Digital Rhetoric on a Damaged Planet: Storying Digital Damage as Inventive Response to the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

This article examines how digital rhetoric in a big data age affects human and more-than-human life (lands, waters, energies, and so forth) in places beyond immediate rhetorical encounters. By putting particular pressure on what the author calls digital damage, the article draws out the material, ecological, and infrastructural dimensions of Facebook’s New Mexico data center. Coupling Donna Haraway’s methodological tactic of “staying with the trouble” with cultural rhetorics perspectives on story, accountability, and relationality, the essay shows how digital damage can be expressed through a series of interruptive stories. Ultimately, the article intervenes in debates on the Anthropocene, arguing that attending to digital damage through story is one way to register the sensitivities, urgencies, and accountabilities needed to respond to worlds of entangled damage.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. I thank RR editor Elise Hurley and reviewers Alex Reid and Donnie Johnson Sackey for their generous and productive comments. I also thank Jonathan Bradshaw, Heather Lang, Bridget Gelms, and Sonia Arellano for responding to earlier versions of this work.

2. The focus on the human (anthropos)—and, worse, the universalizing of human as falling into one discrete category, Man—fails to capture how humans experience life and death differently because of cultural markers of difference (Tsing, “Earth”). Further, it must not be forgotten that something like the end of the world has already occurred for some peoples and species, as practices of colonization, chattel slavery, and capitalism have severed relations through mass genocide, forced relocation/migration, and other (settler) colonial violences (Davis and Todd; Yusoff).

3. After all, new materialism, especially feminist new materialism, does not somehow forget human bodies, issues of identity, or unequal relations, but rather changes the aperture of analysis to consider how uneven human relations are deeply entangled and distributed with other materials, environments, systems, and so on (see especially Booher and Jung; Micciche).

4. While dialogues between new materialist and cultural rhetorics are still very much in progress, we might also look to how cultural rhetoric scholars have begun to consider the ethics of placing such work into more equitable conversation: For example, David Grant’s work with Lakota pipe, Kristin Arola and Adam Arola’s work with the “Electric Pow Wow,” and Gabriela Ríos’ work with farming practices.

5. For more on the histories of fiber optic cables, see especially Mél Hogan on environmental effects; Nicole Starosielski and Tung-Hui Hu on colonial effects; and Jussi Parikka on surveillance effects.

6. The details on incentives negotiated between Facebook and New Mexico can be corroborated through multiple news articles. For an early discussion of the incentives, see Moss.

7. For example, Shannon Mattern argues that water has long been a source of writing material in the form of clay as seen in urban dwellings.

8. Water usage statistics were announced in an interview on public access television (New Mexico in Focus; see also Griego).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dustin W. Edwards

Dustin W. Edwards is an Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. His work, which is situated at the intersections of digital, material, and public rhetorics, has appeared in journals such as Computers and Composition, Computers and Composition Online, Enculturation, and Present Tense, as well as in edited collections. His email is [email protected].