[Edit: the website for this course, including the syllabus, is now available here. And here’s a little story about our class field trip to One Wilshire, the largest Internet exchange point on the West Coast.]
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
— John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (1996)
Wireless internet, cloud-based data storage, devices that fit in the palm of your hand: the language of the digital evokes an airy immateriality, as though digital technology has only the barest physical manifestation. But just out of our sight, hulking server farms eat up mammoth amounts of power, huge satellite arrays feed our information addiction, and ropes of wire coil under the streets and beneath the ocean. Farther afield, people comb through our discarded technology to reclaim precious metals even as workers in great factory-cities churn out new iPhones. This course examines the material manifestations of digital technology, from devices to infrastructure to environmental impact, and asks who performs the labor necessary to maintain the illusion of digital immateriality.