Bunker media: stories from the abundant and redundant underground

ABSTRACT

Media are abundant. So much so that our very identities, past, present and future, are tied – if not defined – by our personal media documents. How then can individuals and communities whose lives have gone unmediated later tell their stories? How can the ‘media scarce’ be heard and recognized? This paper turns to the cold war bunker as a site that arguably universalises the precarity of media scarcity – of being disconnected from our homes, friends, loved ones and indeed our future. Focusing on the Canadian government’s ‘Diefenbunker’, recently renovated into a Cold War museum, the paper argues that the media scarcity of underground bunker life has been kept at bay by the redundancy of bunker media, an installation that communicates the dangers of its own use. The paper concludes with a discussion of the renovated bunker, now an event hall space flush with programmes that bear little resemblance to the dystopic concrete bunker. While returning to a degree of abundance, as was the case in the 1950s, the new bunker museum displaces a redundant state-controlled bunker-media framework and global thermonuclear fallout in favour of participatory forms of play and pleasure replete with zombies, spies, and escape rooms.

KEYWORDS:

• Bunker
• cold war
• underground
• politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The media redundancy of bunkers foreshadows their contemporary remediation as supposedly ultra-secure data centres (Taylor 2023). ‘Redundant equipment’ (417) and protective architecture remains a defining feature of bunkers in their data centre form, articulating a logic of data preparedness that is meant to stave off ‘the unending prospect of data loss or IT system failure’ (405), or what frame in terms of media scarcity.

2 Incidentally, this underground transmitter facility would become the subject of a later conspiracy about a second secret Diefenbunker in Carp (King 2014; 2015).

3 A virtual tour of the Diefenbunker Cold War Museum can be found here: https://diefenbunker.ca/virtual-tours/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Greg Elmer

Greg Elmer is Professor of Communication & Culture at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Stephen J. Neville

Stephen Neville is PhD candidate in the Communication & Culture program at York University, Toronto.