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TECHNOLOGY

The Geology of Media


Future archaeologists will have a lot of material to dig through. An Object
Lesson.
JUSSI PARIKKA
OCT 11, 2013

The Space Store

Thinking about the Earth as an object requires some imagination. As far as


objects go, it is a really big one: The Earths diameter is about 8,000 miles
(with a bit of variation when measured at the poles). Its also very oldit has
an age of about 4.5 billion years. Its pretty dense too, and is composed of
various chemical compounds, mostly silica, but also signicantly alumina,
lime, magnesia, water, carbon dioxide, iron oxide and so on.
But there is something that textbook facts and measurements like these dont

really capture. It feels insucient to think of the geological Earth as an object,


when it is made of up so many connected and interdependent things, such as
the atmosphere. It is an object of interfaces: the magma, the terra, the
atmosphere, and so onso many envelopes in which we live as part of deep
space.

A SERIES ABOUT THE HIDDEN LIVES OF ORDINARY


THINGS

By the 18th century, increasingly accurate measurement techniques forced


humans to consider the Earth as a scientic object. This shift required
acknowledging the layered structure of the earth, and recognizing that this
structure corresponds with temporality. Depth digs through time, and deep
excavations down into the earth involved a kind of time travel.
Scottish geologist James Hutton conceived of this immense scale of time of
the Earth, in which the seeming solidity of the land was actually part of a
longer timescale of processes of destruction and decay that were essential for
life: plants feed on soil, which itself is nothing but the materials collected
from the destruction of the solid land. The Earth was reconceived as a
dynamic entity, one that reached back millions of years. The solid land is one
temporary consolidation of organic and non-organic processes. Just give it
time.
Today, we acknowledge that the Earth consists of geological layers in both
directions. Moving down from our feet we nd the lithosphere, the crust, the
upper mantle, the mantle, the asthenosphere, the outer core and the inner
core. Moving up from our heads: the troposphere, the stratosphere, the
mesosphere, the thermosphere.

We usually see media as an immaterial sphere of communication, one


detached from the human world: Ever since the telegram, messages have
owed faster than their tangible manifestations could have been conveyed.
We sometimes understand information as a sphere of its own. This habit
continues today, with digital culture pitched as an immaterial sphere of
information where ideas become coded into zeroes and ones, independent of
material substrate, transportable on the vague and indeterminate channel of
the Internet.

Warner Bros.

But digital culture is completely dependant on Earths long duration. Despite


the fallacy that media is increasingly immaterial, wireless, and smoothly
clouded by data services, we are more dependent than ever on the geological
earth. Geology does not appear in normal conversations about media and
culture, but there would be no media without geology. This isnt a simplistic
joke, that without the Earth under our feet there would be no need for
universities talking about the Earth or oces of social-media startups in
Silicon Valley plotting away metaphorical business strategies like the
mining and dumping of data. Rather, the resources and materials
gathered from geological depths enable our media technologies to function.
Sometimes we do acknowledge the work of the smart people behind such
innovations: scientists and engineers who enable high tech industrial
processes from electricity to network engineering, from processor
technologies to the meticulous development of screens that convey high
denition audiovisuality.

But the materiality of media is something harder than the usual hardware
layers we mistake to be the endpoint of media materiality. Our electronics are
like mini-mines of minerals and metals themselves: copper, gold, lead,
mercury, palladium and silver among other metals. Too often, the extraction
of Earth has simultaneously poisoned it, for example the coltan (columbite
tantalite) mines in Congo, which have fueled bloody wars there.

Paul Downey/Flickr
For this reason, the long-lasting legacy of Silicon Valley will not amount to
corporations or branding or creativity or individualism, but its soil: the heavy
concentration of toxins that will last much longer than the businesses and

remind of the geological afterglow of the digital hype, the residue of the tech
companies use of chemicals in the manufacturing of our devices. Benzene,
trichloroethylene and Freon are not necessarily things we associate with
digital media cultural ephemerality, but they are some of the historical
examples of health hazards caused from production of disk drives.
Indeed, the dynamics of the Earth are increasingly the focus of our
technological culture: from technologies of measurement concerning climates
and geological resources, to maximizing the communication capacities of
satellite orbits and gauging wireless trac through the airthe Earth is now
an object dealt with on its own scale, a thing to be put to use as a whole,
though well still use it piecemeal as well.
There are various natural and ctional histories that imagine the Earth as a
bizarre, living organism. Arthur Conan Doyles When the World Screamed
(1928) features the prototype of the mad scientist, Professor Challenge, who
pierces through the various layers of the Earth, making it scream. Later, James
Lovelocks Gaia hypothesis argues for a massive dynamic interdependency
among the planets ecosystems, suggesting that we see the Earth as alive in
another, less familiar way.
By realizing the geological importance of the Earth for media culture, we
might also acknowledge that the Earth is a communicative object itself. Not
only that we keenly visualize, talk and imagine the Earth as an object through
media representationsbut that there would not be any media without the
resource base oered by its geology. Even that the Earth as living creature
communicates via the assembled resources it fashions and provides.

A cell phone dump site (David Ohmer/Flickr)


Whether as an organism or a communicator, the Earth now also subsumes the
new materials we have fashioned from it. The philosopher Gary Genosko has
suggested reframing the pre-Socratic theory that the world consists of the four

elements of air, water, re and earth in relation to their industrial


applications. Today, industry takes advantage of high-technological processes
to extract and use earth elements, leaving behind an excess of after-products
in the process: nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and sulfur
dioxide. Centuries or millennia hence, these residues will remain long after
our iPhones have been forgotten. This commercial geological domain is no
longer restricted to the Earth, either: space asteroids have become a popular
future target for mining valuable minerals, materials necessary for the
reproduction of technological culture, including the technology of mining
itself.
Practitioners and theorists of digital culture often look for the edge cases, the
exceptions, seeking an avant-garde of media arts to underscore the unseen
technological possibilities of our gadgets. Glitch art and the New Aesthetic
have emerged as new domains of practice in which computers do unexpected
things without us. And media archaeologists like Siegfried Zielinski have
mustered the paleontological term deep time in reference to media culture,
looking for longer histories of todays media arts than we usually write.
But we need to take this further. Imagine what the fossil record will look like
in millions of years. A future media archaeologist digs through the ruins of
electronic media culture, nding few traces of media devices, keypads or
touch screens, headsets or power cables. Rather, she discovers a range of
environmentally hazardous materials that forms part of the growing waste
piles that are the true leftovers of dead mediathe residue of our expired
industrial equipment and personal devices. Silicon, found in abundance in
normal sand, was an important discovery for computer culture. Perhaps a
future abundance in the decayed materials of a geological strata will be made
of computers and other digital objects we will have left behind.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JUSSI PARIKKA is a writer, media theorist, and reader in media and design at the
University of Southampton. He is the author of Insect Media.

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