Networked Terraforming

Before Class Reading

Required:

• Tega Brain, "The Environment Is Not A System"
• Pick one of the Arts of Living on A Damaged Planet introductions (only read both if you feel like it): Ghosts or Monsters

Optional:

• Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy , Chapter 1
• Julie Klinger, "Rare earth elements: Development, sustainability, and policy issues"
• Listening: NK Jemisen episode of The Ezra Klein Show podcast

Day 1

In Class

• Introduction/terminology setting
• Activity: mapping the stack
• Weather, computation, and societies
• Extraction, computation, and societies
• Interplanetary imaginaries and overview of class assignment

Assignment/Class Project: Terraformer Time Capsule

• Based on discussion and activity in class, select an artifact (object, historical event, landscape) that you would want to show to someone living in a far-future terraformed outer planet in order to explain the patterns and conditions that produced the Earth that their ancestors chose to leave.
• Write 250-300 words summarizing the artifact for this audience and why you think it is significant. Imagine your artifact being represented in a museum on a generation ship or a textbook and you're writing the wall text or the chapter summary.
• If selecting a landscape, please provide geographic coordinates (latitude, longitude) and/or an aerial image of the landscape (Google Earth screenshot is fine)
• If selecting a historical event or object, please provide one to three images to represent the artifact.
• Either email your description and image(s) to Ingrid (lifewinning@gmail.com) or add as a pull request to this repository by 12pm on January 22.
• Be prepared to give a 5-8 minute presentation of your artifact for the next class (slides optional; you can also just show us your image(s); if you make slides also send to Ingrid so we can run them off one machine in class). If you want to bring in a physical object for show-and-tell to represent your artifact, please do!
• We will be collating your artifacts into a publication to be released as part of the class showcase.
• Notes/suggestions for artifact selection
  • This does not have to be framed as an artifact of blame or scorn, and it does not have to be a necessarily negative aspect of life on this planet. Maybe you want to share a cultural practice or a tradition that you think that future terraformers should revive or maintain, or a biological artifact that you think could help terraformers think about how they construct planets. It's as important to consider how you want your audience to think about the past as what artifact you want them to think about.
  • Err toward specificity–"colonialism" is a valid artifact if you want to try and summarize that in 300 words, but a specific story (e.g., the formation of the East India Company, the standardization of ASCII, a defense contractor Powerpoint deck) will be a little more resonant and interesting here, and probably more fun for you to research.
  • Assume that these future human beings are more or less biologically the same as humans today–so you cannot select "humans" or "humanity" or "human nature" in this exercise. Also, that would be a really reductive approach and you're probably more interesting than that.
  • If multiple people pick the same artifact, that's fine; you may be asked to collaborate with those students for the synthesis of your observations for the final publication.

Day 2

In Class

• Most of class will be taken up by student presentations of their artifacts (5-8 minutes presentation, 5-8 minutes questions and feedback x number of students = ~3 hours and assume we're going to take breaks)