Environmental
“Did the Anthropocene Begin with the Nuclear Age?”
Lyn Ringenberg, “A Dramatic Doomsday Warning to the World.” The Doomsday clock has been moved closer to midnight.
Hyperarchival
Jill Lepore, “The Cobweb: Can the Internet Be Archived?”
Alexander R. Galloway, “Network Pessimism.”
I have been understandably busy with the end of a fun and challenging semester. So there are quite a few links that have built up.
Nuclear and Environment
William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, “US Ramping Up Major Renewal in Nuclear Arms.”
Robert Burns, “Air Force: Hagel Departure Won’t Slow Nuke Reforms.”
Mark Memmot, “Nun Who Broke Into Nuclear Complex Gets 35-Month Jail Term.”
Barbara Starr, “Navy Investigation Under Way after Female Officers Filmed.”
Eric Holthaus, “Seventy–Seven Zero–Inches of Snow for Buffalo as Winter Overpowers America.”
The extra hour today means I have time to post some links. There are many, as it’s been a while.
Nuclear and Environment
“Lockheed Announces Breakthrough on Nuclear Fusion Energy.”
Matthew L. Wald, “Calls to Use Yucca Mountain as a Nuclear Waste Site, Now Deemed Safe.”
Rizwan Asghar, “Illicit Nuclear Trafficking.”
“Emergency Agencies Practice Response to Nuclear Explosion in Times Square.” (Didn’t DeLillo have something to say about this kind of thing . . . ?)
Jonathan Tirone, “U.S. Said to Join Russia in Blocking Nuclear Safety Moves.”
“Notice to Congress: Continuation of the National Emergency on Russian Fissile Material.”
Darren Boyle, “Inside China’s Top Secret Nuclear Bunker: Cold War Relic Built into a Mountain to Fend off Soviet Attack Is Now a Tourist Attraction.” (Thanks to Terrence Ross for a lot of the above links.)
“Asgard’s Fire,” on thorium reactors.
Ari Phillips, “New Study Details Alarming Acceleration in Sea Rise.”
Nuclear and Environment
US War Department’s Archival Footage of the Bombing of Hiroshima.
H. Bruce Franklin, “Hiroshima, Nagasaki, American Militarism,” a review of Paul Ham‘s Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath.
Mark Strauss, “Federal Employee Gets Fired After Writing an Article Criticizing Nukes.”
Lindsay Abrams, “Researchers: Warming Responsible for Siberia’s Mysterious Hole.”
Its been a couple weeks since I’ve posted any links, so there’s a bunch of stuff here.
Disaster, Nuclear, Environment, and Deep Futures
John Oliver on America’s Insecure Nuclear Arsenal.
Willie Osterweil, “The End of the World as We Know It.” On the reactionary politics in ancient apocalypse films.
Josh Marshall, “Disaster Porn, For Once for Real.”
Ross Andersen, “When We Peer Into the Fog of the Deep Future What Do We See–Human Extinction or a Future Among the Stars?”
Radical eco-nihilism. Wen Stephenson, “‘I Withdraw’: A Talk with Climate Defeatist Paul Kingsnorth.”
Paul Kingsnorth, “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist.”
Mark Strauss, “Space Junk Is Becoming a Serious Security Threat.”
Robert T. Gonzalez, “Bad News: Scientists Have Measured 16-Foot Waves in the Arctic Ocean.”
Nadia Prupis, “‘There Will Be No Water’ by 2040? Researchers Urge Global Energy Paradigm Shift.”
In a recently published essay, I have defined the term “hyperarchive” as “an archive whose goal, whether stated or not, can be seen in an attempt to gather together as many documents and texts as it can, regardless of content.”[1] This term clearly applies to the recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) data collection. In fact, Prism may well be the best example of a hyperarchive to date (besides the Web). To not at least gesture toward talking about Prism and massive data collection on this blog would constitute gross negligence.
One of the things that this blog consistently tries to demonstrate, draw attention to, and complicate/challenge, is the relationship between technologies of destruction and accumulation, even if only by noting (and sometimes enacting) such relationships with little-to-no commentary. I have refrained from saying much about the recent and developing story about Prism and the NSA,[2] both because it seems too “obvious” and too complex. Prism is an accumulatory technology with clear dangers and evils (which I do not think I have to spell out). Some of these dangers and evils are quite old now, and quite familiar.[3] Others are just emerging, and the potential for misusing the kind of data collected by Prism appears to be limitless. Given the parameters of the hyperarchival impulse of contemporaneity, and the reality of ubiquitous access to massive amounts of information, it is not even vaguely surprising that the NSA has been amassing massive amounts of data. And obviously there is quite a bit wrong with this (part of which is the fact that Edward J. Snowden’s revelation is not surprising).
Glen Greenwald, the writer for TheGuardian who broke this story and has been consistently reporting on it, asked nearly a month ago, “Are All Telephone Calls Recorded and Accessible to the US Government?” Most of us have probably been asking this question for a number of years. The fact that we have been asking this question seriously, for a sustained amount of time,[4] only reinforces the realities of contemporary informatics: that many of us have always tacitly assumed that we were being watched, recorded, etc., pretty much all the time. The fact that we are not much, much more upset about this scandal is probably due to this reality of contemporaneity. Thus Snowden’s whistleblowing is functioning as a confirmation of what everyone always already knew: the emperor is naked, we know, are not pretending otherwise, and don’t seem to mind. This is disturbing, to say the least.[5]
Basically, the issues being raised by the NSA scandal, the implications for thinking about information, surveillance, discipline, and control, issues regarding archives and literature, technology and war, media and communication, contemporaneity and the risk society, immigration, the nation, and the state, are many. I will not dwell on them here, in hopes that thinking about these issues will take the form of an essay (hopefully destined for a more permanent home in a [slightly] different kind of archive). In lieu of more sustained reflection and further remarks, here is a pretty decent smattering of links related to the issue in (more-or-less) chronological order. I imagine I will continue to post links regarding Prism well into the future.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 