Divisions

Dividing Meeting

Extract of transcription from input at The Dividing meeting on 14 January 2023

Jara Rocha:

As Femke was saying, the politics that by means of computational unfoldings affect the exploitation and the ownership and the unequal distribution and the final finishing of what we might understand as livable soils.

So this concrete project of Figurations of Timely Extraction did this attempt of providing ourselves with some, so this is another method, one method might be doing writing a bug report or specific software or technical apparatus. And another might be providing ourselves with figurations that help us stay with complexity to work with. So these figurations that Femke listed were our first attempt to actually speak about these cohabitance of different temporalities in the complex situation of extractive practices that are computationally mediated. So the turbo computation cohabiting with the temporality of geology, which is directly connected with extraction. So in that sense, there's one issue that Frontier is bringing again here as a case study, which is again a consideration of temporalities because there is both the temporality of prevision or of speculation, of this carbon removal. So this reinforcement of linear idea of time that then gets technically divided in order to distribute the damage, and technically pay for that.

But also there is a implementation of a backwardness of that temporality because of the removal move, the removal of damage, the putting back carbon into where it, and there's this narrative, into where it should have never departed. This kind of narratives in relation to temporality, and how they are technically implemented, we are interested in. So I think this is something that I wanted to say that we are trying to continue our trans feminist technosciences practice and maybe also, yeah, that's it for now.

Helen Pritchard:

Okay. Yeah, so I think, I don't know, maybe it's useful just to loop back again to the Frontier and the carbon removal project that we're looking at. Because I think it helps to ground it a bit. And so Frontier, as Femke was saying, is a consortium of these big tech companies to basically provide a purchasing service for tons of carbon removal. And there's been, what we are finding very interesting when we think about aggregation and division is there's been a kind of, let's say a dream within the kind of climate change activist communities, also on the left as well around carbon removal. And this idea that through kind of cooperation and through collectivity on a planetary scale that carbon removal would be possible. And of course what's happened is that big tech together with these global consultancy companies have moved into that space to offer what looks like that and through what they're calling aggregation.

But of course what we are interested to explore more for this article is that aggregation is actually something very different to perhaps other ideas of corporation in the public interest for example. And because of some of the ways that it works computationally, as Jara was also just saying there. So in some ways what we're dealing with, and just to give you a few examples, so Frontier will facilitate the speculative purchases they just launched this summer in 2022 of carbon removal on behalf of buyers, organizations, institutions, and communities. So it's really kind of changing from a state-based carbon management or carbon removal to something that's kind of in the industries and institutions as a responsibility. You can buy tons as an institution that may include carbon removal processes like afforestation, bioenergy, enhance mineralization, which is the crushing of rocks to absorb carbon and kind of squirting in a carbonated fluid into the porous rock.

Also direct air capture, which is actually developed just down the road here in Zurich, which sucks out carbon from the air. So it's all of these kind of potentially molecular bringing together and dividings as well in the way that it works. But this is kind of imaginary to suck carbon out of the atmosphere and put it underground. And of course it's been around for a long time, but the difference here is that it's being facilitated and managed and legitimated by cloud computation and all of the kind of associated things from mobile platforms, artificial intelligence, optimization and so on. So one of the things that we're, as we've been thinking about this example of Frontier that it really brings to the fore is in a way when we've been thinking about computation previously, and I think in a lot of discussions of computation, I think it's come up a bit today, is this idea that computation kind of takes the world as a modernist proposition.

One that's based on that it works through categories, it works through kind of static space and linear time. And our kind of sneaky suspicion with how Frontier is working and actually a lot of cloud computation, is that actually it might be presenting a kind of case of a naturalized linear time and categorizations, but the way it's actually working computationally is really far from that. And it's perhaps working with a kind of topology where spaces are brought together and apart in different, the way in which those cloud computational processes work means that they can deal with all of these different temporalities in different sites and that they can bring them together and present them as a kind of linear time. So the way in which they are engaging with space and time is perhaps not this kind of static space or linear time, but the way of course it becomes rendered and naturalized is very much that, in their proposition you can take carbon out of the air, put it into the ground permanently, and this will be the way in which to solve the climate crisis.

And so this is really, in a way, to move across both that aggregation as division also into thinking about, with some of the discussions in with the bug report as well that we've been having is thinking about, "Well what kinds of relations does this curtail?" And I think this is also a place where division is really happening and aggregation in this space. So those particular kind of divides that are being made through this infrastructure that are curtailing and foreclosing particular types of collective and cooperative relationships with questions around the kind of energy practices, carbon use, relationships to land, relationships to each other.

But again, very much through this kind of practice of division and dividing also the kind of access to be... the kind of division between simply to, in a way, the way in which you're kind of renting this carbon removal is there's a kind of real spatial divide between, because you are not, for example, investing in a particular forest or a particular technology, you are buying into an aggregated scheme. And so there's a kind of really significant division in terms of what's kind of visible and palpable, I guess, also in that relationship. I don't know, maybe don't know if there's any other...

Femke Snelting:

So the work on Frontier, what we're trying to do is something, one of those methods is to write a bug report. So this is a mode of writing from technical practice where a system gets published in the world, but then users and other developers are invited to report on what might not be working in the program or in the software or in the technical system as it was planned. And we started to use this kind of mode of writing as a way to speak back to technical systems, trying to make paradigm shifts in what is expected to work, what is supposed to work or not work, making paradigm shifts in what can be addressed in those systems on purpose to try and make more depth and other kinds of conversations possible. And so what we're preparing is a bug report on a Frontier somewhere this year, with many others, I mean it's not just us.

Helen Pritchard:

Can I just add one other thing? So I mean, I actually wanted to add two things, but one of them is that we were sort of saying last night that in a way if we have the kind of thinking about categories and taxonomy, which has been really present in thinking about how computation works, but actually within this infrastructure it's possible for something to be a kind of category bender, really easily at the same time in different temporalities, and for that to be switched and shifted in a micro temporality. So actually in this system something can be a rock, a plant, an animal, and that's what gives cloud infrastructures the ability to exploit them. For us as well, I think we also have been quite committed to thinking about breaking down the categories in taxonomy as a way to think about resistance to particular types of computational practices. But I think what we are starting to see with the cloud infrastructures is that they're breaking them down and they're using that to, and thrive and using that as a extractive exploitative process.

And really in terms of also kind of what's at stake is that we really see that this particular planetary scale solutionist approach, that Frontier are offering. And just to give you a sense of the amount of economy and energy that's going into this. So I think the McKinsey group, for example, are really leading this prediction that the carbon removal economy will replace fossil fuels and it will be a trillion dollar economy and it's a kind of safer investment from fossil fuels. So as institutions deinvest from fossil fuels, they're being encouraged to invest into carbon removal practices, but through infrastructures like Frontier.

And what we see is that this really has a kind of potential to have a really huge effect on decades of resistance within climate movements that have been really developing a plurality of different types of post carbon practices. And so from an everyday level, instead of institutions considering different types of arts of closure or different types of post carbon practices or even things like considering funding a community farm or a forest or a pedagogy, a different type of pedagogy, that actually they instead could just sign up a percentage of their income to Frontier to reach their kind of 2030 climate net-zero goals. And so Frontier is really quickly becoming the answer, or could quickly become the answer to many institutions' net-zero problem that they have right now.