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[...] Game of Thrones has always been interesting because it is determinedly a story without heroes; the one character who might have been described as a classic hero was killed off in the first season, and everyone who came after him is logically more villain than hero, no matter what cause they claim to be fighting for. Everyone is ruthless, and everyone has blood on their hands.
That this villains-only narrative currently centers on women perhaps says less about female empowerment, and more about the way women are allowed to be seen in mainstream narratives. We are more comfortable with female monsters, it seems, than female heroes. Being the supervillain has historically been a way for people with marginalized identities to come in from the margins, to enter action movies, comic books, and even the journey epics of the Western canon. Where the hero is alway a straight white dude, the person matching the demographic being courted by producers, the supervillain is often “the other,” playing on the expectation that anything outside of this traditionally dominant category will somehow inherently carry with it a whiff of fear and violence. [...] Villains’ origin stories are frequently darker, stranger, and more moving than those of heroes in stories—the trauma must pile up high enough to justify this person’s sadism and bloodlust, even if these traumas are only gestured at and never fully explained. Villainy becomes a sideways mechanism by which to examine the basically traumatic nature of living outside of the single dominantly approved identity in a racist and patriarchal society. Being the villain is a way into the central narrative without actually having to be granted centrality, to move in and assume power in the unmarked spaces while remaining a marked category. Villains are often far more compelling than heroes and are often the point of identification for many of us who, also, do not see ourselves in heroes. The villain is how we get into the story, how we recognize a person who has been warped by trauma and driven by desire, a human who wants and who fails and who lives outside of neat, upstanding categories.
Powerful men are always monsters, so much that monster isn’t a marked category for men. We create heroes out of powerful men, the story disguising the villainy beneath. But no powerful woman is a happy warrior; she’s a trauma monster. The depictions of female villains in both fiction and reality are a reminder that female-ness itself is scary, shrill, and hysterical, either oversexualized or monstrous for its failure to be invitingly sexual. To put women in power without changing our whole society means raising them up as fantasy villains. To have a TV show for a male audience in which female characters dominate the landscape, the female characters must be murderers and psychopaths; everybody can be comfortable with that.
[...]
If men can be accepted as powerful warriors, as complex figures capable of fighting for power without losing sight of integrity, capable of seeking glory without that seeking turning into a bloodbath of betrayal, then the hope is that women, in fiction, in life, and in the places somewhere in between the two, might one day be allowed the same consideration. Female heroes—the proverbial “strong female characters”—exist, but in both fiction and life, they are portrayed as one-dimensional, or fail to rouse any real belief or excitement, falling quickly back into what reads as villainy, such as Game of Thrones’ mostly botched attempts to write Daenerys, the closest thing they have to strong female character who isn’t evil, as an inspiring leader. Their flaws quickly disqualify them from heroism, rather than offering the complexity we seek out in male characters. Flawed male heroes are still heroes, but a flawed female character immediately becomes a villain. Villains are often more fascinating and more honest characters than heroes, but in consigning female characters to these roles, women are once again asked to bear the burden of the ugly truths of both heroism and villainy.
We have been told two things about the relationship between technology and nature. The first is that technology has enabled humans to master nature. The second is that technology has caused humans to destroy nature.
At the intersection of these two stories lies the idea of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene contains a paradox: the term recognizes the immense power humans wield over the rest of creation, such that nothing on the planet is immune. Yet this same power poses a serious threat to humans. We’ve shaped the earth so intensively to suit our needs that it can no longer support them. (Some of us. Some needs.)
In this issue, we try to tell a different story about the entanglements of nature and technology. No surprise that the end of the world looms large. Big Tech teams up with Big Oil to build systems for smarter drilling. The residents of a small town continue to fall ill long after the microchip plant shuts down.
But there are also reasons for optimism. There are movements demanding a more “correct relation with the non-human world,” to borrow one contributor’s phrase. This issue offers some materials for imagining what such a relation might look like.
so good
Technological mastery is a myth. Prometheus is not coming. In truth, everything is dirty, even the digital—especially the digital. Computers were supposed to be made of sunshine: “all light and clean because they are nothing but signals,” as another contributor to this issue famously wrote on her first computer, an HP-86, decades ago. As she already knew then, they are less pristine than promised. Their metaphors are ethereal but their footprints are filthy. They too are implicated in armageddon.
The renewable transition itself may involve new kinds of destruction.
But recognizing that nature is human-entangled and vice versa opens up more options than conservation. Recognizing that there was never any Eden to return to lets you look ahead. Indeed, the most hopeful futures may come from the darkest histories, where the lessons of resistance have been well learned. The world has ended before; there have been many armageddons. But this also means: We have to learn how to mourn. To mourn without despair; to mourn towards a future.
But the TCO managers also wanted to talk about something else. “We have a lot of workers in the oil fields. It would be nice to know where they are and what they are doing,” one manager said. “If they are doing anything at all.”
This is what our Chevron partners were most keen to discuss: how to better surveil their workers. TCO had thirty or forty thousand workers on site, nearly all local Kazakhstanis. They worked on rotating shifts — twelve-hour days for two weeks at a time — to keep the oil field running around the clock. And the managers wanted to use AI/ML to keep a closer eye on them.
They proposed using AI/ML to analyze the video streams from existing CCTV cameras to monitor workers throughout the oil field. In particular, they wanted to implement computer vision algorithms that could detect suspicious activity and then identify the worker engaging in that activity. (My Microsoft colleagues and I doubted the technical feasibility of this idea.) Enhancing workplace safety would be the reason for building this system, the managers claimed: more specifically, they hoped to see whether workers were drunk on site so that they could dispatch help and prevent them from hurting themselves. But in order to implement this safety measure, an “always-on” algorithmic monitoring system would have to be put in place — one that would also happen to give management a way to see whether workers were slacking off.
The TCO managers also talked about using the data from the GPS trackers that were installed on all of the trucks used to transport equipment to the oil sites. They told us that the workers were not trustworthy. Drivers would purportedly steal equipment to sell in the black market. Using GPS data, the managers wanted to build a machine learning model to identify suspicious driving activity. It’s not a coincidence that minor tweaks to the same model would also allow management to monitor drivers’ productivity: tracking how frequently they took bathroom breaks, for example, or whether they were sticking to the fastest possible routes.
The TCO managers were also interested in Microsoft products that could analyze large quantities of text. “Let’s say we have the ability to mine everyone’s emails,” one executive asked. “What information could we find?”
When I reflect back on this meeting, it was a surreal experience. Everyone present discussed the idea of building a workplace panopticon with complete normalcy. The TCO managers claimed that monitoring workers was necessary for keeping them safe, or to prevent them from stealing. But it wasn’t convincing in the slightest. We knew that they simply wanted a way to discipline their low-wage Kazakhstani workforce. We knew they wanted a way to squeeze as much work as they could from each worker.
I held my tongue and made sure to appear calm and collected. So did my colleagues. Collectively representing Microsoft, we turned a blind eye, and played along perfectly. We sympathized with TCO’s incriminating portrayal of their Kazakhstani workers and the need to uphold the rule of law. We accepted their explanation that increased surveillance would improve worker safety. But truth be told, we didn’t even need the excuses. Microsoft was hungry for their business. We were ready to concede.
aaahhhh
During the workshop, I asked a coworker how she felt about Microsoft working with Big Oil. She responded sympathetically, understanding my concerns about climate change. But she also seemed to feel there was nothing we could do. For her and many other colleagues I’ve spoken to, change has to happen at the top. The problem, of course, is that the top has powerful incentives not to change. Microsoft executives aren’t going to give up on the billions of dollars to be made from Big Oil, especially if it helps them win more of the coveted cloud market.
They are happy to offer employees small ways to live more sustainable lives, however. The company runs various recycling programs, encourages employees to “skip the straw” to reduce plastic consumption, and funds sustainability hackathons. (One hackathon project involved using AI/ML to detect trash in the ocean.) More broadly, Microsoft works hard to present an environmentally friendly public face. Its most ambitious green initiative is its promise to power its energy-hungry data centers with renewable sources. In 2016, Microsoft announced its goal to transition its data centers to 50 percent renewable energy by 2018. Hitting that target one year early, president and chief legal officer Brad Smith announced that the next goal is to surpass 70 percent renewable by 2023. “Time is too short, resources too thin and the impact too large to wait for all the answers to act,” he said.
On the surface, then, Microsoft appears to be committed to fighting climate change. Google has constructed a similar reputation. But in reality, these companies are doing just enough to keep their critics distracted while teaming up with the industry that is at the root of the climate crisis. Why go through the effort of using clean energy to power your data centers when those same data centers are being used by companies like Chevron to produce more oil?
At the workshop in Atyrau, a young Kazakhstani data scientist approached me to ask about a project that he was migrating to Microsoft’s cloud platform. He didn’t speak English fluently, but I could tell he was a good engineer. I wasn’t sure if he really needed my help. It seemed like he just wanted to chat with another engineer in a room filled with businesspeople.
Afterwards, he told me a bit about how he ended up working for TCO, and how he wasn’t able to find any other opportunities in the country that could match the offer. He had attended Purdue University to get an undergraduate degree in computer science. But since the Kazakhstan government paid for his tuition, he had to return to the country to work. “It means that I have to work in oil,” he said. “It’s basically the only industry that pays.”
Speaking with him made me realize the extent of oil’s dominance in Kazakhstan. Oil is by far the biggest economic sector, accounting for 63 percent of the country’s total exports. In 2013, TCO made $15 billion in direct payments to the government — an enormous figure, considering that the country’s entire tax revenue that year came to $21 billion. TCO is also a major source of wealth for the region. For years, the venture has invested millions of dollars into building schools, community centers, and fitness centers for the local people.
Kazakhstan’s dependence on oil has only grown over the past decade. In 2016, TCO announced a $36.8 billion expansion to the Tengiz project, tying the country’s economic future even more closely to fossil fuels. To make matters worse, the country’s ability to produce oil relies heavily on multinational oil companies. At the time of its founding, TCO was a fifty-fifty partnership between Chevron and the state-owned KazMunayGas. Since then, ExxonMobil and the Russian oil company LukArco have joined the venture, but only KazMunayGas’s share has been diluted.
While the country would struggle to take advantage of its oil-rich lands without the help of these foreign partners, the partnership is far from a win-win deal. Chevron keeps a tight grip on power, appointing most members of TCO’s upper ranks. The power dynamic was clear at the workshop: lower-level employees were Kazahkstanis while management was almost entirely American. The local economy has also completely aligned itself with the needs of the American-dominated TCO. TCO proudly announced in Q1 of 2019 that it spent over $1 billion on Kazakhstani goods and services, which includes hiring more than forty thousand local workers to work in the oil field. But this makes local businesses highly dependent on TCO. If American oil companies pulled out of the venture or slashed funding, TCO would crumble, and many businesses would lose their biggest (and often only) customer, leaving the economy in shambles.
Big Tech isn’t responsible for Kazakhstan’s reliance on oil. Nor can we blame it for the climate catastrophe that we’re facing. But it is certainly exacerbating both. While Kazahkstan’s economy may benefit in the short run, intensifying the climate disaster will ultimately hurt the country too. Research shows that the region will suffer from increased aridity and more frequent heat waves, which could decrease crop yields and challenge food security.
this is insane
The cyborg vision of gender as changing and changeable was radically new. Her map of how information technology linked people around the world into new chains of affiliation, exploitation, and solidarity feels prescient at a time when an Instagram influencer in Berlin can line the pockets of Silicon Valley executives by using a phone assembled in China that contains cobalt mined in Congo to access a platform moderated by Filipinas.
You mentioned that your current work is more focused on environmental issues. How are you thinking about the role of technology in mitigating or adapting to climate change — or fighting extractivism and extermination?
There is no homogeneous socialist position on this question. I’m very pro-technology, but I belong to a crowd that is quite skeptical of the projects of what we might call the “techno-fix,” in part because of their profound immersion in technocapitalism and their disengagement from communities of practice.
Those communities may need other kinds of technologies than those promised by the techno-fix: different kinds of mortgage instruments, say, or re-engineered water systems. I’m against the kind of techno-fixes that are abstracted from place and tied up with huge amounts of technocapital. This seems to include most geoengineering projects and imaginations.
So when I see massive solar fields and wind farms I feel conflicted, because on the one hand they may be better than fracking in Monterey County — but only maybe. Because I also know where the rare earth minerals required for renewable energy technologies come from and under what conditions. We still aren’t doing the whole supply-chain analysis of our technologies. So I think we have a long way to go in socialist understanding of these matters.
Socialists aren’t the only ones who have been techno-utopian, of course. A far more prominent and more influential strand of techno-utopianism has come from the figures around the Bay Area counterculture associated with the Whole Earth Catalog, in particular Stewart Brand, who went on to play important intellectual and cultural roles in Silicon Valley.
They are not friends. They are not allies. I’m avoiding calling them enemies because I’m leaving open the possibility of their being able to learn or change, though I’m not optimistic. I think they occupy the position of the “god trick.” [Eds.: The “god trick” is an idea introduced by Haraway that refers to the traditional view of objectivity as a transcendent “gaze from nowhere.”] I think they are blissed out by their own privileged positions and have no idea what their own positionality in the world really is. And I think they cause a lot of harm, both ideologically and technically.
damn