Code Ecologies
In the Spring of 2024, I taught a Special Topics class on Code Ecologies for a few grad and undergrad students at University of Denver. This class is a development of Code Ecologies conference I co-organized with Nabil Hassein and Sonia Boller in the winter of 2018 at the School for Poetic Computation in New York City. This latest iteration of the Code Ecologies incorporates recent conversations around computing and climate change.
Course description
What are the relationships between climate change, computer programming, and colonialism? This Special Topics class will focus on critical and creative research about ecology, urbanism, network technologies, e-waste, and resource extractions from the past and present.
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, European powers extracted natural resources, displaced and exploited people through slavery in their newly conquered territories. Nowadays, the Global North continues to extract natural resources and valuable rare earth minerals like cobalt and nickel from the Global South, all the while legally and illegally dumping trash back into those same lands.
Colonialism was (and is) a supply chain for transporting materials it extracted and the slaves it exploited. It is a worldview that legalizes criminal activities, domination, and theft. It is also a technology project. New technologies such as code, communications, transport, and computing rely on colonial infrastructures and materialize what anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler calls intangible “imperial formations” in Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (2013). Through these formations, colonialism is given a new life to mutate into forms of implicit compartmentalization that result in social inequalities and the alienation of marginalized people, as it did during the sixteenth century to confine and control enslaved and Indigenous bodies.
In this class, code means both a form of encryption of technological program instructions and legal agreements that legitimized colonialism. Together as a research group, the class will investigate the history and present-day relationships of technologies and the environment, to create alternative world views to resolve the social and environmental conditions created with code.
Each week will center around a reading assignment and response essays. Midterm quiz will focus on assessing research skills and analytical thinking. Midterm and Final project will focus on creative interpretation of research and storytelling with Video format.
Lectures
Here is one of the lectures I delivered in ten weeks. This particular video is from another section of Computing Culture, but the content is similar.
Readings and discussions
A: Big Data Ecologies
- Big Data Ecologies by Mél Hogan
https://ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/contribution/18-3hogan.pdf - Data centers are proliferating. So are concerns about their effects on Colorado’s environment by Mark Jeffe
https://coloradosun.com/2024/03/25/as-demand-for-data-centers-grows-so-do-concerns-over-their-effects-on-colorados-environment/
B: Shrimp Town to Cobalt Mines
- Spicy red in Shrimp Town: Smart farming and settler colonialism in Guizhou province by Xiaowei R. Wang https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/14614448231174524
- How ‘modern-day slavery’ in the Congo powers the rechargeable battery economy by Terry Gross https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893248/red-cobalt-congo-drc-mining-siddharth-kara
C: From Crystals to the Cloud
- Prehistory of the Cloud by Tung-Hui Hu (page 32~41 Shape of the Network)
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262529969/a-prehistory-of-the-cloud/ - From War Crystals to Ordinary Sand: excavating silicon supply chains by Ingrid Burrington
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10477773/
D: Stolen Time and the Big Help
- Stolen Life, Stolen Time: Black Temporality, Speculation, and Racial Capitalism by Tao Leigh Goffe
https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-abstract/121/1/109/294108/Stolen-Life-Stolen-TimeBlack-Temporality?redirectedFrom=fulltext - The Rotten Roots of the IMF and the World Bank by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/the-rotten-roots-of-global-economic-governance/
Midterm
Midterm project is a video essay of each students’ unique research about Code Ecologies of Denver and Colorado and a chapter in Imperial Debris : Reflections on Ruins and Ruination by Ann Laura Stoler https://www.dukeupress.edu/imperial-debris
Final projects
Video essay in response to Climate Change and All of our Relationships by Nabil Hassein
More related works and lecture videos https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxGyLWWOap-2gBQpMf1VWNQ3TlC2eI_b8
Student feedbacks
- Very thoughtful and effective instructor.
- This course challenged me at multiple times, but was always in a fair and equitable way. This was a very rigorous course, but I thoroughly enjoyed it . The class was relatively small and therefore was more focused on personal discussion and input, which I thought was really valuable especially as an upper level course. Some of the subject matter and readings were interesting and thought provoking, and led to interesting avenues for the midterm project. The instructor seemed to be conscious of the way the course was moving and the workload of the students and at times adjusted the course as necessary. Professor provided a lot of personal and insightful comments during discussion, and allowed students to speak their opinions relatively freely. Was also usually understanding of individual situations for students and made accommodations/exceptions when necessary.
- Taeyoon is such a kind, thoughtful, and engaging professor who is unafraid to confront heavy, serious issues that are found in today’s world. He brings a global perspective to the classroom and helps develop critical thinking skills by always being willing to play devil’s advocate and see an issue from a completely different side’s perspective.
This was a very rewarding, and challening class to teach. I’m organizing a conference on a related topic, Ecological Futures in SNU Powerplant this summer. https://distributedweb.care/posts/ecological-futures-2024-en/
