Loving Fiber Optic Cables

Loving Fiber Optic Cables (or the Internet as Land) outlines the ways expanding digital infrastructure compels settler colonial expansionism as global communication thresholds likewise increase. The book uses non-standard prose, slanting traditional academic verbiage to produce an affective argument about digital infrastructure that steers the book, wherein the focus is on how we should feel about digital infrastructure to better think about what we should do with it. The book argues that we cannot devise a way out of the settler colonial portent of the Anthropocene by relying on analytics formed within intellectual projects that likewise find their velocity within settler colonial thinking; indeed, an animating argument in the book is that we must abandon Western intellectual traditions altogether when future-building, including the Anthropocene, given the ways neo-European intellectual genealogies map onto settler conquest across the world. Affixing Indigenous cosmology to the project, then, Loving Fiber Optic Cables argues that, if we are able to love a cable or otherwise inanimate things by seeing them as alive with organizing principles, then we can better theorize and build around an uncertain future. Essentially, the book is a theory-building project at the speculative interface of human / non-human livability; that is, its sole focus is outlining a theory of digital infrastructure that requires human love to collate the human and the non-human to revise settler colonial doom.

Centering on three general sites across the world, the book focuses on revising grammars of place via the Indigenous feminist method of Critical Place Inquiry: the Atlantic ocean, the desert of Phoenix, Arizona, and Arctic ice within the Far North region of Russia. This argument unfolds through a layering of cosmological, ontological, and epistemological analyses of digital infrastructure using three respective case studies focused on: 1) fiber optic pathways mapped onto Trans-Atlantic slave ship pathways that continue European legacies of extraction; 2) data server farms flourishing in desert spaces through the use of sustainability rhetorics; and 3) receding Arctic ice caused by climate change that allows corporations to lay more fiber optic cables across continents. Each case study advances concepts meant to invigorate discourses about digital infrastructure specifically and technological development more broadly, moving from a landed analytic (the internet is land), which treats digital infrastructure as land, to a revised temporality that accounts for the settler colonial milieu of digital infrastructure (the future at any cost), and ending with a sustained examination of the relational beingness regarding the human and nonhuman components of digital infrastructure that foregrounds the human as an anticolonial proxy for colonized land (an intercontinental fiber optic love triangle). Through the three case studies and concepts therein, each argumentative element of the book cascades into the next, sequencing the ways a cosmological shift of digital infrastructure affords refreshed onto-epistemological understandings of the human / non-human interface and relations-making. The book concludes with a methodological meditation on concepts derived from the case studies and what readers might do with them in their own projects and lives. Ultimately, readers will learn about—and ideally grapple with—what loving colonized elements of land entails and how we might act as vectors for anticolonial action on their behalf.

The primary contribution of the book is a third option beyond the bind of 1) the nihilist pessimism of settler doom, which treats digital infrastructure solely as a world-ending technology, and 2) the opacity of techno-optimism, which treats digital infrastructure and its composite technologies as the only solution for progress and modernity amid climate change. Rather, to break this cycle, Loving Fiber Optic Cables offers love as an anticolonial means of limning a complicated future together, given the pleasure, comfort, uncertainty, auspiciousness, disruption, and animosity (among many other emotions) that are entailed in loving something and someone. In sum, through Indigenous cosmologies and analytics from settler colonial studies, Loving Fiber Optic Cables renders a settler colonial grammar of infrastructure and then offers a suite of techno-ethics grounded in the affective potential of love.