E-cologies Part 2: Data Water
See below for image description
BY ALIS OLDFIELD
In order for the machined internet to be a living, breathing ecology, we need to locate and protect its cultures. In the pursuit of this exchange, this diverse culture, we need an elemental ingredient - water. Water is the stuff of life. The force that enables cellular exchange, feeds organic matter and brings with it verdant and abundant life. Water connects all living things, making up 60% of our bodies and flowing from and through us into the cyclical network spanning the globe.
The water of our interranet is data. Data is the digital force of exchange. Data flows from (and through) us, transported through pipes and stored and circulated in clouds. It threatens to overwhelm us in its increasing magnitude as data-levels rise. The cost of its storage, sometimes of its creation, ripples out to the offline world too, where the increasing energy needed to maintain servers results in melting icecaps.
The history of human interference and management of water is, on first glance, a triumph of man’s domination of nature. Of dwindling scarcity and vulnerabilities eradicated. What lurks beneath the surface of this account however, is strengthening condensations of power. Control of water creates new forms of scarcity; access is now dependent on market viability and corporate strategy. These have less to do with ecological conditions of glut and want than vulnerabilities entrenched by social hierarchy and corporate domination. In privatising efforts to control water flow, the new water barrier is financial and political:
With increasing societal controls over hydraulic flow, access to water is unequally distributed throughout society, controlled first through the bureaucratic state and then by the capitalist market, with claims to unequal access - political or economic - always ultimately backed by force. (Andrew Biro in Chen, MacLeod, and Neimanis 2013, 170)
Water is a resource that is Earthly given but became a tool of power and then ultimately a commodity. Vandana Shiva, in her book Water Wars, locates the assertion of colonial power over water in the mining camps of the American west, where the “rule of appropriation - Qui prior estin tempore, potion set in cure (he who is first in time is first in right) first emerged” (Shiva 2016, 22). Water courses were disrupted, and indigenous populations dispossessed of access with devastating consequences. Data occurs ‘naturally’, or at least consequently, as a result of participating in any online activity. So too is data owned but not by the users who create it. Instead, it is bartered, bought, manipulated, and panned, to create, or locate within its matter, a marketable commodity. Owning and controlling the water in a given place, is might. Owning and controlling data on the internet, is might.
We see the strategies of water wars played out in conflicts world-over. Israel controls the water in the West Bank through its occupation. Between August 1967 (two months after the end of the 1967 war) and the Oslo accords of 1993, Israel’s military commander had complete authority on water issues. After the accords a Joint Water Committee (JWC) was created with representatives from the Israeli and Palestinian water authorities. However, “[t]he establishment of the JWC merely institutionalized the intrinsically discriminatory system of Israeli control over Palestinian resources set in motion since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank three decades earlier” (Braverman 2019, 529). Springs are necessary water sources in an otherwise arid terrain, where surface water is scarce. Palestinian access to these springs has been curtailed by the creation of national parks and nature reserves, notionally to protect the ecosystems that surround the springs. Palestinians must provide ID and pay a fee to access these reserves, which are free to Israelis. Some of these springs have transformed (illegally) into tourist spots that further curtail Palestinian access. These dispossession tactics which are “are performed by Jewish settlers with the tacit support of Israeli authorities” are entrenched in layers of Military Orders, of which “while it granted no new permits to Palestinians to drill wells, Israeli authorities have allowed Jewish settlers to do so, and have even granted permission to situate them in proximity to existing Palestinian wells, a practice that has resulted in a decrease in water flow and an increase in its salinity” (Braverman 2019, 532).
The fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal laid clear what geo-political strategies and disruptions are possible with access to data and manipulation of algorithmic feeds. Data wars bubble beneath our feet and in the clouds that transport our information around the globe.
Larry Page grasped that human experience could be Google’s virgin wood…we have no formal control over these processes because we are not essential to the new market action. Instead, we are exiles from our own behaviour, denied access to or control over knowledge derived from its dispossession by others for others. Knowledge, authority, and power rest with surveillance capital, for which we are merely ‘human natural resources’. We are the native peoples now whose claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience. (Zuboff 2019, 99)
Astrida Neimanis reminds us that we are all a body of water. Hydrofeminism asserts that water is at once a catalyst, motion, conduit and memory. Neimanis calls for water to be brought “out of the mute, passive background to which it is too often relegated” (Christian and Rita 2017, 52). The attributes and roles Neimanis gives water can translate to data, possibly reminding us of its potential impact and our responsibilities to it. As a solution for metabolic reactions, water is a catalyst. Data has the potential to facilitate change, carry new information, link resistance, aid organisation. Oceanic movements are driven by thermohaline circulation, dependent on temperature and salt content. Water is in motion on a global networked scale - so too is data.
Globalisation, accelerated by the advent of the internet, has made us think the world is knowable, mutable and controllable. That logic “presumes a world can be laid out, grid-like, plotted on our GPSes and ultimately comprehended-conquered” (Christian and Rita 2017, 63). But the world is beyond our mastery and beyond our knowing “…an understanding of and respect for what human beings do not and cannot know, as a necessary counter to our contemporary techno-capitalized drive towards mastery…Water will always elude our total control and our efforts to fully “know” it” (Christian and Rita 2017, 55-58), so too the internet, as a whole, is unknowable. Despite being human-made, it now makes our reality, forms and shapes it in ways we cannot perceive. Water is not limited to water-ways; it carves conduits into the land, linking seas and oceans node to node. With increasing app-based engagement with the internet, facilitated by smartphone usage, it is increasingly difficult to carve new data ways outside of the predetermined and heavily orchestrated interactions apps are built on. Those who claimed first right forged gargantuan data-ways that diverted attentions and traffic to the Silicon Valley data-dam titans. Water terraforms landscapes – so too are our data channels forming the terrain of our internet. We need to consider what health is afforded to landscapes that are starved of water, diverted for other means.
Though flooding, cyclones and snow melt from the Himalayas immediately threatens the Uttarakhand region in India that Shiva writes about, it is the damage wrought by the ‘green revolution’ that pushed intensive agriculture with thirsty crops that has created the greater threat of groundwater loss, resulting in a “water famine”. “Soil moisture” she writes, “is the most reliable drought and climate insurance” (Shiva 2016 xxii). Though it may feel like we are drowning in data within the internet-as-landscape, perhaps we are seeing only the overwhelming attempts to monetise it at increasing computational and ecological cost. Perhaps there is a shortage of ground-water or ground-data, where interactions and culture aren’t first stripped of market value before settling in the e-soil. Perhaps allowing data to bubble and pool and trickle down into the inter-terra-soil would create a healthier and more fruitful internet. In the same way that ice carries memories (sometimes viruses) of long forgotten existences - data carries a trace and a thread back to history. We share our water with companion species, like algorithms that feast on engagement, and are duty bound to consider what contaminates flows into its depths. Neimanis quotes a simple proposition of Jenna Tiitsman: “The way that we live in the world is bound to what we imagine the world to be” and further suggests that “how we treat the world is bound to how we think the world”. (Chen, MacLeod, and Neimanis 2013, 51). Our human imaginary is so powerful a construct and so shaped by theory and philosophy that has gone before, that we have warped our sense of responsibility and impact to imagine the world either impervious or resilient to our late-stage capitalism. I posit that the way we treat the internet is similarly impacted by our concept of it.
In Water Wars, Shiva paints a sorrowful picture of lands exploited for profit and misguided into plundering further into imbalance with ‘aid’ and advice from policies that further entrench the damage. It is a lesson in market-led decisions and colonial arrogance over inherited and lived knowledges, forged through relationships to the land. Shiva asks us to “learn once again, to have reverence for our sacred mountains and rivers” for “the sacred sets limits; ecological fragility sets limits”. How then can we imbue the internet with ecological fragility in order to set limits to our consumption? What is sacred in the interranet?
Part 3 Teaser:
The sacred is awe-some in that it is both incredible and terrifying. It reflects the power that can both create and destroy, which in turn demands reverence and respect. Next time I will consider what that equates to inside the in-terra-net, what god-like powers might be manifest in the network and who (what) might be wielding them and to what effect?
This may serve as a reminder to reconsider the agency of digital matter and its ability to wreak havoc, because as inert pliable matter, our interaction with it is one-way, calculable and deterministic but as vital matter charged with a diffuse divinity it has the ability to consume and devour the earth.
It is here that we glimpse the figure of cyber-pan who might guide us and remind us to act with more-than-human care for our in-terra-net.
Image Description:
The image is made up of; google earth images of oceanic movement, an image of an Elan Reservoir printed in the Observer’s Book of Geology (published 1968) and a section of a Welsh woolen blanket from Melin Tregwynt. Elan is mentioned in the Observer’s Book of Geology under the title ‘Man As a Geological Agent’ and though labelled here as Birmingham, Elan Valley is in Mid Wales. Built during the industrial revolution, it provides the drinking water for Birmingham, carrying it 73 miles over a land border by gravity to where Alis lives, drinks and waters her plants. Alis has just completed a residency at Elan Valley, with Elan Trust, Arts Council Wales & Welsh Water.
Alis Oldfield is a lecturer and artist, currently working on a PhD at Northumbria with supervisors Christine Borland and Fiona Crisp. As an artist, she’s interested in networks both digital and cultural, infrastructural and metaphorical.
Edited November 2 2023, adding the image now found at the top of this article, and its description at the end
