s soon as the COVID-19 pandemic severely started to kick in Europe in March 2020, many of the local cultural events were switched to online. Like many others, It took me sometime to get accustomed to proprietary online meeting environments such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet (all of which I only use on the Windows side of my dual-boot Linux-base ThinkPad [Jitsi is an exception]). While I enjoyed the vibe of “anyone could attend anything from anywhere in the world”, I felt the novelty of “at home” or “remoteness” had quickly disappeared. These days, I still do book interesting-looking online events, but can barely get motivated to actually show up in front of the screen. When “online” has been rendered almost completely flat by the surge of repetitive Zoom conferences and streaming events, perhaps it is time to look back some of the first virtualization efforts of art in history. In fact, “available from home” was nothing new.
@ -164,7 +164,6 @@ crimes should be adopted.[^38] We ask: could restorative justice
offer an alternative way of dealing with the occurrence of AI
crimes?[^39]
Dale Millar and Neil Vidmar described two psychological
perceptions of justice.[^40] One is behavioural control, following
the legal code as strictly as possible, punishing any
@ -273,8 +272,6 @@ restoring justice, for social justice.
-----------------------
**Adnan Hadzi** is currently working as resident researcher at the University of Malta. Adnan has been a regular at Deckspace Media Lab, for the last decade, a period over which he has developed his research at Goldsmiths, University of London, based on his work with Deptford. TV/Deckspace.TV. It is through Free and Open Source Software and technologies this research has a social impact. Currently Adnan is a participant researcher in the MAZI/CreekNet research collaboration with the boattr project.
Adnan is co-editing and producing the after.video video book, exploring video as theory, reflecting upon networked video, as it profoundly re-shapes medial patterns (Youtube, citizen journalism, video surveillance etc.). Adnan’s documentary film work tracks artist pranksters The Yes Men and net provocatours Bitnik Collective. Bitnik’s practice expands from the digital to affect physical spaces, often intentionally applying loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms, formulating fundamental questions concerning contemporary issues. <http://dek.spc.org>, <http://bitnik.org>, <http://deptford.tv>
**Adnan Hadzi** is currently working as resident researcher at the University of Malta. Adnan has been a regular at Deckspace Media Lab, for the last decade, a period over which he has developed his research at Goldsmiths, University of London, based on his work with Deptford. TV/Deckspace.TV. It is through Free and Open Source Software and technologies this research has a social impact. Currently Adnan is a participant researcher in the MAZI/CreekNet research collaboration with the boattr project. Adnan is co-editing and producing the after.video video book, exploring video as theory, reflecting upon networked video, as it profoundly re-shapes medial patterns (Youtube, citizen journalism, video surveillance etc.). Adnan’s documentary film work tracks artist pranksters The Yes Men and net provocatours Bitnik Collective. Bitnik’s practice expands from the digital to affect physical spaces, often intentionally applying loss of control to challenge established structures and mechanisms, formulating fundamental questions concerning contemporary issues. <http://dek.spc.org>, <http://bitnik.org>, <http://deptford.tv>
**Denis Roio**, better known by the hacker name Jaromil, is CTO and co~founder of the Dyne.org software house and think&do tank based in Amsterdam, developers of free and open source software with a strong focus on peer to peer networks, social values, cryptography, disintermediation and sustainability. Jaromil holds a Ph.D on “Algorithmic Sovereignty” and received the Vilém Flusser Award at transmediale (Berlin, 2009) while leading for 6 years the R&D department of the Netherlands Media art Institute (Montevideo/TBA). He is the leading technical architect of DECODE, an EU funded project on blockchain technologies and data ownership, involving pilots in cooperation with the municipalities of Barcelona and Amsterdam.
n observation during the first Corona lockdown, on the topic of doing nothing: It was astounding that already after the first few days after the outside world was locked away, numerous texts, commentaries, and newsfeeds started being circulated that suspiciously and hyperactively told of all the things that could finally be done in the sudden nothingness. Going from one hyperactivity to the next taking place mainly on the net. I just remembered a study that was taken in 2014. The setting was straight forward, the question was simply: Do people who are forced into doing nothing actually prefer doing nothing, or would they opt for a (weak) electric shock that THEY GIVE TO THEMSELVES? Many of those who took part of the study chose the electric shock, which was slightly surprising. During a small, non-representative survey among friends, I came to the same conclusion, or rather, the decision for the electric shock came up more often than expected. And yes, it was accompanied by laughter. But it was there. Maybe this says something about the human condition, the human need for "something". Already in the 17^th^ century *Blaise Pascal* said: "The tragedy of humans is that they are incapable of remaining calmly in a room". Blaise Pascal obviously had a good sense for people, maybe even for a future Conditio Humana organized around electricity. Thinking about all those experiments based on electric shocks à la Milgram, the question could be asked why the electric shock is such a popular method for scientific study, and yet the answer to the question why human beings have such a propensity towards torment could be simpler and more complicated at the same time: Because otherwise EVERYTHING feels LIKE NOTHING.
or the occasion of the March 2020 Art Meets Radical Openness (AMRO) festival, Jamie Allen and Caroline Sinders prepared a workshop, “Trace Carbon”, that would discuss the histories and metaphors we use for measuring of carbon — as a gas, a metric, and as a projective means of counting and accounting for climate change responsibilities. What are the human impulses, stories, desires, values, systems and institutions that drive the re-composition of carbon and are being transformed into (new?) methods of traceability, cycling, currency, and calculation. The cultural and political ecologies of carbon are ambiguous, as we realise that its distribution, not its existence or essence, are of primary importance in the positioning of element number 6 and its oxidised forms (CO2) as ‘friend’ or ‘foe’. The ambiguous distributions of carbon testify to the element’s allotropic middle positioning on the periodic table: neither highly reactive, nor inert, carbon equivocates, like human attempts to liberate, contain, and count it do.
Likewise, Carbon management techniques trace ambiguous stories of human attention and passions, intentions and interests, benevolence and care. These include techniques that until quite recently seemed the regime of conceptual, speculative and media arts ‘becoming real’[^1], and further opening into suggestive possibilities of things like personal 12-step carbon self-help programs (that might wean us off of our addiction to fossil fuels) and programmes that might limit mobility and personal choice in ways that still offend liberal sensitivities (e.g.: ‘carbon surveillance’[^2] or, more subtly, the way in carbon metrics have become almost the sole metric for all climate and environmental regulation, becoming over-simplifying and reductive).
Although it is a changing stereotype (and communities like AMRO are agents in this change), artists and environmentalists alike are notorious enemies of quantification and measurement. The metrication and calculation ‘of nature’ revisit necessary critiques and the blindspots of a ‘technology vs. nature’ debate that is recurrent and transhistorical. Most everyone in the critical-studies and eco-critical pantheon — from Socrates to Marx to Arendt to Derrida; from Carolyn Merchant to Rachel Carson, Bakhtin to Bookchin — worried about this kind of calculative abstraction, taking us away from the material, real effects of what it is we are quantifying, counting, calculating about. Understood as an unstoppable trajectory, list making, writing, counting leading to monetising and marketising, such methods of grammatisation can become a crutch that results in the alienation and forgetfulness that comes via lacks of direct, grounded interaction and action. Such critiques resurface with each new means of calculating the world, arriving en masse in our particular moment of various “artificial” intelligences promising to take precedence over human sensibilities and decision making.[^3] In some cases, they have been given licenses to do so already.[^4] Important cautions should be heeded, of course, but can they also run the risk of obscuring those important, humble cultural techniques of counting and calculation, techniques that empower communities and individuals in their ‘accounting for’ something? Carbon, for example?
<small>Reductions in CO2 over corona period, screenshot</small>
We were invited to write this short essay both reflecting on the Trace Carbon workshop held at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic[^5], and in response to the widely held and hopeful idea that lockdown and curtailments of activity, globally, may present a kind of opportunity for the emergence of new habits, directions, systems, and ways of living. Could these correspond to a more eco-political sensitivity, an ‘eco-subjectivity’ perhaps, that persists even after vaccinations render human populations more resilient to the virus that still wreaks havoc upon them? It is unclear if global industrialism’s current forced sabbatical will allow these activities to reemerge with a more sharpened and insidious toolset, or if the current hiatus will produce lasting changes in awareness, policy and action that acknowledges the untenability of the ways industries treat the atmosphere and biosphere. We have, at least, been given the opportunity to witness and analyse a step response in planetary systems operations that would make Oliver Heaviside[^6] proud, as it has registered in its carbon outputs.[^7] Although we were perhaps all intuitively aware that this was the case, there is now a recent, statistical and systemic link we can draw between reduced CO2 levels in the atmosphere and the actual and potential slowdowns, curtailments and cessations that have been exercised by industrial actors and terrean citizens. Industrial economies and atmospheric carbon are, indeed and undoubtedly, directly proportional.
Amongst the “slow hopes”[^8] that new pandemic socialities and politics have produced, there lies the potential for new forms of both solidarity and joy, new senses of common-purpose through self-restraint that say, one to our fellow humans, “I gotcha”. A direct connection and responsibility to others, even more ignored in daily life the way it was lived pre-Corona, is manifested in every mask worn, flight or trip not taken, every check-in message sent to a potentially lonely or just bored colleague, friend, family member. In a strange, perhaps contradictory slip, we have daily reminders and methods of expressing connection and solidarity with one another in our willingness and discipline in staying apart, at a distance. Even though it is true that being trapped in permanent lock down wouldn’t not in itself ‘solve’ climate change, there are moments in which our calculation of personal concerns and common purposes become more aligned, and now it seems to be one of them.
Could a similar concern for the carbon commons give way to a curtailing of the parts we all play in sickening the planet, as Corona congeals a better sense of the material, bio-geological community in which we all take part? Self-management, personal governance, accounting and calculation, are cultural techniques that do not necessitate the development of exploitative, capitalistic, oligarchical evils. These could, as Mark Fisher has suggested, be means of ‘accelerating management’[^9] in directions that are empowering forms of personal boundary setting; means of collectively considering the notion of what is or should be “essential” (essential travel, essential services, essential business, etc.); means of finding joy and hope in more measured, conscientious activities of calculative care for human and nonhuman others, in a world of accelerating ecological change.
Ponder for a moment, the personal calculator. A humble, portable object, relatively ubiquitous across the world and thousands of years old. Calculators are everywhere and have been everywhere, from the abacus with it’s rods and sliders in 2500 BC to our mobile phones with simple arithmetic apps, to the expensive Texas Instruments graphing calculators used in American high schools since the 1980s. Ponder further on what a calculator does: along with calculation, it can be a form of empowerment, self-control, visualisation and the ability to make information tangible, handheld, graspable. The work and advocacy that the W.A.G.E (Working Artists and The Greater Economy) calculator provides is in calculating, is a form of personal documentation, archiving and historicising conditions. W.A.G.E is a rubric and a watchdog for pricing fees and remuneration in the arts.
Calculators, of other shapes and sizes are used to create sense and solution from comparative measure, through conceptual abstraction. A “calculator” these days is not a simple device for displaying and manipulating numbers, but is used for documenting and visualizing all kinds of different conceptual analogies that exist for measurement and comparison, such as wages, footprints, energy, and labour. The kinds of ‘calculators’ that pop up everywhere online these days can be potent and empowering to individuals and collectives alike, self-motivating alignments of behaviour through numbers that can also produce a most satisfying sense of connection, completion and satisfaction — not unlike that feeling you get when a square peg fits into a square hole, or when something finally clicks and the balance sheet decisively balances. These are the practices of aesthetics and of personal calculation that speak of new forms of individual-communal self-governance; technologies of the self that could be directed toward producing better relations to self and others, ecologies and environments.
During the Trace Carbon AMRO workshop in March 2020, we revisited carbon realities and metaphorics, revealing how very varied and storied the means and media are we use to trace, track, compare and calculate carbon. Nested metaphors of carbon cycles, footprints, accounting, budgets, markets, offsets, intensity, law and cryptocarbon were brought up and interrogated. The notion of carbon cycles, for example, has its roots in the both theological and chemical histories of the seventeenth and eighteenth century chemical revolution.[^10]
Footprints, as Anita Girvan writes in her book “Carbon Footprints as Cultural-Ecological Metaphors”[^11], are a cultural practice and signifier of the imposition, or at least presence, of human beings in and on natural landscapes. It calls to mind “Lucy”, a famed representative of a 3.2 million year old fossilised hominid species that also left footprints in that sense long ago at Laetoli, in Tanzania. It is this fundamental, root commonality that couples footprints to the likewise immemorial need to count, or measure, our effects. In calculating ‘carbon footprints’, we use a measure that feels graspable, corporeal, and elementary, like a footprint in the earth.
Ecological footprints, and hence carbon footprints, were born of carrying capacity debates in the early 1990s — explicit attempt to provide “adequate feedback about ecological overshoot” and make planetary ecological limits accessible through calculations of human demands on, and regenerative capacities of, the biosphere. These demands and supplies were initially expressed in terms of the physical area of an ecology (i.e.: a ‘footprint’) that was necessary to support them. Carbon footprints can be composed as the bioproductive land required to sequester anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, but this has more recently transformed into a non-spatial measure that is more amenable to the measures of industrial processes. CO2 ‘footprints’ are now mostly communicated and compared in terms of weight, net kilograms or tonnes of CO2, released and/or sequestered. Somewhat circularly, the carbon tonnage that is liberated by any such industrial process, can also be re-converted into a number of trees required to absorb that carbon, or the land area required to offset it (e.g.: “On average, a Forest Garden offsets 144.64 metric tons of carbon dioxide per acre over 20 years.”[^12]).
@ -50,6 +57,8 @@ A critique of calculators and calculations is that they often give little sense
<small>Carbon footprint scale of transportation means icon</small>
The measurement and management of carbon is wrought with technocratic metaphor, myths and imaginings, that make the accuracy of carbon calculations both of questionable origins and epistemological value, let alone the evaluation of their change-making potentials for veering us off our current path of accelerated climate change. Although imperfect and simple, these calculators are, however, like the humble pocket calculator, readymade for the kinds of broad, general understandings we need to cultivate as eco-subjects. They are just-enough and good-enough supports for the beginnings of what might be a profoundly new literacy. These kinds of calculators — non-totalising, fudgeable and fungible, even inexact — show us how hard it is to recon quantification with lived experience, but they help nonetheless to compose ‘back of the envelope’ calculations for a next car trip to the grocery store. And, importantly, they evoke how these activities measure up to other activities, and the activities of electricity, heating, agriculture, manufacturing, and other types of industrial production. So, get out your calculators!
@ -45,8 +45,6 @@ The future of online community building will likely take a combination of approa
**Charles Céleste Hutchins** was born in San Jose, California in 1976 and currently lives in London, England. Growing up in Silicon Valley, he started programming at a young age and has continued to do so, even after leaving dot coms to pursue music composition – obtaining an MA from Wesleyan University in 2005 and a PhD from the University of Birmingham in 2012. He teaches music technology at the University of Kent and is a co-founder of the Network Music Festival. His recent work has focused on gendered labour and AI.
-------------------------
[^1]: The Coding Machine. (2020) Work Adventure. *GitHub*. \[Software\] <https://github.com/thecodingmachine/workadventure>
[^2]: McLean A. (2019) Email to Live Code list, 30 April. \[Online\] <https://we.lurk.org/hyperkitty/list/livecode@we.lurk.org/thread/7PTEJ7OIWJLMOSXAZEFOIQMU6Z2FZH6E/>
@ -16,6 +16,8 @@ In rich countries, however, the focus is on always-on connectivity and ever high
.]({static}/images/kris-de-decker_how-to-build-a-low-tech-internet-1.png)
<small>A node in the [Scottish Tegola Network](http://www.tegola.org.uk/hebnet/).</small>
While the high-tech approach pushes the costs and energy use of the internet [higher and higher](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/10/can-the-internet-run-on-renewable-energy.html), the low-tech alternatives result in much cheaper and very energy efficient networks that combine well with renewable power production and are resistant to disruptions.
If we want the internet to keep working in circumstances where access to energy is more limited, we can learn important lessons from alternative network technologies. Best of all, there's no need to wait for governments or companies to facilitate: we can build our own resilient communication infrastructure if we cooperate with one another. This is demonstrated by several community networks in Europe, of which the largest has more than 35,000 users already.
@ -34,7 +36,9 @@ Most low-tech networks are based on WiFi, the same technology that allows mobile
The longest unamplified WiFi link is a 384 km wireless point-to-point connection between Pico El Águila and Platillón in Venezuela, established a few years ago.[^3][^4] However, WiFi-based long distance networks usually consist of a combination of shorter point-to-point links, each between a few kilometres and one hundred kilometers long at most. These are combined to create larger, multihop networks. Point-to-points links, which form the backbone of a long range WiFi network, are combined with omnidirectional antennas that distribute the signal to individual households (or public institutions) of a community.
<small>Picture: A relay with three point-to-point links and three sectoral antennae. Tegola. <http://www.tegola.org.uk/howto/network-planning.html></small>
Long-distance WiFi links require line of sight to make a connection -- in this sense, the technology resembles the 18th century [optical telegraph](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2007/12/email-in-the-18.html).[^5] If there's no line of sight between two points, a third relay is required that can see both points, and the signal is sent to the intermediate relay first. Depending on the terrain and particular obstacles, more hubs may be necessary.[^6]
@ -65,10 +69,11 @@ Another example, also in India, are the AirJaldi networks which provide internet
<small>A node in the AirJaldi network. Picture: AirJaldi.</small>
A second type of long distance WiFi network in poor countries is aimed at providing telemedicine to remote communities. In remote regions, health care is often provided through health posts scarcely equipped and attended by health technicians who are barely trained.[^17] Long-range WiFi networks can connect urban hospitals with these outlying health posts, allowing doctors to remotely support health technicians using high-resolution file transfers and real-time communication tools based on voice and video.
An example is the link between Cabo Pantoja and Iquitos in the Loreto province in Peru, which was established in 2007. The 450 km network consists of 17 towers which are 16 to 50 km apart. The line connects 15 medical outposts in remote villages with the main hospital in Iquitos and is aimed at remote diagnosis of patients.[^17][^18] All equipment is powered by solar panels.[^18][^19] Other succesful examples of long range WiFi telemedicine networks have been built in India, Malawi and Ghana.[^20][^21]<p/>
## WiFi-Based Community Networks in Europe
The low-tech networks in poor countries are set up by NGO's, governments, universities or businesses. In contrast, most of the WiFi-based long distance networks in remote regions of rich countries are so-called "community networks": the users themselves build, own, power and maintain the infrastructure. Similar to the shared wireless approach in cities, reciprocal resource sharing forms the basis of these networks: participants can set up their own node and connect to the network (for free), as long as their node also allows traffic of other members. Each node acts as a WiFi routing device that provides IP forwarding services and a data link to all users and nodes connected to it.[^8][^22]
@ -94,6 +99,8 @@ Therefore, the worst-case average bandwidth available per machine is approximate
<small>Wireless links in the Spanish Guifi network. Credit.</small>
Under these circumstances, even the most common internet applications have poor performance, or don't work at all. The communication model of the internet is based on a set of network assumptions, called the TCP/IP protocol suite. These include the existence of a bi-directional end-to-end path between the source (for example a website's server) and the destination (the user's computer), short round-trip delays, and low error rates.
Many low-tech networks in poor countries do not conform to these assumptions. They are characterized by intermittent connectivity or "network partitioning" -- the absence of an end-to-end path between source and destination -- long and variable delays, and high error rates.[^21][^27][^28]
@ -118,6 +125,8 @@ Examples are DakNet and KioskNet, which use buses as data mules.[^30][^34] In ma
Outgoing data (such as sent emails or requests for webpages) is stored on local computers in the village until the bus comes withing range. At this point, the fixed WiFi-node of the local computer automatically transmits the data to the mobile WiFi-node of the bus. Later, when the bus arrives at a hub that is connected to the internet, the outgoing data is transmitted from the mobile WiFi-node to the gateway node, and then to the internet. Data sent to the village takes the opposite route. The bus -- or data -- driver doesn't require any special skills and is completely oblivious to the data transfers taking place. He or she does not need to do anything other than come in range of the nodes.[^30][^31]
> In a data mules network, the local transport infrastructure substitutes for a wireless internet link.
@ -132,6 +141,8 @@ Obviously, a delay-tolerant network (DTN) -- whatever its form -- also requires
<small>A Freifunk WiFi-node is installed in Berlin, Germany. Picture: Wikipedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Freifunk-Initiative_in_Berlin-Kreuzberg.jpg).</small>
Browsing and searching the web requires more adaptations. For example, most search engines optimize for speed, assuming that a user can quickly look through the returned links and immediately run a second modified search if the first result is inadequate. However, in intermittent networks, multiple rounds of interactive search would be impractical.[^26][^32] Asynchronous search engines optimize for bandwith rather than response time.[^26][^30][^31][^35][^36] For example, RuralCafe desynchronizes the search process by performing many search tasks in an offline manner, refining the search request based on a database of similar searches. The actual retrieval of information using the network is only done when absolutely necessary.
Many internet applications could be adapted to intermittent networks, such as webbrowsing, email, electronic form filling, interaction with e-commerce sites, blogsoftware, large file downloads, or social media.
Some DTN-enabled browsers download not only the explicitly requested webpages but also the pages that are linked to by the requested pages.[^30] Others are optimized to return low-bandwidth results, which are achieved by filtering, analysis, and compression on the server site. A similar effect can be achieved through the use of a service like [Loband](http://www.loband.org/loband/), which strips webpages of images, video, advertisements, social media buttons, and so on, merely presenting the textual content.[^26]
@ -146,6 +157,8 @@ Furthermore, many of these applications could be organized in different ways. Wh
<small>Stuffing a cargo train full of digital storage media would beat any digital network in terms of speed, cost and energy efficiency. Picture: Wikipedia Commons.</small>
Just like a data mules network, a sneakernet involves a vehicle, a messenger on foot, or an animal (such as a [carrier pigeon](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/02/sneakernet-beats-internet.html)). However, in a sneakernet there is no automatic data transfer between the mobile node (for instance, a vehicle) and the stationary nodes (sender and recipient). Instead, the data first have to be transferred from the sender's computer to a portable storage medium. Then, upon arrival, the data have to be transferred from the portable storage medium to the receiver's computer.[^30] A sneakernet thus requires manual intervention and this makes it less convenient for many internet applications.
There are exceptions, though. For example, a movie doesn't have to be transferred to the hard disk of your computer in order to watch it. You play it straight from a portable hard disk or slide a disc into the DVD-player. Moreover, a sneakernet also offers an important advantage: of all low-tech networks, it has the most bandwidth available. This makes it perfectly suited for the distribution of large files such as movies or computer games. In fact, when very large files are involved, a sneakernet even beats the fastest fibre internet connection. At lower internet speeds, sneakernets can be advantageous for much smaller files.
Title: If You Lived Here, You\'d Be at Work Already
Title: If You Lived Here, You'd Be at Work Already
Author: Marloes de Valk
Date: 24 March 2021
@ -10,9 +10,9 @@ Date: 24 March 2021
██║ ╚████║
╚═╝ ╚═══╝
</pre>
ine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I accepted an invitation to join an event. It would take place, like all other events these days, in my house. The organiser send me an enthusiastic email with a Zoom background image attached, mentioning the image would make for a nice tool to hide anything I don\'t want share on the Zoom grid. I instantly started dreaming of also replacing my voice and face with augmented reality and AI, but was rudely awakened when I couldn't even make the background image work. My laptop's CPU is too old. Video conferencing tools handle background image calculations on the client-side, to reduce network traffic and latency. My laptop can hardly handle video conferencing without augmentation, client-side calculations are well out of its league.
ine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I accepted an invitation to join an event. It would take place, like all other events these days, in my house. The organiser send me an enthusiastic email with a Zoom background image attached, mentioning the image would make for a nice tool to hide anything I don't want share on the Zoom grid. I instantly started dreaming of also replacing my voice and face with augmented reality and AI, but was rudely awakened when I couldn't even make the background image work. My laptop's CPU is too old. Video conferencing tools handle background image calculations on the client-side, to reduce network traffic and latency. My laptop can hardly handle video conferencing without augmentation, client-side calculations are well out of its league.
Suddenly this phrase popped into my head: \"If you lived here, you\'d be at work already\". It's an advertisement in the movie "Sorry to bother you" from writer and director Boots Riley. The movie takes place in a dystopian future where a company called Worry Free, offers employees "lifetime labour contracts" including food and housing at the company. At Worry Free you literally live at work. When I saw the movie two years ago, I had no idea how well this ad would reflect 2020's reality of living at the office, even if the office is in the home instead of home being at the office. Somehow all my things -- my house, my laptop, my printer, my electricity, my heating -- are now also used by my employer, and by Zoom, Microsoft and Google. It was an emergency. There was no time to really think this through. Nine months later though, many companies are thinking about making working at home a permanent change. Less traveling, smaller office buildings and thus less overhead and a smaller environmental footprint.
Suddenly this phrase popped into my head: "If you lived here, you'd be at work already". It's an advertisement in the movie "Sorry to bother you" from writer and director Boots Riley. The movie takes place in a dystopian future where a company called Worry Free, offers employees "lifetime labour contracts" including food and housing at the company. At Worry Free you literally live at work. When I saw the movie two years ago, I had no idea how well this ad would reflect 2020's reality of living at the office, even if the office is in the home instead of home being at the office. Somehow all my things -- my house, my laptop, my printer, my electricity, my heating -- are now also used by my employer, and by Zoom, Microsoft and Google. It was an emergency. There was no time to really think this through. Nine months later though, many companies are thinking about making working at home a permanent change. Less traveling, smaller office buildings and thus less overhead and a smaller environmental footprint.
It is an industry trend to shift network bottlenecks into local computational tasks. It's called edge computing. It is not a new method, it started in the 90s with the advent of Content Distribution Networks for a faster distribution of video to end users. Today, data storage and computational tasks are both offloaded to the edge node in order to improve latency and reduce network traffic. It is particularly helpful for tasks that require fast processing speed, such as facial recognition and augmented reality, but also for bandwidth heavy applications such as cloud gaming and the growing pile of smart objects on the edge of networks, that are constantly phoning home to corporate servers generating massive amounts of data to be processed, real-time data generated by sensors and users, with zero tolerance for latency[^1]. After all these years of Software as a Service and cloud storage, moving our software and data onto corporate servers many hops away from our modem, now some of that is once again decentralized, just like the office.
@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ Can we still get rid of the almighty lords that have wedged themselves in betwee
[^1]: 5G is linked to this development, even though mostly targeted at mobile broadband for handheld devices, it offers the transfer speed needed for businesses to use edge computing without needing to rethink their centralized core infrastructure. 5G is notoriously energy inefficient. According to Earl McCune, professor in the Electronic Circuits and Architectures group at TU Delft, 2G had an energy efficiency of 60%, "For 5G, the efficiency will be only 10%, meaning that \[for every 10 watts\] nine watts will be turned into heat." (Engelsman, no date)
[^2]: The campaign still exists, among the sponsors are many companies responsible for disposable plastic packaging and pollution -- such as Pepsico, Dow Chemical Company, McDonald's, Mars Wrigley and UPS -- and their trade associations -- the Plastics Industry Association, the International Bottled Water Association, []{#anchor}the National Association of Convenience Stores and the American Chemistry Council. <https://kab.org/about/partners/>
[^2]: The campaign still exists, among the sponsors are many companies responsible for disposable plastic packaging and pollution -- such as Pepsico, Dow Chemical Company, McDonald's, Mars Wrigley and UPS -- and their trade associations -- the Plastics Industry Association, the International Bottled Water Association, the National Association of Convenience Stores and the American Chemistry Council. <https://kab.org/about/partners/>
---------------------
@ -44,13 +44,11 @@ Dean, J. (2020) Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?, *Los Angeles Review of Boo
Gabrys, J. (2015) Powering the Digital: From Energy Ecologies to Electronic Environmentalism, in: *Media and the ecological crisis*. New York: Routledge.
Engelsman, M. (no date). How not to waste energy on 5G, *TU
Delft*. Available from: [https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/how-not-to-waste-energy-on-5g/](https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/how-not-to-waste-energy-on-5g/) \[Accessed 15 January 2021\].
Engelsman, M. (no date). How not to waste energy on 5G, *TU Delft*. Available from: [https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/how-not-to-waste-energy-on-5g/](https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/how-not-to-waste-energy-on-5g/) \[Accessed 15 January 2021\].
Keep America Beautiful (1953). \[advertisement\] <https://www.npr.org/2019/09/04/757539617/the-litter-myth>
*Sorry to Bother You.* 2018. \[film\] Boots Riley. Los Angeles:
Annapurna Pictures.
*Sorry to Bother You.* 2018. \[film\] Boots Riley. Los Angeles: Annapurna Pictures.
*Translated from an original blogpost in Italian by Elena Gerebizza and Filippo Taglieri from Re:Common introducing their new report: ["The great illusion. Special economic zones and infrastructure mega-corridors, the way to go?"](https://web.archive.org/web/20200814132820/https://www.recommon.org/la-grande-illusione/)* The original article and link to the report can be found [here](https://web.archive.org/web/20200814132820/https://www.recommon.org/la-grande-illusione/).
**Elena Gerebizza** is a researcher and campaigner for Re:Common since 2012, she focuses on campaigns against the expansion of fossil fuels and large scale infrastructure for over 15 years. A graduate in international politics with a MA in International relations at the University of Amsterdam ISHSS, she has participated in field visits to communities affected by the impacts of the extractive industry in Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Republic of Congo, among others. Her most recent activity includes investigative research on the expansion of infrastructure mega-corridors, including on some specific gas and transport projects.
**Filippo Taglieri** is a researcher and campaigner for Re:Common since 2017, he works on campaigns against fossil fuels, especially coal and gas, and has carried out field research, particularly in Latin America, on the socio-environmental impacts of extractive industries and large infrastructures. Graduated in communications studies, he has been a political activist in support of farmers' movements for years.
**Re:Common** is an Italian, non-for-profit organization. It conducts investigations and promotes campaigns against the dodgy economy and the devastation of the territories across the world caused by the indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources and large public and private infrastructure projects.
<www.recommon.org>
-----------------------
*Translated from an original blogpost in Italian by Elena Gerebizza and Filippo Taglieri from Re:Common introducing their new report: ["The great illusion. Special economic zones and infrastructure mega-corridors, the way to go?"](https://web.archive.org/web/20200814132820/https://www.recommon.org/la-grande-illusione/)*
The original article and link to the report can be found [here](https://web.archive.org/web/20200814132820/https://www.recommon.org/la-grande-illusione/).
