The Labor of Logic and Vice Versa: Semiconductors, Infrastructure, Work

• In Event: Media Studies Interruptions of STS - III

Abstract

In recent years, infrastructure studies has proven to be one of the most generative intellectual frameworks to arise from the intersection of media and science and technology studies. This paper argues, however, that the infrastructural turn cannot be fully appreciated without troubling the distinction between structure and infrastructure, or, in the language of network theory, between nodes and edges. Specifically, while key infrastructure studies texts have concerned themselves with conduits, whether of electricity, data, water, air, or other flows, in doing so they have relied upon an implicit distinction between channel and terminus. This opposition is especially debatable in computing, where, as electrical engineers have long understood, what we call "hardware" is ultimately little more than a series of complex and densely-packed electrical pathways.

Challenging this arbitrary distinction between the digital center and periphery, in turn, challenges another one: that between the thermodynamic conception of "work" as a transfer of energy and the human one, which, following Marx, can be understood as a transfer of value. If computation, as Adam Greenfield, drawing on the work of computational physicist Charles H. Bennett, has suggested, meets this former definition, then what are we to make of the increasing anxiety around the elimination or automation of vast swathes of human activity via networks, digitization, and computation? This paper will thus explore the relationality inherent in an expanded definition of infrastructure alongside that in human labor. In doing so, it will make explicit the humanistic connections between the projects of media studies and STS.

Author

• Andrew Lison, University at Buffalo