TWO
Ephemeral Screens
EXCHANGE AT THE INTERFACE
Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile—a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.
—DONNA HARAWAY, “A Cyborg Manifesto”
The signal and the thing are not as cut off from each other as they say.
—MICHEL SERRES, The Parasite
Stock Exchange: Removing and Transplanting
Throughout most of its history, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) conducted the majority of its transactions through the medium of paper. Ticker-tape remainders and other paper scrap that recorded the latest stock quotations circulated and accumulated in the flurry of trading. At the close of each day, the trading floor would be littered with these leftover papers that had been fleeting carriers in the circuit of exchange. In 1968, the artist Dennis Oppenheim collected some four tons of this “paper data” from the floor of the stock exchange and relocated it to a rooftop in New York City.1 His project, Removal Transplant—New York Stock Exchange, transferred and revealed the ephemeral material that was expended in the process of market transactions. Transactions between distant places were recorded on the paper scraps, but the rapid pace of exchange had rendered the printed matter residual. By placing the litter against the Manhattan skyline, Oppenheim moved the overlooked debris of communications to the foreground, demonstrating that it, too, was an essential building block that cut through the core of the city.
This “removal” and “transplant” describes the movement and relative abstraction of material within markets—not only paper material, but also the material of commodities. Each scrap of paper and ticker tape tracks a record of the fluctuations of the market, as well as the values of the exchanges and commodities it represents. This is a core operation that stock exchanges perform in the distancing and removal from materials and sites of production. In addition to the process of removal, such movement enacts a displacement and transformation: through the process of exchange, objects materialize and dematerialize based on their value and the contexts in which they circulate. Exchange is a process of removing, transplanting, and transforming. In this way, another kind of removal has since occurred in the spaces of trading. With the arrival of electronic telecommunication networks and computing systems, the paper ticker tape has transformed into screen-based displays, and the exchange floor has migrated from a central physical location to a dispersed network of millions of terminals scattered across the globe. Now, markets have been removed and transplanted to electronic screens and networks. With this removal, even the stock exchange appears to have dematerialized.
This chapter focuses on the electronic screen as a space and device through which “the signal and the thing” (the subject of the quote from Michel Serres at the beginning of this chapter) seem to be disconnected and dematerialized. Looking specifically at the deployment of screens in and through the electronic network of NASDAQ, I consider how screens within this particular market are critical objects through which to examine processes of materialization and dematerialization, specifically through exchange and the rise and fall of value. By articulating this relationship between signal and thing, my point is not to draw a direct and unproblematic line between these but, instead, to discuss how the signal and the thing are bound into shared material processes. From screens to networks and from networks to software and automation, technologies and programs have emerged for distributing and mobilizing matter—the thing—toward signals and light. Through my analysis of NASDAQ and by considering the screens that form a considerable part of the traffic in electronic waste, I excavate the layers and processes of materiality that sediment through electronic exchange, screen imaginaries, and the performativity of networks and software. These processes suggest that the signal and thing are co-constitutive, that commodities, value, and matter emerge or dissipate not through the sheer inertness of things but through the processes that allow these things to cohere—even if momentarily. Similar to the chip, the screen of electronic markets is another key site and fossil from which to rematerialize electronics in order to assemble a dense material record—a natural history—of these devices.
Electronic Performativity
The introduction of electronic trading occurred primarily through the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations system, which began to electronically display stock quotes through an automated system in 1971. The display system could be accessed by traders throughout the United States, almost in real time. With this electronic network, NASDAQ dispensed with a central exchange floor and instead established a dispersed market that spanned the entire United States. In many respects, by decentralizing and distributing its trading across electronic networks, NASDAQ achieved greater coverage and, eventually, greater volume of exchanges. It previously played a secondary role to the authoritative NYSE, but through its electronic network, NASDAQ became recognized as the world's first electronic stock market. This network now makes real-time stock quotes available and allows for order execution from over two million terminals worldwide, while at the same time making delayed market information available on its Web site.
NASDAQ registers not just the electronicization of markets but also the rise of information and communication technology values within markets, as it has come to be known as an index representing a high proportion of technology companies.2 Microsoft, Intel, and Google all feature on NASDAQ. The efficiency and speed with which trading may be conducted and the fact that NASDAQ is “the largest electronic screen-based equity securities market in the United States,” listing over 3,250 companies, mean that it “trades more shares per day than any other U.S. market.”3 In its electronic transactions and as the emblematic index for the “new economy,”4 NASDAQ has moved from a previously novel electronic display system to become a mode of exchange that influences dynamics of value and devaluation, as well as materialization and dematerialization.
March 10, 2000, is well known by now as the date when NASDAQ reached its peak but also experienced a sudden plummet in value. From 5,048 points, NASDAQ quickly fell 3,000 points. It had lost 60 percent of its value by March 2001 and continued to decline. While this crash seemed to portend the end of digital dominance, it has, in many ways, had a contrary effect. The value of NASDAQ now oscillates below its historic peak, yet its volume and speed of trading has continued to accelerate. With this performance, however, the “new economy” was more continuous with historic economic practices than the term suggested. Speculative bubbles, fueled by technology and the promises in new development that technology generates, are a long-standing dynamic within stock markets.5 Financial crashes and the waste generated through these crashes, whether in the form of devalued stock or ruined companies, can be a crucial dynamic in the generation of value. This is because rubbish is a generative dynamic.6 Waste—the possibility of devaluation—also enables the opportunity for revaluation. Value is unstable; things move through stages of value and may in all likelihood become waste. The generative dynamic of waste, then, describes a possible limit of value as much as a condition for potential recuperation of value.7 Yet this same set of dynamics translates into discards, from obsolete devices to devalued shares to bankrupt companies. Indeed, overvalued Internet companies were not the only casualties of the dot-com crash. As the previous chapter notes, the material remainders from this rapid devaluation can be discovered in the vacant buildings and empty parking lots that periodically litter the landscape of Silicon Valley. Electronic commerce has more than a passing connection to electronic waste. As the present chapter suggests, these cycles of value are not without remainder.
In addition to these wavering cycles of valuation and devaluation, NASDAQ has achieved a more thoroughgoing effect on markets through its electronic network and through the speed, volume, numerical precision, and automation that underpin this network. Setting the pace, as it does, NASDAQ transactions are informed by the temporality of digital technology. This is a timing that is bound up with the instantaneity and mutability of turning profits on the tick of the virtual ticker tape.8 Yet the electronic market sets the pace in more ways than one, for the speed of trading has as much to do with the rise and fall in value as it does with the accelerated movement and programming of exchanges. These electronic markets are bound up with performative registers—material, temporal, and rhetorical deployments that involve affective as much as calculative maneuvers. In fact, the calculative becomes inseparable from the performative.9 But such performativity is, as suggested throughout this study, often unruly. In a volatile market, the inevitable devaluation and destabilization of commodities, share prices, and futures can potentially move at an even faster pace through the enhanced calculability afforded by electronic exchanges. As was revealed by the losses from the crises involving subprime mortgages and credit in 2007, such calculations can contribute to even more complex entanglements and oscillations of value.
Electronic markets emerge through the material and performative qualities of digital technologies at the interface and through the extended effects of these machines that, as wryly suggested by Haraway in her quote at the beginning of this chapter, are seemingly comprised only of sunshine and signals. NASDAQ is more than a financial instrument. It sets into play a performative and material economy, which has political, cultural, and environmental effects. From the speed and volume of exchanges, to the volatility of values, to the apparent “removal” of material structures, this electronic market contributes to the circulation, dematerialization, and devaluation of electronic technologies. The performativity of NASDAQ can even create conditions of “counterperformativity,” where the failure of market devices can interrupt their performance.10 Electronic markets perform in ways that exceed expectation: they reach saturation, collapse, generate waste, and recuperate, sometimes almost instantaneously. The performative or “expressive” failure of markets suggests that these processes of valuation and materialization involve something more complex than rational, calculative intention.11
NASDAQ does not wholly encapsulate the extent or force of the new economy. In fact, electronic market structures and digital technologies are more pervasive, complex, and unpredictable than a single index can measure.12 The electronic, captured in the eponymous prefix e-, includes, as media theorist Rita Raley writes, “communicative networks, electronic commerce, modes of production, and global financial markets.”13 The whole of market activity cannot be explained through a discussion of the materiality of electronic exchange. Yet in many ways, electronic technologies do become tantamount to the markets they power.14 In this respect, NASDAQ can be studied as a particular register of how electronic markets and technologies collide and collude in the making of electronic excess. The rhythm of electronic markets, as much as the processing speeds of microchips, impacts on electronic technologies’ formation and transformation, distribution and erosion, both in terms of their materiality and value. The electronic, then, extends from technologies to markets and to modes of waste, decay, and disintegration. NASDAQ encompasses performative registers that are bound up with distributions and dispersals of matter. Using the term electronic to refer to markets describes not the absolute elimination of material resources but, rather, the mobilization and even more rapid turnover of materials and material relationships. These are electronic modes of waste, and this is how waste performs electronically.
Through these material and performative registers of electronic markets, there emerge distinct temporalities of exchange. The electronic exchanges that take place at the interfaces of NASDAQ terminals are typically urgent yet ephemeral. These modes of display, together with the interconnected network of exchanges, establish a pulse and performance that rework the formation of values. It is a network that arguably has contributed to the transformation of what value—or a commodity, particularly an informational commodity—even is. To assemble this natural history, I begin the next section with a discussion of several overlapping and ostensibly dematerialized screen displays and networks associated with NASDAQ. These displays span from the megalithic NASDAQ MarketSite building in Times Square; to the seemingly virtual and fleeting surface of the innumerable distributed screens where market transactions occur; to the networks, software, and automated technologies that inform this particular vehicle of electronic exchange. The screens, networks, and software that constitute NASDAQ emerge as material and performative infrastructures that impact on the rise and fall of electronic markets, the performance of electronic technologies, and the formation of electronic waste.
From Microchip to Megalith
The tale of dematerialization is often told through the rapidly shrinking size of digital technologies. Laptops now have more processing power than the computers that put astronauts on the moon and computers have diminished from room-size mainframes to compact and portable gadgets. But on the whole, the decrease in computing size has not, by any available evidence, reduced the total amount of resources deployed in the manufacture and consumption of digital technologies. Even though these technologies are smaller, they are consumed more frequently and in greater proportions.15 So, by another process of “removal-transplant,” the physical bulk from individual machines has diminished but has at the same time proliferated across more devices.
A similar transfer process seems to have occurred in the NASDAQ MarketSite headquarters in Times Square in New York, a location established to consolidate and present a “face” for what is otherwise a relatively decentralized and pervasive electronic market. In many ways, MarketSite is designed to reveal the sprigs and sprockets that make its engines turn. The designers selected for the project sought to convey a futuristic vision of NASDAQ and, to this end, settled on a design that would give MarketSite visitors a sense of inhabiting a computer. The designers note, “The client wanted a space that would look as different as possible from the paper-strewn New York Stock Exchange—one that resembles the inside of a computer.” The design of MarketSite inverts the usual spatial relationship by placing people inside an environment that emulates a set of digital effects. Lighting within the spaces appears as “information traveling through a network” and is “strung on cables like microchips on a circuit board.” Punctuating the ensemble, the design and lighting directs visitors toward an even more stunning feature. As a reviewer in Architectural Record describes,
These lights are programmed to dim in a wave that draws attention first to a neon-lit, shimmering artwork of silk and metal fabric and then leads the eye through the space, which terminates at a curved 55-by-11-foot video wall comprising 100 video monitors. Continuously updated news, stock prices, and performance information are displayed at this state-of-the-art digital information system.16
The electronic stock exchange amasses as an architectural exclamation point, a concentrated and serial repetition of all the terminals that comprise its otherwise dispersed infrastructure. Inside this designed and materially recast network, it is possible to venture into an enlarged version of computers and circuitry and to experience a performance of electronic exchanges at the interface.
MarketSite was designed to be at once both “a physical environment that would help communicate the image of a company that has billed itself as ‘the stock market for the next 100 years’”17 and an “epicenter for financial and business news.”18 In order to convey the significance of this electronic market-without-a-market, however, a tremendous amount of material was deployed. The NASDAQ MarketSite tower is clad in what is declared to be the largest stationary video screen in the world. This surface, which is over seven stories in height, covers a span of nearly 10,000 square feet and is powered by nearly 19 million light-emitting diodes. The video screen displays advertising and NASDAQ messages and runs the ever-present virtual ticker tape of financial data across its surface. In what would seem to be a strange reversal to the dematerialization trend, microchips and computers have inflated to scales well beyond even that of the most prehistoric mainframes, into computers the size of skyscrapers, pixels at the scale of billboards, and data that is not virtual or immaterial but, rather, something we inhabit. Material structures shift not once but several times over. While NASDAQ is a dematerialized marketplace that conducts its transactions not on the trading floor but, instead, dispersed across telecommunication networks, it simultaneously inflates the electronic apparatuses of microchips, networks, and screens and rematerializes them at an epic scale. Through this inversion, NASDAQ appears to be “virtual” within an extensively material presentation.
As it turns out, an enormous amount of material and resources are required in order to establish and convey the sense of the virtual. The number of screens alone at MarketSite illuminates this paradox. From the hundreds of interfaces that spill over with the urgency of new economy news, to the roving electronic ticker tape that wraps the MarketSite building, to the millions of terminals worldwide that process and receive NASDAQ data, there exists a considerable concatenation of surfaces through and across which NASDAQ trading transpires. Although these are material architectures and technologies, they operate in support of the dematerialized imaginaries of electronic networks. From manufacture to display, the matter and the material operations of these screens are impalpable. These same screens eventually end up in the trash heap or are shipped near and far for recycling, but before they reach their final installments, they perform as the seemingly immaterial conduits for global finance.
Screening the Virtual
As an interface and space of transaction, the screen seems particularly conducive to conveying a sense of virtuality and dematerialization. Electronic objects collapse and disappear into the space and function of the interface.19 Through the electronic transaction, the screen's role as a primary site of involvement seems to disappear from view, as the screen becomes a portal for a more virtual engagement. Yet as the array of screens, interfaces, and transactions at NASDAQ's MarketSite illustrates, the virtual is far from immaterial. The virtual, in fact, is a mechanism of expenditure. Such expenditure occurs most intensely in the apparently absent space of the screen, in what is the space of exchange.
Before I move further into describing the electronic infrastructure of NASDAQ, I would like to elaborate on the notion of expenditure, as it underscores the key ideas in this chapter. The “virtual” of course has a long history of use, from the potential or germ of possibility to the more general sense of a simulated reality as is typically meant in the context of computing.20 The virtual also at times has come to mean an abstract model or paradigm to which practice is made to conform.21 Without plunging into the vagaries of these uses and attempting to resolve the virtual, I would like to make a lateral move and suggest that the virtual as it emerges in this specific discussion of NASDAQ refers neither to the material nor to the immaterial exclusively, neither to model nor to practice specifically, neither to potentiality nor to actuality, but, rather, to expenditure. While the virtual appears to exist in a “space of flows,” generally unfettered and detached from material structures, the expenditure that the virtual enables has consequences that exceed the material or immaterial (and, as such, undoes this division). The sense of the virtual that emerges in the allure of NASDAQ's MarketSite is the expenditure required to sustain and circulate the forwardness of digital technologies. Often, in the “forced march” of technological innovation and growth, more is expended than is gained (as will be discussed shortly concerning financial outlays for digital networks and technologies). The virtual is the force of expenditure that is ultimately required to sustain the momentum of technology and the momentum of its promise (because the two are inseparable).22
This expenditure is seemingly abstract, but it in fact constitutes an intensity and performative force through and around which electronic markets realign.23 In some respects, expenditure can be seen to be a defining trait of the “new economy.” As much as $150 billion was raised during the mid- to late-1990s to support and galvanize the new economy.24 Credit, speculative or venture capital, and stock offerings are examples of the continuity between expenditure and the virtual. These forms of finance impact on the movement and amplification of markets and market activity. They are neither fact nor fiction; rather, they are virtual expenditures that set in motion self-perpetuating and even obligatory economic conditions.25
The enormous sums of money moving through markets and into technology companies and the ensuing “speculative bubble” that resulted in an overinflated NASDAQ came to be known, after Alan Greenspan's characterization, as “irrational exuberance.” With the collapse and correction of the “new economy,” it became difficult to verify the extent to which new technologies and the new economy created conditions of demonstrable economic growth. Economist Robert Shiller suggests that whether there is measurable growth stemming from the new economy is perhaps less important than “the public impressions that the revolution creates.”26 Through repeated online activity or through the presence of multiple electronic interfaces scrolling financial news, a self-reinforcing logic may emerge that can be located neither in the impressions nor in new technologies but, rather, in the expenditure (in time and money) required to keep both of these afloat. Digital technology is meant to constitute a “new growth paradigm,” and this objective may become the guiding agenda through which electronics and electronic exchanges operate.
Screens are a site of intensive practice and attention through which growth-focused electronic exchanges transpire. Expenditure at the interface is not just restricted to an excess of financial outlay in the rapid exchange of shares through electronic markets, however, but also receives yet another source of reinforcement from the reporting of financial news. From CNN to CNBC, the media screens of financial news intersect with the electronic screens of market exchanges, at times even collapsing into the same space, as brokers watch financial news while trading.27 At this juncture of media screens on digital screens, it is essential to recall that one of the primary functions of NASDAQ's MarketSite is to serve as a media site, a space where “major financial broadcast outlets conduct daily reports from MarketSite and reach viewers around the country and world.”28 The number of these “live market updates,” typically broadcast by major media conglomerates, reaches over 175 per day. So pervasive and insistent are these broadcasts that they come to seem as essential to the new economy as the technology and markets on which they report.29 The speed and prevalence of the electronic ticker tape and the insistence of media screens contributed to the reordering of finance and its performance.30 The financial news media are not only entangled in the “irrational exuberance” of the new economy; they also help to generate the terms of the new economy's performance.
While in the 1990s these screen-based performances of the new economy may have been relatively novel if not futuristic, they are now increasingly distributed across multiple spaces where the business traveler may be in transit. Media screens laden with financial information, whether in the form of scrolling indices or news analyses, distribute across a wide landscape that includes, as geographers Gordon Clark and Nigel Thrift identify, “hotel chains around the world, airport lounges, and shopping malls,” as well as “laptops, PDAs, and mobile phones,” which allow for updates on investments and financial news “on the move.”31 These media screens have become constant indicators of the status of markets. They have fueled the performances of expenditure (and exuberance) that variously circulate as new economy speculations. From these overlapping infrastructures, networks, and technologies, there emerges a mode of electronic exchange that is so pervasive it seems to fade into a flickering background noise. Part of the reason for this persistent hum is not just the sheer everydayness and everywhereness of these networks but also the rapid and fleeting pace at which they operate.
As an electronic stock market, one of NASDAQ's primary distinguishing functions is its unmatched speed of exchange.32 The market's trading networks are fast and comprehensive, linking traders in 146 countries. To improve their “transaction services,” which are the “engine” of their market, NASDAQ acquired an additional electronic communication network (ECN) in 2004, which further improved its efficiency and increased its liquidity. In 2007, NASDAQ averaged 2.17 billion trades daily. The NASDAQ systems are capable of processing 250,000 messages per second, an average of 1 millisecond each.33 Described in these estimates is a pace of exchange that is bound up with a capacity for rapid rates of circulation, where shifts in value tick across screens and terminals with an ephemeral and fleeting insistence.
Electronic markets can thus be characterized by higher rates of stock turnover and increased volumes of trading. These accelerated levels of electronic market activity can be traced to an increase in online trading in general, as well as to greater accessibility and ease of making trades, together with more constant news about financial activity.34 These assessments add up to a certain rhythm of economic life.35 Economic progress becomes defined through rates of transfer. Electronic markets facilitate more rapid rates of transfer, but in so doing, they alter the materiality and performance of those markets. Just as electronic networks enable trading in greater speeds and larger volumes, so this increase in speed and quantity potentially results in greater volatility. But it is precisely through the sudden and even minute shift in values that profit may be made.
With the migration of trading from the physical floor of a stock exchange to electronic networks, the ups and downs of market values are tracked within different scales and temporalities. While traders in an open pit depend on a commanding physical performance in order to execute trades, electronic markets engender a much different attention to and manipulation of trades.36 The ephemeral shifts in electronically displayed values can translate into money lost or gained. Anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom describes, through comparative ethnographic research, just how intently traders play the spread between bid and ask prices by continually negotiating “temporary assessments of market conditions, momentary markers of approximate valuation.”37 The speed of trading becomes bound up with the rates of transfer and tracking afforded by electronic technologies. What traders must accustom themselves to most of all is the instability of these values. So while they work within instability, they also turn it to their advantage. Electronic technology, which amplifies instability in many ways, also becomes a way to take advantage of the ambiguities and volatility of numbers.38 The question is whether the traders are playing the numbers, the technology, or both (or whether, even, the technology is playing them). The rapid scroll of financial data across screens can be tracked, momentarily stabilized, and acted on through these electronic devices. While the values operated on may seem relatively fleeting, this process is a material performance, involving electronic screens and networks, traders’ bodies, and office buildings, distinctly electronic temporalities and rhythms of exchange.
In this discussion of the volatility and volume actualized by electronic markets, what we take for the virtual—for apparently dematerialized conditions and objects of exchange—is in fact closely bound up with material and temporal expenditure. The ephemerality of numbers on which profits are won or lost and the errant spikes and dives in value emerge from and contribute to a sense of dematerialization and destabilization. This sense of time, of volatile and instantaneous events continually renewed, resonates with what Haraway calls the “technopresent” where “beginnings and endings implode.”39 This is a temporality that describes a rate of turnover, a rhythm of exchange, and an anticipation of progress that could be described as coded and so flattened, characterized by a sort of automaticity. Increased speed and expenditure give rise to the sense of dematerialization that is so specific to electronic technologies and electronic markets. The technopresent describes time as a program, which is operational and efficient but also dematerialized and ultimately depoliticized.
Dematerialization: Networks and Software
While it is by now clear that dematerialization is in fact a contradictory way to describe electronic technologies that are in fact deeply material, there are of course clear reasons why these technologies do seem to dissolve. From thin screens to tiny chips and from dispersed networks to rapid rates of exchange, many of the qualities of electronics convince us that they are relatively free from material requirements. Yet the term dematerialized does not necessarily mean “without material” but may, instead, refer to modes of materialization that render infrastructures imperceptible or ephemeral. This is electronic technology's sleight of hand, its magic. It appears to be immaterial, but this sense relies on dispersed material infrastructures. Such a condition does not simply involve revealing the invisible but obviously physical props that enable these apparently virtual technologies. Instead, a sense of immateriality is bound up with complex and specific ways of mobilizing and imagining material performativity as being free from resource requirements.40
Dematerialization can further constitute a way of making technologies seem even more operational and effective.41 The sense of dematerialization, in this case, may emerge through the speed of exchange and space of the interface, which foreground the transfer of signals and light in place of the supports of chemicals, metals, plastic, and labor. Here is a process of erasure—as well as a process of substitution that works toward a new performativity in the form of accelerated exchange and output. Such erasure unfolds through the speed of electronic networks but also through the apparent immateriality of the software that influences the “functionality” of those networks. Yet another form of erasure occurs in the timing of these exchanges, as suggested earlier. The ephemerality and accelerated rates of exchange that electronic networks facilitate influence, in turn, how we understand the materiality or immateriality of digital technologies.
Rather than refer to dematerialization, in relation to markets Don Slater suggests that we consider how things hold together at all. He instead proposes that objects and goods may move through processes of “stabilization” and “destabilization.”42 The market is a primary space where this operation takes place; it is an institutional and authoritative register for informing the stability of goods and lapses in value. Dematerialization describes less a condition of things without materiality, in this sense, and more the processes of materialization that allow things to register as entities. How and why do objects hold together, and what resources are at play in both stabilizing and destabilizing those objects? Beyond the dubious category of “physical” objects, what other dynamics emerge to reveal how “things” like computers, mobile devices, software, microchips, screens, NASDAQ indices, and billboards register as sites of momentary value and materiality—or immateriality? Electronics may even appear to be dematerialized because they are more fleeting, more disposable, “provisional,” and even volatile.43 Provisionality, ephemerality, and volatility have arguably become more central qualities of goods and markets; these are qualities that may contribute to a sense of dematerialization, and they are also mechanisms for realizing a perceived increase in performativity within the new economy.
Even prior to the establishment of the NASDAQ network, financial institutions were some of the first organizations to employ computerized and automated telecommunication networks in order to facilitate the processing and automating of transactions. Nearly parallel to these usages, manufacturing companies began to take up the use of these networks in order to ensure more regular control of stock and inventory.44 These histories will be taken up in greater detail shortly, but this discussion of networks begins with the most dematerialized version of networks—as they are imagined to be in an indefinite but dematerialized future. Kevin Kelly, one of the founding editors of Wired magazine, suggests that networks allow not just for the more effective coordination of manufacturing but also for the potentially complete dematerialization of systems required to produce things in the first place. In Kelly's assessment, goods may be developed according to “‘just-in-time’ production techniques,” which could “respond to trends in consumption.”45 But in order for such timing and responsiveness of production techniques to be enacted, networks must be employed. Networks allow for sudden changes, responses, and adaptations that can be set in cue with market demand. To realize such responsiveness, however, these networks must become not only quicker but lighter. Kelly writes,
But this flexibility demands tiptoe agility from multi-ton machines that are presently bolted to the floor. To get them to dance requires substituting a lot of mass with a lot of networked intelligence. Flexibility has to sink deep into the system to make flexible manufacturing work. The machine tools must themselves be adjustable, the schedules of material delivery must turn on a dime, the labor force must coordinate as a unit, the suppliers of packaging must be fluid, the trucking lines must be adaptable, the marketing must be in sync. That's all done with networks.46
As much an advocate for as an analyst of dematerialization, Kelly sets the tone for a more immaterial economy by promoting the advantages and efficiency of these seemingly lighter networks. Automation here occurs through dispersed networks, which makes objects cheaper to manufacture and reproduce, because manufacturing is faster, the objects may be smaller, and the processes require less material. So promising is this ostensible elimination of material inputs that Kelly forecasts a time when “one can imagine the future shape of companies by stretching them until they are pure network.”47 As pure network, companies would be pure process, and any material they produce would always be in transition, transformation, and exchange.
Yet, for all their seeming absence of material requirements, networks have been major sites of resource expenditure.48 So convincing is the logic of networks for their ability to improve efficiency, capacity, timing, and profits that scores of companies have invested in network technology in pursuit of this promise. Don Schiller documents how in the 1990s, at great cost, a number of companies undertook network application projects in order to save time and money and to speed products to market.49 The majority of companies investing in these technologies have been located in the United States, where expenditure on information and communication technologies soon surpassed that of any other capital expenditure. Despite this investment in network and information technologies, many of these ventures often did not achieve their stated aims. Far from constituting a reasonable investment or restructuring of production and distribution, these network projects were then characterized by tremendous expenditures and waste. Many of these network projects were in fact never completed.50 A tremendous amount of money and resources was expended in order to implement the logic and technology of networks. Such expenditure, even when it fails, appears to be a way to reinforce the promise and prevalence of electronic networks. This expenditure has had such an impact, moreover, that, together, these information technologies have now been classified as the largest industry in the United States.51 With such a sudden and thorough rise to a dominant position, information and network technologies have contributed to the transformation of economic practices and manufacturing conditions alike.52
If networks describe the restructuring of economic, material, temporal, and environmental processes, then how do we begin to describe the qualities of such restructuring? These networks enable a sense of virtuality, of greater efficiency, accelerated speeds, and lower resource requirements.53 At the same time, networks emerge not as materials or resources but as relations and systems of exchange. Even though networks have even been referred to as the new factories, as a “factory for information,” the prevailing sense is that a network somehow describes modes of operation rather than sites or materialities. Yet the tendency toward apparent dematerialization is a key part of how a network operates. Kelly elaborates on the network-as-factory theme: “A factory-made widget once followed a linear path from design to manufacturing and delivery. Now the biography of a flexibly processed widget becomes a net, distributed over many departments in many places simultaneously, and spilling out beyond the factory, so that it is difficult to say what happens first or where it happens.”54 While resource inputs and the space of manufacture become decentralized through a network, Kelly's statement suggests that a widget is not without resource requirements but that those resources have been distributed in different ways, across networks.
In this sense, materialities are restructured in a way that changes their ratio and distribution, as well as their economic, political, and environmental effects. A network may redistribute material, but it does not eliminate it. A network still requires resources, and it is essential to take into account the resources it extracts, processes, and distributes and where the wastes from processing circulate. The “network” of electronics extends from Superfund sites in Silicon Valley, to the networks of exchange and valuation of NASDAQ, to the recycling villages and dumps in China and Africa. It is through these other expanded networks that it is possible to trace out these transformed material structures and these electronic modes of waste. These networks not only are made of more than sunshine and signals; they also depend on hidden labor, political inequalities, and environmental damage. But the distribution of these aspects of electronic networks can be disparate and remote from sites like electronic markets. Electronic markets, moreover, typically operate through programs of efficiency—or software—that can render automatic and even seemingly “natural” many of the functions, distributions, and relationships that make these exchanges possible.
On the surface of things, NASDAQ may exist as an electronic network, but in order to actually access it, users require distinct software that will allow them to access discrete “levels” and modes of market information. Software exists for “data feed” and for “transaction services.” In fact, it is software that enables the operations of computer networks, by programming for specific capacities and “functionalities,” including algorithmic trading.55 Software enables another level of material inversion, not those megaliths constructed to resemble microchips, but seemingly immaterial architectures constructed to power vast material and manufacturing structures. Software is the code that appears to circumscribe the ratios and proportions, the speeds and relationships, within networks. The critical function of software is to program processes—of manufacture, calculation, automation.56 What drives networks is software; this is the automatic program that constitutes the design of the manufacturing process. In fact, most expenditure is now directed toward things that look increasingly like software, from research to licensing, but these inputs typically do not fully register within economic processes. Invisible though it may seem, software still operates in the microspaces, networks, and unnoticeable backgrounds; in the “guts of a set of commodities”; and, finally, across multiple platforms to be delivered as programmed content to screens everywhere.57
Software ensures that the lid stays on the black box of electronics, and our only window into these mysterious devices is through the interface, which can effectively obscure the workings of this technology. This directing of attention toward the effectivity and functionality of these devices and not toward their resources, labor, and environmental effects is a way in which software programs matter. But in programming matter, software becomes tied to matter; it constitutes a distinct articulation of material processes. In this respect, it may even make sense to say that “there is no software.”58 There is no software because there is nothing soft—or absent—about it. Media theorist Friedrich Kittler explains how the difficulty of determining just what software could be has even led to its near extinction in German regulatory spaces, where the “concept of software as mental property” had to be rescinded, as it was next to impossible to determine where hardware stopped and software started, since the latter could never operate “without the correspondent electrical charges in silicon circuitry.”59 As soon as we attempt to delineate software, it inevitably leaks into material structures, demonstrating that while the program of software operates as a code of effectivity, it is irrevocably bound up with material and technological processes that enable these performances. Software facilitates the increasingly refined programming of matter and exchanges; but even more, it allows for the sense of expanded possibilities for transforming that matter—to dispense with it, to distribute it, and to generally minimize material requirements so that the process itself can appear infinite, even if the resources are not. The “program” of automation may help to explain further why this tension between material structures and apparent erasure has such a lasting influence on the performativity of electronic networks.
Automation: Programming Matter
The soft and hard technologies that fuel electronic markets were a long time in the making, and depending on which influences we would choose as most critical, we could find major contributing factors in the nineteenth century, with Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine, or in developments during the World War II era, including the Turing machine and ENIAC. But the advent of the second wave of automation, in the 1950s, may most directly inform this analysis of electronic markets. Automation allowed for the control of stock and inventory and began the movement toward “automatic programming” that would enable machines to coordinate entire financial and industrial processes without human intervention. Taking up the term automation and applying it to manufacturing and businesses alike, John Diebold used the notion as a tool for rethinking economic processes through computerized feedback. Of this new model of 1950s industrial practice, he wrote, “The pushbutton age is already obsolete; the buttons now push themselves.”60 Automation is relevant to this investigation into electronics not just because the first mainframe to be applied to industry and financial use, the UNIVAC, was employed by General Electric and NASDAQ alike but also because it was within the theories of automation that notions pertaining to programmed exchange and a dematerialized stock exchange were first developed.
In the same book in which he popularized the term automation, Diebold put forward a proposal to rethink “the problem of the New York Stock Exchange” through automation.61 The NYSE required more than just the mere appendage of some “new gadgets” to what were “obsolete processes,” he argued; instead, the stock exchange needed to rethink its entire operations through automation. Diebold elaborated on what he perceived to be the inefficient and outmoded operations of the NYSE.
Characterized as the nerve center of American industry, the exchange is really a glaring anachronism. On the floor of the exchange as in the ancient market places, the traders stand at their posts and offer wares—not stone jugs, but stocks and bonds. Hundreds of men swarm over the paper-strewn floor. Messengers dart to and fro with scribbled bits of paper. The glitter of a few modern devices such as the high-speed ticker tape (which records what has happened but does not participate in the action) is so blinding that we never question the basic process.62
Diebold sought a way in which to “automatize” the materially encumbered exchange. He suggested, “What is called for is something completely different from the exchange floor as it exists today.” That something different was the use of computers to execute automatically the processes of exchange. Such a change would be so revolutionary that computers might even “provide a means for eliminating the exchange floor altogether.”63 Diebold suggested that automation would greatly improve the speed and efficiency of the stock exchange. As part of this improved operation, the required material infrastructures would be expendable and even eliminated. In Diebold's description of automation is the logic that later comes to define the workings of software and networks, and of electronic market transactions.
In Diebold's text, where he searches for early applications for automation, it is the elimination of existing material structures and relocation of processes through programmed machines—in other words, computers—that would allow for the realization of greater efficiency, not just in the circuits of exchange, but also in processes of manufacturing. Computers were seen not only as a way to improve speed and efficiency through automation but also as a way to reduce waste and free workers from repetitive tasks.64 Elaborating on these advantages, Diebold suggested that automation involves more than simply making existing products through computerized means. Instead, automation would lead to automatic processes that would, in turn, inevitably change the products produced.65 These alterations are due not just to automation but also to the electronic quality of the machines doing the processing. Electrical and electronic automation can lead to entirely different “inventories,” comprised, as McLuhan suggests, “not so much of goods in storage as of materials in continuous process of transformation at spatially removed sites.”66 The removal, redistribution, and transformation of goods through these processes apply not just to automation in the 1950s and 1960s but, arguably, just as well to electronic networks of finance and industry in operation today. Just as with Kelly's notion of a “pure network,” when materials are in constant transformation, they seem to dissipate completely. But if we look closely, we see that the materials have not just disappeared; they have instead realigned and transformed—stabilized and destabilized—through electronic modes of exchange.
Automation, from industrial-mechanical to information-electronic, is a process that transforms matter—it could even be called, following philosopher Michel Serres, “a revolution operating on matter.”67 When technologies are automatic and autonomous, they become catalysts not only of material complexity but of new distributions and creations of energy.68 Electronics and electronic networks—coded, distributed, efficient, automatic, and seemingly immaterial—give rise to distinct patterns of movement, exchange, and transformation. When machine technologies spark conditions of material transformation and complexification, they seem to operate as “natural” forces. This is exactly the sense in which I here deliberately take up the term natural to write toward a natural history that describes processes of materialization as situated, cultural, political, and environmental events. This materiality describes not an essential or given condition but, instead, a technonatural enfolding, where electronics generate distinct material processes.
Exchange Theory
Exchange, the processing that transpires across electronic networks, becomes the basis not just for transmission and transformation but also for deformation. Serres writes that “the exchanger is also a transformer,” and so the process of exchanging messages becomes a process of change.69 Within electronic markets, transformation takes place in particular ways: toward the instantaneous, the voluminous, and the volatile. Transformation and expenditure may give rise to destabilization. Yet within electronic markets, this processing and circulation becomes the basis for value. Instability and volatility can actually become forces on which to capitalize. Exchange, in this sense, can be understood as the source of value. The ways in which objects circulate—or are exchanged—inform their value.70 By focusing on exchange, we can study not just how commodities form but also how they circulate in and out of value. Such an approach allows us to go beyond the object or product and, instead, to consider how exchange can enable objects to obtain value as commodities and, by extension, how exchange can also ensure the loss of value and potential decommodification of objects.71 Indeed, in the context of this chapter that focuses on the sorts of exchanges that electronic networks enable, it becomes evident that the terms of exchange, value, and commodities shift. The processes of networks and software direct attention toward process as a key register of products. The rates and the volatility or provisional quality of exchanges can also enable more rapid processes of valuation and devaluation. In the language of the new economy, the commodity may no longer even be a stable object but may instead be formed through a networked process.72 Within electronic processes, commodities have become marked by instability, a certain alchemy, which accelerates the process of transformation, information, and deformation around the boundaries and values of those goods.73
Some of the earliest attempts to theorize just what information—or an information commodity—is and how we should measure it for its economic value have focused on the fluid, rather than solid, aspects of information. Indeed, Fritz Machlup, an Austrian-American economist who contributed to the popularity of the phrase information society, asked in 1980 whether there were “any ways to measure or estimate the magnitudes of the stocks and flows of knowledge.”74 Machlup was concerned with how to establish a common standard of measure for anything that could count as information, which at that time meant “society's stock of recorded knowledge, mostly in the form of books and journals stored on the shelves of libraries.” Unlike the “How Much Information” report discussed in chapter 1, Machlup found this physical basis for measurement to be insufficient, because “counts of volumes and counts of titles lead to very different results.”75 Knowledge counts could be easily duplicated, and the scale at which these knowledge counts should even begin was not obvious: should we count works, pages, titles, or volumes? Information challenges the traditional units of measure, which in this case were strictly tied to physical formats; instead, those instruments have to be invented, modified, and adapted to the task of measuring an apparently formless entity that does not compare to the regularity of stock.
Wrestling with this problem, Machlup decided that “flow” is the most ideal measure for reckoning with the quantity of “society's knowledge.” By measuring circulation, it is possible to measure value.76 The measure of value adheres not to the actual unit of information but, rather, to its circulation; its circulation implies exchange, and exchange equates to value. If information is requested, transmitted, or received, then it is in use or in demand, and it therefore moves within structures of value. These structures of value are arranged as networks. This is how a network can further enable value by increasing the web of connections. As Kelly writes,
If you have the only fax machine in the world it is worth nothing. But for every other fax installed in the world, your fax machine increases in value. In fact, the more faxes in the world, the more valuable everybody's fax becomes. This is the logic of the Net, also known as the law of increasing returns. It goes contrary to classical economic theories of wealth based on equilibratory tradeoff. These state that you can't get something from nothing. The truth is, you can…. In network economics, more brings more.77
As Kelly describes, circulation—in the form of networks—is not just the means for generating value; it is the source of accumulating value. But such structures of circulation, accumulation, and value do not describe information alone. Even noise—junk messages—can acquire value through circulation.
As I have suggested early on in this chapter, circulation is the basis not just for value but also for devaluation; as such, it is bound to the generative dynamic of waste. What appears to be waste may even acquire value through its circulation within particular spaces of value. This condition is true for both spam and junk mail, which constitute a large proportion of Internet and mail traffic. While attempts have been made to legislate against the circulation of junk, estimates still refer to nothing less than an exponential increase in spam, or unsolicited e-mails. Billions of spam messages circulate through the Internet, a volume that is made possible by innumerable personal computers that are programmed to inundate the electronic networks of the Internet. Spam is a program as much as a sham offer for property in Bermuda; it automates the circulation of messages in bulk across networks that do not—up until recently—discriminate from the information or noise that it exchanges. Spam is lucrative precisely because it flows in massive quantities. By sheer odds, some messages do eventually reach receptive audiences, who execute “buy/sell” orders (most likely based on “pump and dump” missives).78 What informs the circulation of these messages most of all is the fact that they are part of an automated exchange made in bulk, where the volume of material in circulation eventually realizes a profit by finding its way to spaces of value and exchange.79 Just as the volume and frequency of these exchanges may actualize a profit, however, so may they circulate through spaces of devaluation. In just this way was it once possible, with the dot-com crash, for NASDAQ to be valued as nothing but junk.
In an even more pronounced performance of these cycles of valuation and devaluation, the financial crisis that has played out since the end of the 2007 housing bubble, fueled by subprime mortgages, and through the ensuing credit crisis has generated its own cast of material remainders. From collapses in balance sheets to mortgage foreclosures and loss of jobs, multiple spaces of devaluation have unfolded within the mysterious calculus of speculative capital. Complex financial instruments and distributed investment packages have, in many ways, been amplified through the infrastructures of electronic markets and exchanges. The scale of the current market “correction,” with write-downs and write-offs in the trillions of dollars, has a discomfiting correlative in the now-vacant homes, closed storefronts, unemployment lines, and idle container ships that scatter from the swamps of Florida to the harbors of Singapore.80
To understand the fallout from the rise and fall in value, from so many numbers flickering across screens and processors, it is necessary to understand what role waste and wasting play in this dynamic. Waste operates not just at the terminal end of a commodity's life but across its production, exchange, and consumption.81 When mapped through these more extended processes, exchange emerges in a more entangled relation with waste, both in the ways devaluation occurs and in where the potential for revaluation resides. This is a way of reading exchange through the dynamic potential of waste. As cultural theorist John Frow elaborates through his reading of Thompson's Rubbish Theory, “the transformation of value is not grounded in the intrinsic properties of objects”; rather, value emerges as “an effect of the circulation of objects between regimes of value.”82 These circulations are complex, possibly driven as much by wastefulness as by the recuperation of value. But such circulation cannot be reduced to markets alone, because the emergence of value through circulation works within spaces of potential virtual expenditure. Virtuality is bound up with the inexhaustibility of things and with the generative and dynamic qualities of waste and the formation of value.83 Waste is at once an inevitable and distinct force at play, informing the circulation of objects and their value. Waste overlaps with other circuits of exchange, other networks and material distributions. In this sense, it is not too far to trace another connection between the circuits of electronic exchange to the resurfacing of electronic waste as it circulates toward another exchange, the circuits of disposal and recycling.
Dematerializing and Rematerializing
The circulation of waste extends from the “virtual” and performative exchanges of electronic markets to the material and environmental exchanges of digital rubbish. The apparent dematerialization of digital technologies may enable greater “functionalities,” but in many ways, it also generates greater volumes of waste. As the seemingly more immaterial digital technologies demonstrate, this is due, on one level, to an enhanced ability to process and distribute materials.84 By some odd turn of events, processes of dematerialization have even facilitated accelerated rates of output.85 As this chapter attempts to establish, however, these same processes that seem to require less resource-intensive production and exchange rematerialize not just through abundance, toxicity, speed, destabilization, or performativity of materials. Electronics rematerialize again through obsolete devices in the form of electronic waste. Indeed, electronic waste gives rise to a reconsideration of what constitutes the boundaries of electronic technologies, which intersect with processes of materialization from exchange to automation.
To “rematerialize” electronic technologies is also to map the political relations that support their operations. The politics of dematerialization emerge in sharper focus when we consider where the overlooked remainders of electronic technologies circulate. As mentioned earlier, much of the electronic waste that is sent for “recycling” from the United States and other wealthy countries finds its way to less economically privileged countries. The flow of garbage typically follows this course from developed to developing country. This circulation and exchange, delineating the valued and the devalued, sustains the figure of dematerialization. The ability to sustain economic growth may even require the sense that growth has a more “immaterial” quality; yet supporting this immateriality is a politically unequal material infrastructure that enables growth.86 To this extent, the Basel Action Network has suggested, in its report on the exportation of electronic waste to Southeast Asia, that much of the “virtuality” of digital technologies exists by virtue of the factories and dumping grounds that are positioned in locations remote from sites of consumption. By rematerializing electronic technologies, it is possible to draw together these apparently disparate relations as constitutive material processes.
Strategies of rematerialization can be one way to locate the apparently dematerialized flows of the digital. Just as the interface fades from view, a conduit for the exchange of so many electronic messages, it comes into focus once again in the form of inert and abandoned computer monitors and abandoned screens of all types. Many of these screens are composed partly of recyclable materials—glass and copper yokes. But the process of their extraction is toxic, and this extractive labor is typically performed not by users of computers or electronic screens but by workers who bear an entirely different relationship to these machines. In contrast to the relative disentanglement of computer users, these workers’ “place of work,” as media theorist Lisa Parks writes, “has become the inside of the machine—the part that is kept off-limits, locked up, closed off in Western consumer societies.”87 Beyond the interface, there are extended global economies through which discarded computers are processed. The labor, bodies, and economies bound up with dismantling computers entail a much different relation to the interface and to the black box of electronics. The workers who dismantle monitors typically extract the cathode-ray tube (CRT), a device rich in copper but also highly toxic to remove.88 Images and exchanges that processed in milliseconds transform into metal scrap to be salvaged for raw materials markets. Far from constituting a virtual space, the apparently dematerialized interface depends, in fact, on power structures, resource movements, and material economies—all of which rematerialize when electronics literally break open and become waste.
Captured in this chapter are the sites and processes that are revealed by moving from the glow of the interface to the “inside of the machine” and beyond. From the initial discussion of inhabiting the megalithic microchips of NASDAQ's MarketSite to the screens, networks, and software that enable programs of automated exchange, electronic exchange relies on the displacement, dematerialization, and destabilization of technologies, as well as the generative dynamic of waste. The interface rematerializes as an electronic technology bound up with these performative registers—as well as with the global economies and ecologies of resource inputs and waste disposal. The material effects of discarded electronics often register far from the spaces of their past operation. “These sunshine-belt machines,” as Haraway writes, “are as hard to see politically as materially.”89 When they are rematerialized—mapped within a layered natural history—they emerge as complex material and political devices. The next chapter turns to the circuits that enable the consumption and disposal of so many electronic interfaces. These infrastructures, which undergird and coexist with the more performative and distributed electronic exchanges discussed in this chapter, rematerialize electronics from networks of signals and light to the often extended and complex circuits of material divestment and disposal.
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