Resource Wars Against Rural Communities and Their Networks

• In Event: Networking Rurality Part 2

Abstract

Researching rural communities facing petrochemical extraction in the United States, our team witnessed massive informational (and other) infrastructures being built and renewed. The private and proprietary infrastructure for extraction is built at the expense of other infrastructures: farming disrupted, roads degraded, water fouled, and civil society infrastructures co-opted and captured. The extractive information infrastructure was as unidirectional as the 4’ pipelines pulling gas from the ground: satellite communication trucks at drilling sites and 3g modems on wellheads relayed information back to Houston and Calgary, depicting the changing streams of chemicals being fractured into groundwater, but the locals who farmed with and drank the water remained ignorant of the composition because its secrecy was protected by law, and industry ran active disinformation campaigns. Assaying the damage to livelihoods, bodies, and environment, I was left wondering if this was a form of low-level resource war: a war by growing cities on valuable but easily-conquered rural areas, whose occupants were left describing their communities as “national sacrifice zones.” Can these damaging exchanges be reformulated? And are rural-specific information infrastructures necessary, ones that may help to resist co-option and capture? I’ll briefly describe a series of attempts to design possible forms of rural information systems with these goals in mind, including the ExtrACT project and RootIO.

Author

• Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, Cornell University