The Hammer Principle: Smashable (and Sustainable) DH
At THATCamp this past weekend, I had the opportunity to gesticulate with a hammer and talk about smashing stuff. Specifically, I talked about the smashability of the internet, a much underdiscussed property of the most prominent infrastructure of our times. The point is that if the internet is smashable – and it is – then it must be material.
In a blog post over at HASTAC, I discussed an approach to thinking about digital materiality that I call the hammer principle. This is my extreme version of Matthew Kirschenbaum’s haptic fallacy, which describes the belief that digital objects aren’t material because we can’t touch them. The hammer principle says instead that if there is something that can be smashed with a hammer, resulting in the loss of your digital object, then that object is material. By focusing on what would have to be smashed to lose a file, the hammer principle draws our attention to the possibility of apparently singular digital objects being materially plural. In our age of cloud computing, the destruction of your hard drive does not necessarily mean the destruction of your digital data. This is not because the material basis has been eliminated, but rather because it has been multiplied. It does not suffice to smash just your hard drive – you would have to smash numerous storage media in possibly far flung places to eliminate “your” digital object. Moreover, your file depends not only on these storage media, but on thousands of miles of cable and hoardes of network routers that enable you to readily access your digital object from wherever you may be. Curiously enough, then, the ethereal term “cloud” designates the heightened materiality of our digital moment. This cloud is not abstract; its intense materiality is simply cordoned off and hidden from us. The thing that stops us from smashing our newer digital objects with hammers is not that they aren’t material, but instead that we no longer have access to their materiality.
The hammer probably isn’t the first piece of technology that comes to mind when we think of the digital humanities. If forced to bring hammers and DH together, as for instance when a DH blog post features an image of a hammer-wielding hand, we might first think of the centrality of making to DH. But I think we can make this image do triple duty. Signifying the place of making is of course primary, but the hammer also reminds us of smashing, that is, of materiality. Which of course brings us to labor. If all of our digital making is material, that has all sorts of implications – implications for the environment, implications for the future of our work, and implications for labor and socio-economic relations. If you’d like to explore some of these implications, please come join us for our sustainable DH working group at the Digital Humanities Center. And for more on the hammer principle, including a fun home experiment, take a look at the HASTAC post I mentioned above. Happy Smashing!