Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies

a Cultural Politics Book

by Sean Cubitt

While digital media give us the ability to communicate with and know the world, their use comes at the expense of an immense ecological footprint and environmental degradation. In Finite Media Sean Cubitt offers a large-scale rethinking of theories of mediation by examining the environmental and human toll exacted by mining and the manufacture, use, and disposal of millions of phones, computers, and other devices. The way out is through an eco-political media aesthetics, in which people use media to shift their relationship to the environment and where public goods and spaces are available to all. Cubitt demonstrates this through case studies ranging from the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang to an image of Saturn taken during NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission, suggesting that affective responses to images may generate a populist environmental politics that demands better ways of living and being. Only by reorienting our use of media, Cubitt contends, can we overcome the failures of political elites and the ravages of capital.

Genres: Environment, Nonfiction

256 pages, Hardcover

Published January 3, 2017

About the author

Sean Cubitt is Professor of Film and Television, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the author of several books, most recently, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels.

Reviews

[Lukáš · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finite media is a worthwhile read. The first two thirds of the book give a robust overview of the political economy of energy and material necessary for keeping the contemporary digital world running. It is specifically sensitive to the ways how this whole process constitutes the 'environment' through the market 'externalities' (i.e. the costs to the extraction / production / maintenance / political representation that are not fully reflected in the market price and are the source of profit), and the costs that are paid for by those disenfranchised in this process. Also, it has some relevant criticisms addressed at some of the 'new materialists' (for example, Jane Bennett's analysis of the electric blackouts on the East Coast) and the posthumanist temptations. At the same time, just as this position is detailed as fundamentally neoliberal, Cubitt asks some relevant questions about what it means o be human at the moment, when the human-nature distinction collapses, and the commons of knowledge commodified as data complicate the human-nature relationships in the form of a biospheric biopolitics. The last two chapters outline the challenges on the level of political aesthetics and the formation of the political subject in very philosophically robust terms, giving some insightful answers and an advocacy for an eco-populism, inspired by, but not slavishly bound to Ernesto Laclau and Jacques Rancière. While, despite some of the political-economic analysis clearly draws a lot on Marx and some contemporary Marxist thinkers, on the first reading it seems to me to be slightly more emphasizing the problem of property as opposed to labor in perhaps a somewhat Proudhonite fashion (even though, this can be also a question of how one reads their Marx), and a few more questions can arise here or there [right now I think it wouldn't necessary have to downplay most of the book's conclusions, but perhaps rather broaden the array of political strategies], I nevertheless recommend giving this one a shot.

[melancholinary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Densely filled with fact and information—quite often case studies—relating to the ecological and societal impact of the technical media, Finite Media interestingly opens by looking the materiality of celluloid and The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906). Cubitt's idea of financialization and datafication of mineral is useful to see how the ouroboros of media consumption is manifested—as well as Marxist accumulation of capital that he implemented in this book. However, Cubitt theorises the politicisation of environmental and media seems far stretched, though his assumption on eudaemonism is unusual to me. The raise of standardisation, that Cubitt touches on the book through the development of MPEG, is important to see the relation between indigenous and colonial.

[nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cubitt, making good on his radical commitment to tracing digital media from the strip mine to dump, takes such a circuitous route in search of a viable politics of media that he risks losing the thread entirely. But the payoff is very much there, most of all in a political theory of media that convincingly navigates the basic environmentalist peril of contradictions between human and nonhuman wellbeing. The end chapters also provide a few concrete examples that tie the whole grand tour together with a bit of bravura scholarly writing.

That said, I’m not sure I agree with Cubitt’s ideas here of what the humanities should do (diagnose) or what artworks do best (mediate)—when films and other media appear here, he values them above all as sites of “communication” between disparate beings and things. Analysis of media works can and should do more than evoke their conspicuous absences, their incidental indexes of more-than-human goings-on.

[Devin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent materialist analysis on the infrastructure behind digital media. I wish some of his more philosophical musings on the futurity of media as revolutionary medium in the last two chapters was a bit more developed, but he’s trying to imagine outside the confines of capitalist realism and that’s a difficult task.

[Burc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots to disagree with but also lots to learn from.

[Ana Peraica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Media pollution is often defined by semiotic terms of a noise in a transfer of a message through a channel, technologically solvable by the enhancement of media capacity (bandwidth), or advancement of coding (programming / software).

Other senses of pollution, in terms of material by-products but also a whole wasting culture of outdated models in this speeded up usage-oriented economy, are hardly approached by media theory. Still, shocking pictures of ‘electronic graveyards’ as for example Agbogbloshie in Ghana, or some places in China, warn us that e-waste is dangerous. Moreover, only a small part e-waste is recyclable (no more than 15% of parts are re-sold to repairs shops, while as cooper and gold from cables are extracted by firing them), while the rest, predominantly the un-degradable plastic is left to land absorption. Located nearby slum neighbourhoods, having no solution even for the organic waste, e-waste dump yards are polluting natural resources, land and water, commonly in the Third World where the population indicates a large percentage of lead in their blood. Consequently, it results in high percentage of cancer.

A question may be raised: Will technological waste will outlive its creators? Duration of media, long believed to transcend humanity into more pure, digital and abstract-mathematical universe, is in the centre of Cubitt’s new book. Media discourse presented shows signs of post-utopian nature, becoming rather dystopian, as not only a pollution visibly destroys a nature, but also as energy sources, and some materials, are almost exhausted.

Chapters move from almost generally accepted environmental theories to rather complex political ones. Over four chapters, Cubitt describes various systems of pollution that are a direct result or an epiphenomenon of production of mobile phones, LED lights, screens and computers, defining the amount of weight of waste by digital media in kilo per capita. In the first two parts of the book Cubitt concentrates on energy and materials, covering electric and nuclear energy production, as well as issue of disappearance of metals and rare minerals as lithium, aluminium, tin, gallium, indium, and arsenic. In following parts, he develops the idea of material pollution as a paradigm for contaminations of the non-physical. One of the toxicities is informational pollution becoming visible in economic crises that are consequences of trading of abstract data rather than goods in “semiocapitalism”. In the last chapter, Cubitt distinguishes commons from social, where commons are communicative, “mediated by matter and energy, and so material”, contrary to society which is abstract (Cubitt, 2016: 167). Doing so, he founds political and theories in media studies claiming all media is political – not merely their messages, rather than sociology and stating as its goal – ecological communication, using media in order to save the planet.

In criticism of compulsive consumption, Cubitt relies on materialist Marxist theories of ‘accumulation of capital,’ which he reformulates for post-digital age as “ruled by cyborgs, vast biocomputer hybrids characterised by their lack of shame, their obsession with profit, their inhumanity, their suicidal tendency, and the integration of waste into their life cycle” (p. 20). Still, Cubitt’s view on by-products of commodities and compulsory consumption diverge from Marxism in terms of forecast on commons, which, according to Marxists, are to be––communist, while by Cubitt––communicative, shifting the social aspect of ideology onto material one, in which ideas such as ‘toxicity’ or a ‘waste’ gain a completely different meaning.

Filled with cases of environment changes of contemporary age, Cubitt approaches the topic with journalistic clarity and deep comparative activist source-data, uncovering various types of criminal activities that he grounds with many background theories. Discourse started with his Eco Media (2005) crossing to this new, critical approach to the development of computer industry. Similar to previous books, Finite Media is a rather short (and concentrated) reading, with an even lighter style that makes reading a very pleasurable experience.
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This reiew was originally published by Leonardo https://www.leonardo.info/review/2017...