Live, from the center of the Earth
Seven light-years into the possible we go
Welcome to twenty-six-nineteen, the place from which all remixed things come
A long, long, long, long time ago, before the beginnin' of time
There were thi- there were others - there was thi’ people
A group called by many names. ...Yeah
There were many of 'em
One was named..forgotten and one was named invisible, or sum' like that
Anyway, dem' folks survived some of the coldest stuff I ever experienced in my life
Would you like to come?
Anyway, legend has it, if you close your eyes, and be real still, you can hear them folks at night
Shhh! Listen! Listen, y’all listen!
*skit sampled from “Camp Fire Intro” by Outkast on Big Boi and Dré Presents, and from “Intro” by Outkast on the Stankonia album
The dominant history of computing, the environment, and our relationship to them, is told primarily as a single story-- through a white, male, western lense that is incomplete. The findings of the Anthropocene Working Group(AWG) held “the Anthropocene to be stratigraphically real, and recommends formalization at epoch/series rank based on a mid-20th century boundary.” This single story of the anthropocene overlooks “the diverse, dynamic, and even contradictory discourses of peoples throughout the globe contending with catastrophic environmental change.” There are cultures and peoples that have faced environmental disaster or anthropocenic realities prior to the mid-20th century. There are histories and practices that are already rooted in relationships of repair, care, reciprocity, and love with the environment. There are traditions that prioritize community and collaboration, not individual ownership; embrace symbiosis not domination. This single story of computing and the anthropocene has limited our view of possible futures and our imagination of possible frameworks of response.
“Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.” What if we start the story of computing and the anthropocene not with western, capitalist models of efficiency and intellectual property, but with the “resurgent, resistant, resolute, and still-living Indigenous peoples who have already faced the upheaval wrought by the early forces of the Anthropocene”? What if we start with the Black and brown bodies that have been given inhuman categorizations “by historical geographies of extraction, grammars of geology, and imperial global geographies, and contemporary environmental racism”? Widespread panic resulting from climate change, CO2 emissions, melting polar ice caps, nuclear explosion testing, overpopulation, and rapid animal extinction have rightfully garnered much attention in scientific communities. What is much less discussed is that Black and brown peoples’ proximity to death due to human action and exploitation has been an issue since before the 15th century--and has negatively impacted the planet in various ways. There is a growing body of work, including A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, calling for a pluralistic approach to understanding anthropocenic origin points. How might we understand computing and the Anthropocene through these other stories?
“The Anthropocene makes for an easy story. Easy, because it does not challenge the naturalized inequalities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity’s strategic relations of power and production.” Reclaiming the story of the Anthropocene awknowledges that it “is not a new event, but is rather the continuation of practices of dispossession and genocide, coupled with a literal transformation of the environment, that have been at work for the last five hundred years.” Opening up the Anthropocene beyond its eurocentric framing requires that we consider the Indigenous and Black philosophies, narratives, and processes that are absent.
Assumptions and values that drive computing have contributed to the proliferation of e-waste, increasing demands for energy, and the depletion of natural resources, to name a few. The single story not only limits our notions of possible futures, it ignores the unbalanced impact of these issues on marginalized people and poor communities. Computing facilitates the creation of toxic geographies that “are also lived environments, where people encounter hazards in their day-to-day lives, in mundane and incremental ways.” Slow violence “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” But “toxic pollution is a form of violence.” Continual expansion and rapidly increasing waste unevenly impact poor and marginalized communities. Engaging multiple stories, experiences, and realities shifts our perspective -- changing how we understand the anthropocene, changing the nature of the problem itself. How might we resist selective perspectivism of the anthropocene and engage the many origins and histories of both it and computing?
Emphasis on capitalist ideals of expansion and profit has supported the perpetuation of practices like planned obsolescence and rapid device replacement culture. Both of which result in developing nations bearing the brunt of e-waste produced in other countries. There is a separation between the producers of e-waste and those who must negotiate the resulting stockpiles of slow decomposing plastic, toxic metals, or contaminated water and soil. It is important for us to not only acknowledge this unbalanced impact of computing, we must also imagine responses and futures that consider it at the core of the problem of computing and the anthropocene.
Marginalized bodies and the proximity to death that permeates daily life is often unconsidered in scientific discourse on the anthropocene. Cases of environmental injustice and racism resulting from the polluting of poor, marginalized neighborhoods is critical to these discussions about computing and the anthropocene. One example is the petrochemical industry and its disregard for small, rural communities of Black people living in Freetown, Louisiana. The petrochemical industry situated in this once vibrant, healthy community has contributed to what scholars have described as “slow violence” for over eight decades. This violence is described as virtually invisible, not easily seen, practically unnoticed--though folks have begun to ask—“invisible to whom?” There is a juxtaposition of slow crises versus the fastness of computing and technological advancement that warrants further exploration
Afrofuturism is a method of embodiment, production, exploration, and theorization that centers Black narratives, creations, and histories to imagine Black futures, and to recover our pasts. Afrofuturism also challenges the narratives and assumptions of western epistemologies and ideologies--critiquing everything from biodeterminism, identity and stereotypes to the futures industry and beyond. It is partially concerned with mediating the disruption of Western norms that permeate daily life. Speculative ruminations and explorations on “things to come'' are the products of Afrodiasporic peoples “continuously creating culture and radically transforming visions of the future...these visions are necessarily transgressive and sub verse to dominant discourse”. Afrofuturist cultural production comes in all forms, from music of Sun Ra to films such as Pumzi, art, literature like The Invisible Man, the science fiction novels of Octavia E. Butler and beyond. It is a practice heavily rooted in the production and imagining of futures that center, include, and afford the continued progress and existence of marginalized people (things that the futures industry dominated by western scientists, scholars, and writers fail to do). We believe that using Afrofuturism-the-project as a lens for reasoning about the anthropocene is viable due to the connections that the two maintain in theorizing about the future--whether these futures are doom and gloom, hopeful and revitalizing, a mix of the two, or neither.
“The refitting, repurposing, and intentional remixing and misusing of technological commodities created by dominant, western culture is at the heart of the Afrofuturist movement.” This sort of remixing has been described as a way of rewriting history, as well as finding new ways forward. “DJ’s are the digital griots of modern times.” They remix history “to ensure that the soul and funk, Stax and Motown, getting paid and seeking change, civil rights and Black Power, Malcolm and Martin, stay alive….in ways that don’t condemn us to either/or approaches”. In conversation with Afrofuturistic claims, marginalized groups aren’t the disinterested technophobes that western culture positions them as. Instead, “from the vernacular engineering of Latino car designers to environmental analysis among rural women, groups outside the centers of specific power persistently defy the notion that they are merely passive recipients of technological products and scientific knowledge. Rather, there are many instances in which they reinvent these products and rethink these knowledge systems, often in ways that embody critique, resistance, or outright revolt”. Taking up the practice of technological appropriation and remix culture allows the reconsideration of the notions of computing and the anthropocene from multiple stories -- particularly those that have been absent from dominant narratives of both.
Playing on the taxonomies of remixing that Banks and Navas discuss, we explore (a) extension, which which grows directly from an original, (b) selective versioning, which keeps and deletes elements of the original, still adding new sounds but keeping the original essence, and (c) the reflective remix that “allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of a sampling, where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original”. We hope that applying various methods to the concepts and practices that we will remix and prototype will shed light on remixing and Afrofuturism-the-project broadly.
In the early 1990s, DJ Screw introduced “chopped and screwed” (also called screwed and chopped, or slowed and throwed) onto the Houston Hip-Hop scene. The technique slows the tempo of a recording and applies operations such as skipping beats, record scratching, and stop-time to affect portions of the music to make a "chopped-up" version of the original. The slow down of tempo creates the opportunity for intervention and creative expression. Perhaps our obsession with speed has collapsed these opportunities.
Virgil Abloh’s work is a process of repurposing, recontextualizing, and recombining imagery to highlight relationships, make commentary, and push conceptions of fashion and design. Trained as an architect, a DJ, a fashion designer, and artist, Abloh consistently uses remixing as an aesthetic and the potential of mixing multiple sources (sound, images, words, icons, etc.) as a critical exercise.
Romare Bearden’s textured collages began as cut and torn photographs from popular magazines that he then reassembled into statements on African-American life. For Bearden the collage fragments ushered the past into the present: "When I conjure these memories, they are of the present to me, because after all, the artist is a kind of enchanter in time.” Collage, or what might be considered remixed images, becomes formal, cultural and socially conscious in Bearden’s work.
Planned obsolescence and the black boxing of technological devices has made it difficult for users to keep their devices and encourages the rapid increase of e-waste. What might we learn from cultures that have been silenced by capitalism about the relationship between humans and the environment? How might we extend the lifespan of computing products through principles of repair and care rooted in african and indigenous philosophies? Using remixing approaches and techniques, we provide various ideas that play on care, repair, and imperfection to extend the life cycles of devices -- “extending the beat” in response to problems such as e-waste, unbalanced impact, and slow violence. We begin with african and indigenous philosophies and techniques as a strategy of decolonizing the anthropocene.
The DJ is to music as the computer scientist is to programmable technology. The DJ is responsible for the creative work that bubbles to the fore in the nightclub, on the records we play, in the on-stage performances of our favorite artists, or in the solo groove that we blast through our headphones. The method is by no means simple, as many elements must be artfully and thoughtfully sampled, revamped, edited, and or omitted altogether. The message is just as complex as the method, where a DJ could take tunes from times long past and use them in the present to, say, make a statement about anything--to pull us into the past in fresh ways that suddenly have us jamming songs from our grandparents’ era. This is the beauty of the remix that the DJ masters. What would computing and the anthropocene look like if computer scientists embodied the methods and goals of a DJ through afrofuturistic, environmentally conscious lens?