, Chun (Programmed Visions), Cox, and Wardrip-Fruin in pointing toward analogies between software, language, metaphor, narrative, and literature. And finally, while Manovich links software very closely with cinema, Laurel compares it with theater, while Kitchin and Dodge relate it to architecture.

3. I follow current practice in decolonial feminist cultural studies of science and technology in arguing that technologies are cultural objects in the sense that they are, at least potentially, politically reflexive processes of techno-social and broadly multidisciplinary construction, expression, and negotiation among users and designers— past, present, and future. Briefly put, anything constructed may be deconstructed and reconstructed differently; thus, socio-technological process is always fertile with possibilities for change (Balsamo 9–15). For another influential discussion of the social implications of technology, see Chun, “Race and/as Technology.”

4. A number of recent studies address the widespread lack of recognition and understanding of the material underpinnings of digital culture, its energy requirements in particular. These include the methodologically diverse essays edited by Parks and Starosielski; The Marvelous Clouds, in which John Durham Peters interprets the natural environment as media, as well as vice versa; Parks’s “Energy-Media Vignettes” in the online journal Flow; and Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud, an archaeology of cloud computing as material culture.

5. Referring to the system of networked remote data storage as the cloud has foregrounded its less spatial and physical components: electrical signals and protocols, for instance. The most directly tangible part of the cloud is the rapidly growing system of servers and other hardware infrastructure that permits this remote and secure storage of data. The cloud relies on hard drives that are always running, usually idling, often on a sublimely vast scale (imagine hundreds of thousands of servers on a “farm”). As I will emphasize, it is the often wasteful cloud computing of Internet and communications technology corporations like Google, Facebook, and YouTube, rather than the aggregate cloud storage of individual users and small businesses, that contributes most substantially to the cloud’s electricity usage.

6. Rather than the historical period associated with eighteenth-century Europe, I use the term “enlightenment” to designate a widespread project of democratizing reason and knowledge that paradoxically tends to lead to instrumentality. In this, I follow Horkheimer and Adorno. The Internet expresses enlightenment ideals in concrete form through its expanding networks of communication and information storage.

7. Szeman adopts the term “energopolitics” from Dominic Boyer (“Conclusion” 462).

8. On the Anthropocene, see especially Parikka (Medianatures) and Wark (Molecular Red).

9. See, for instance, Balsamo, Chun (“Race” and Programmed), Nakamura, Nakamura and Chow-White, and Wajcman.

10. In 1992, Amitav Ghosh noted the cultural inscrutability of oil, and Hitchcock is among those who have investigated this question further.

11. For a thorough and influential explanation and critical appropriation of the techno-scientific concept of black-boxing, see Latour (6).

12. Of this topic, Thomas P. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, originally published in 1965, remains one of the best explanations.

13. Although not the focus of this essay, greenwashing is a form of obfuscation additional to but also related to those elaborated by Hitchcock, LeMenager, and Szeman, since even those who recognize it tend to overlook the energopolitical dimensions of the digital.

14. Several theorists have used the phrase “second nature” to refer to the sociocultural effects of human civilization reconfiguring the natural world.

15. In this essay, I focus on the cloud’s spatial properties rather than on the production of value through a version of labor or social reproduction (by means of indirect monetization of user-generated data) or on the complexities of circulation and intellectual property that characterize the Internet. As compelling, central, and intertwined as these other aspects of capitalism are, they have been treated at length by scholars such as Tiziana Terranova, Tim Jordan, and Jonathan Sterne, and there is no lack of acknowledgment or continuing refinement of the discourse related to them—Kylie Jarrett’s work on user-generated content as a form of social reproduction is particularly useful.

I have focused instead on ways in which the cloud’s material infrastructure enables the establishment of privatized rather common online space: space that has been enclosed and leased to individuals, corporations, and governments, and this has suggested other analogies with land, rents, and especially with the exploitation of the natural environment. A number of scholars are working to expand the referential frame of capitalism along these lines. Jason Moore, for instance, explains in Capitalism and the Web of Life (2015) that capitalism, particularly its establishment and expansion, cannot be defined solely in terms of the relationship between profit and wage-labor (and nor can the important reframing provided by social reproduction fully make up the difference, due to its emphasis on humanity rather than on biological life in general) (52–55). The history of capitalist, and colonial and imperialist, expansion is one of, among other things, dispossession from traditional embeddedness in nature. Displacement from access to land as the means of survival was followed by the instantiation of both the rent and wage-labor systems (ibid.). In Moore’s view, capitalist accumulation is the production of a different kind of space and temporality than was experienced before, and it involves a dialectic of relations of exploitation and appropriation, both in the sense of primitive accumulation as well as appropriating the “work/energy” of natural processes (8–18). On this point, in addition to Caffentzis (14) and Lefebvre (10–11), Moore acknowledges the influence of feminist materialists, such as Donna Haraway (34–35). The resulting milieu is experienced as an immersive spatial location as much as a temporal process, and I suggest that the same is true of online space facilitated by the cloud. As Jody Berland also argues, “the nineteenth-century idea of an endlessly receding horizon advanced by America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ reappears in the twentieth-century vision of a new respatialized frontier in cyberspace, and fuels twenty-first century ideas about transformation through digital technologies” (19).

Focusing on labor and production has often led Marxists to overlook environmental concerns (Tanuro).

16. For an incisive discussion of the “critical ambivalence” towards technology experienced by less advantaged individuals and communities, see Eubanks.

17. As Terranova points out in “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” the term “labor” has been complicated—correctly—for partaking of various oversimplifications. As one reader of this article has suggested, the terms “input,” “time,” and “work” might serve well in its place. Yet, like Terranova, I nonetheless continue to use the term “labor” in a broad and ecumenical sense to describe the basic process, whatever form it takes, of contributing to the generation of value, and I do so in order to emphasize the impact on temporal experience, a limited life resource easily commodified and devalued in the flexible and precarious post-Fordist milieu. Today, many users create unremunerated online content for all to enjoy that is subsequently monetized for advertising purposes, and on this basis the global economy is rapidly transforming, such that Google and Microsoft have become some of its most significant influences. Hence, in my media analyses I utilize the ideas of free labor and indirect value extraction.

18. Harvey introduced the idea of “accumulation by dispossession” in his 2003 article “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession.” In a debate with Edward Glaeser and Seth W. Pinsky hosted by the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center in December 2013, Harvey linked the concept with the Google search engine (“What”).

19. Other quasi-spatial iterations of primitive accumulation include a popular online business model sometimes referred to by its critics as “astroturfing,” where services initially offered for free are later leased for a fee after the associated habitus is established.

20. For instance, services one would probably never imagine to ask for are provided automatically through networked devices with little opportunity for opting out. Fuchs argues in “Google Capitalism” that replacing the opt-out clauses in user agreements with opt-in clauses would provide an effective means for reducing indirect value extraction through data mining, and I would add that they could also be used to prevent unnecessary transmission of data-intensive graphics through ICTs instead of relying on liberal subjectivity to recognize and make the decision consciously.

21. Grounded in many years of interdisciplinary scholarship in digital studies, critical race theory, and gender studies, McPherson’s reflections on modularity’s co-constructive relationship with its social context lead to a strong association with “the covert” as a means of containing social unrest. The following quotation summarizes her position:

Modularity in software design was meant to decrease “global complexity” and cleanly separate one “neighbor” from another (Raymond 85). These strategies also played out in ongoing reorganizations of the political field throughout the 1960s and 1970s in both the Right and the Left. The widespread divestiture in the infrastructure of inner cities can be seen as one more insidious effect of the logic of modularity in the postwar era. … Let me be clear. By drawing analogies between shifting racial and political formations and the emerging structures of digital computing in the late 1960s, I am not arguing that the programmers creating UNIX at Bell Labs and in Berkeley were consciously encoding new modes of racism and racial understanding into digital systems. (Indeed, many of these programmers were themselves left-leaning hippies, and the overlaps between the counterculture and early computing culture run deep, as Fred Turner has illustrated.) … Nor am I arguing for some exact correspondence between the ways in which encapsulation or modularity work in computation and how they function … in emerging regimes. Rather, I am highlighting the ways in which the organization of information and capital in the 1960s powerfully responds—across many registers—to the struggles for racial justice and democracy that so categorized the United States at the time. Many of these shifts were enacted in the name of liberalism, aimed at distancing the overt racism of the past even as they contained and cordoned off progressive radicalism. The emergence of covert racism and its rhetoric of color blindness are not so much intentional as systemic. Computation is a primary delivery method of these new systems, and it seems at best naïve to imagine that cultural and computational operating systems don’t mutually infect one another. (“Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?” 149)

In short, McPherson’s insight is comparable to analyses that interpret the onscreen media of the Internet or cinema as engagements, though often symptomatic ones, with their social contexts.

22. McPherson explores this “lenticular logic” in greater detail in Reconstructing Dixie.

23. In Volume II of Capital, Marx introduces the idea of “realization” in the first chapter, particularly section 4, “The Circuit as a Whole” (131–143). Realization (of surplus value) refers to the conversion of commodity capital back into the money form but also into the form of profit.

24. I have published a more expanded cultural analysis of the political economy of online higher education in Mediations (see Elerding).

25. Corporate philanthropy has sponsored extensive research warranting the claims of cloud mythology on behalf of education: Preparing for the Digital University by George Siemens et al. and The Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Commission by New Media Consortium are only two of many examples.

26. In Programmed Visions Chun uses the term “bleeding edge” to describe the rate of obsolescence typifying new media.

27. Some media and software theorists, such as Manovich (Software 16), argue to the contrary that technology is available to anyone. Postcolonial feminist media theorists like Nakamura (“Indigenous Circuits”), boyd, and Eubanks have thoroughly critiqued this claim in their research and analyses of the sociocultural differences that shape participation online and in digital tech communities.

28. Collins and Pinch discuss a related principle, the porous boundary between “learned” and “lay” expertise, throughout The Golem and The Golem at Large.

29. In “Designing for Difference,” McPherson explores possibilities for applying Balsamo’s approach in digital humanities research and pedagogy. Here, closely related to her previous work on modularity, McPherson’s critical focus is the profoundly problematic and very common “notion of the ‘bracketing’ of identity or other signs of culture that might prevent one from accessing the technical nature of the computer[,] … the tendency to describe computation as a series of levels increasingly abstracted from culture” (179).

Benjamin Bratton is also known for theorizing alternative approaches to design and design education. In “On Speculative Design,” Bratton envisions design cultures that would conceptualize temporality differently from the cycles of commodity production.

In addition, in “New Ancestors: A Conversation with McKenzie Wark,” Gean Moreno and Wark discuss the importance of “broadening the technological imagination” through anti-commodification design.

Works Cited

• Balsamo, Anne. Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.
• Berland, Jody. North of Empire. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Print.
• Berry, David M. The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.
• Blacker, David J. The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame. Winchester; Zero Books, 2013. Print.
• Blum, Andrew. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. New York: Ecco, 2012. Print.
• boyd, danah. “White Flight in Networked Publics: How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook.” In Race After the Internet. Eds. Lisa
• Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White. London: Routledge, 2011. 203-22. Print.
• Bratton, Benjamin H. “On Speculative Design.” Dis Magazine (2016): n. pag. Web. 23 May 2016.
• Brouillette, Sarah. “Academic Labour, the Aesthetics of Management, and the Promise of Autonomous Work.” Nonsite 9 (2013): n. pag. Web. 2 June 2015.
• Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge: MIT P, 2011. Print.
• —. “Race and/as Technology: Or, How to Do Things to Race.” Camera Obscura 70 (2009): 7-36. Print.
• Cole, Simon A. “Which Came First, the Fossil or the Fuel?” Social Studies of Science 26.4 (1996): 733-66. Print.
• Collins, H.M., and T.J. Pinch. The Golem: What Everyone Should Know about Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Print.
• —. The Golem at Large: What You Should Know about Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.
• Cox, Geoff, and Alex McLean. Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political ExPion. Cambridge: The MIT P, 2013. Print.
• Dyer-Witheford, Nick. Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999. Print.
• —. Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex. Toronto: Pluto P, 2015. Print.
• Elerding, Carolyn. “Mass Online Education: Dialectic of Enlightenment 2.0.” Mediations 28.1 (Fall 2014): 105-126. Print.
• Eubanks, Virginia. Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age. Cambridge: MIT P, 2011. Print.
• Fuchs, Christian. “Google Capitalism.” Triple C: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 10.1 (2012): 42-8. Print.
• —. “The Implications of New Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability.”
• Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development 10.3 (2008): 291-309. Print.
• Gabrys, Jennifer. “Powering the Digital: From Energy Ecologies to Electronic Environmentalism.” Media and the Ecological Crisis. Ed. Richard Maxwell, Jon
• Raundalen, and Nina Lager Vestberg. New York: Routledge, 2015. Print. Ghosh, Amitav. “Petrofiction.” New Republic 206.9 (1992): 29-34. Print.
• Glanz, James. “Power, Pollution and the Internet.” New York Times 22 Sept. 2012. Web. 2 June 2015.
• Gold, Matthew K., ed. Debates In the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. Print.
• Golumbia, David. The Cultural Logic of Computation. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. Print.
• Haiven, Max. “Finance as Capital’s Imagination? Reimagining Value and Culture in an Age of Fictitious Capital and Crisis.” Social Text 108 (Fall 2011): 93-124. Print.
• Haraway, Donna Jeanne. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-182. Print.
• Hardy, Quentin. “The Era of the Cloud.” New York Times 11 June 2014. Web. 2 June 2014.
• Harvey, David. A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume 2. New York: Verso, 2013. Print.
• Harvey, David, Edward Glaeser, and Seth W. Pinsky. “What Are the Economics of the Creative Economy?” 17 Dec. 2013. The Graduate Center, City U of New York (CUNY). YouTube. Web. 2 June 2015.
• Hayles, Katherine. My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Print.
• Hitchcock, Peter. “Oil in an American Imaginary.” New Formations 69.1 (2010): 81-97. Print.
• Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987. Print.
• Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge: MIT P, 2015. Print.
• Jarrett, Kylie. Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife. New York: Routledge, 2016. Print.
• —. “The Relevance of ‘Women’s Work’: Social Reproduction and Immaterial Labour in Digital Media.” Television & New Media 15.1 (2014): 14-29. Print.
• Jordan, Tim. Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society. London: Pluto P, 2015. Print.
• Kitchin, Rob, and Martin Dodge. Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge: MIT P, 2011. Print.
• Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1965. Print.
• Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. Print.
• Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1993. Print.
• LeMenager, Stephanie. “The Aesthetics of Petroleum, After Oil!” American Literary History 24.1 (2012): 59-86. Print.
• Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 2001. Print.
• —. Software Takes Command: Extending the Language of New Media. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.
• Marx, Karl. Capital Volume II. Trans. David Fernbach. London: Penguin, 1992. Print.
• Maxwell, Richard, and Toby Miller. Greening the Media. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. Print.
• McPherson, Tara. “Designing for Difference.” Differences 25.1 (2014): 177-188. Print.
• —. Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.
• —. “U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX.” Nakamura and Chow-White. 21-37.
• —. “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation.” Gold, Debates in the Digital Humanities. 139-160. Print.
• Moore, Jason. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso, 2015. Print.
• Moreno, Gean. “New Ancestors: A Conversation with McKenzie Wark.” E-flux (2014): n. pag. Web. 22 May 2016.
• Nakamura, Lisa. “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture.” American Quarterly 66.4 (2014): 919-941. Print.
• Nakamura, Lisa, and Peter Chow-White, eds. Race After the Internet. New York: Routledge, 2012. Print.
• New Media Consortium (NMC). The NMC Horizon Report: 2014 Higher Education Report. Austin: New Medium Consortium, 2014. Print.
• Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Print.
• Parikka, Jussi. “The Geology of Media.” The Atlantic 11 Oct. 2013. Web. 4 June 2015.
• —. “Insects and Canaries: Medianatures and Aesthetics of the Invisible.” Angelaki 18.1 (2013): 107-119. Print.
• —. “Introduction.” Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste. Ed. Jussi Parikka. Open Humanities P/Living Books About Life 7 Oct. 2011. Web. 4 June 2015.
• Parks, Lisa. “Energy-Media Vignettes.” Flow 19.08 (n. d.). n. pag. Web. 23 May 2016.
• Parks, Lisa D., and Nicole Starosielski, eds. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2015. Print.
• Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015. Print.
• Ravitch, Diane. Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. Print.
• Siemens, George, Dragan Gasevic, and Shane Dawson. Preparing for the Digital U: A Review of the History and Current State of Distance, Blended, and Online Learning. UT Arlington LINK Research Lab. 2015. Web. 4 June 2015.
• Smelik, Anneke and Nina Lykke, eds. Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2008. Print.
• Sterne, Jonathan. “ComPion: A Loose History.” Parks and Starosielski, 31-52. Print.
• Stiegler, Bernard. “Teleologics of the Snail.” Theory, Culture and Society 26.2-3 (2009): 33-45.
• Szeman, Imre. “Conclusion: On Energopolitics.” Anthropological Quarterly 87.2 (2014): 453-464. Print.
• —. “Literature and Energy Futures.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 126.2 (2011): 323-325. Print.
• —. “System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 106.4 (2007): 805-823. Print.
• Tanuro, Daniel. “Marxism, Energy, and Ecology: The Moment of Truth.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 21.4 (2010): 89-101. Print.
• Taylor, Astra. The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014. Print.
• Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text 18.2 (2000): 33-58. Print.
• University Committee on Planning and Budget (UCPB). The Choices Report. Systemwide Academic Senate, U of California, March 2010. Web. 4 June 2015.
• Wajcman, Judy. TechnoFeminism. Malden: Polity, 2004. Print.
• Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. ExPive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. Cambridge: MIT P, 2009. Print.
• Wark, McKenzie. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. New York: Verso, 2015. Print.
• —. “Third Nature.” Cultural Studies 8.1 (1994): 115-132. Print.
• Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford UP, 1977.