Analyze

As of 13 February 2023, South Africa declared a national state of electricity disaster. In this paper we consider the impacts of global tech giants on the land, environment, people, heritage, and the technological landscape in Cape Town, South Africa. Our methods consist in long-term ethnographic fieldwork (Waltorp 2010, 2019, Waltorp et al 2022) and decolonial design anthropological approaches (Kambunga 2023) as we work with a group of local assistants and critical friends (www.digisatproject.com). We start from the controversy surrounding Amazon Web Services Headquarters: In 2021, the Observatory Civic Association and the Goringhaicona Khoi Khoi Indigenous Traditional Council filed an urgent notice with the High Court of South Africa to interject the construction of the Amazon River Park development on sacred land, where confrontations between the Peninsula Khoekhoe and the first Dutch settlers took place (genesis of colonialism in South Africa), and one of the only natural floodplains in Cape Town. Respondents argued that the site has no visible heritage significance, and the interjection will hinder economic development and job creation, an urgent concern, with Cape Town home to the most data centres on the continent. Data centres provide the computing and storage power that is essential to realising the smart digital futures furthered by corporate strategists and government policymakers. Yet, the data centres that underpin these futures are themselves energy-intensive enterprises (Howe et al. 2015) placing burdens on national energy supplier Eskom and energy shortages for the neighbouring communities (Pollio and Cirolia 2022). Data are entangled with water, wind, oil and other elements. Resource prospecting and extraction of energy were driving forces of colonial expansions. The material effects this has had on contemporary human and more-than-human life as well as geopolitical formations continue: How might we think together beyond techno-solutionism and -determinism to imagine technological futures otherwise.

Waltorp, Karen and Asnath Paula Kambunga. 2023. "Land, Legacies and Energy Futures in Cape Town, South Africa." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

• Outside of this group, I believe my work will/is performing a similar type of work to Boyer's, detailing all of the factors, the multiplicity of forces, both historical and contemporaty, that enable, preclude, and characterize energy transition in a specific locale. However, I will dedicate more effort to developing that middle ground between conceptual minima and ethnographic maxima, primarily through the scales and systems. I hope to use the scales and system huristic to provide a clearer analysis of how these specific “multiplicity of forces” become entangled in different ways. I intend to tease out how these entanglements engender processes and phenomena that can be abstracted to generate such concepts as energopower and the like.

• Renewable energy transition, if it recreates the same extractive, centralized, domineering, energopolitical regimes as the fossil fuel industry, has the potential to be just as damaging to the planet and to human beings as fossil fuels.
• Abstract power concepts like energopower, biopolitics, capital do not do justice to the particularities of specific locales. Ethnography is needed to be better attuned to the historical and contemporary relations of power that characterize politics in the Anthropocene.

• "If we wish to imagine and discuss aeolian futures in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—or, for that matter, anywhere else in the world—what is needed are more and better ethnographies of the multiplicity of forces (historical and contemporary, material and anthropolitical) that are generating, inflecting, and obstructing potential futures" (193).

• The separation of theory and ethnography in this text is… stark. There were literally only a few lines here and there that tied the ethnographic material back to the discussion in the introduction. I understand this to be an intervention in Anthropology that privileges ethnography over social theory. And I appreciate that. But perhaps there is a meso level between conceptual minima and ethnographic maxima? A level that identifies “the multiplicity of forces” that characterize the political terroir and that attempts to discern the entanglement of these forces in a way that clearly specifies the limits of the concept.  

The text builds on the concepts "biopower" and "capital" and introduces the concept "energopolitics" to exisiting anthropolitical minima. In the text's introduction, Boyer disucsses the limitations of these concepts when universalized, because they are multiplicities that have been bundled into more nominal forms as part of analytic projects, and then expands on these concepts in order to situate them within anthropolitical and technopolitical domains in Mexico. For example, biopower, which can be defined as a practice of governance that denotes vast networks of enablement with many infrastructures and actors in order to optimize human life, and in Mexico the government put forth discourse around renewable energy development that discusses it as a means of guaranteeing or imporiving the health and welfare of human enviornments, economies, communities, and individuals. 

I will consider the impacts of retrofitting, rennovations, and weatherization in new terms now. A "just" transition will be at the forefront of my mind when considering the impacts of green energy in Philadelphia. Gentrification is already a massive issue in Philadelphia, and I had considered how green energy may play into it, but now I have models, like the Yansa model, which offer ways for a green transition to benefit the community at large. On top of this, I can now relate capital and biopower into this transition better, with detailed examples as seen in the book.

I good example of biopower in the book is how the extractive nature that is a requirement for oil and fossil fuel bussiness has translated into wind, despite not being a requirement. In Philadelphia, we have seen something similar with solarize Philadelphia. I do not have the exact details right now, but I remember a plan for a community based building for solar panels running into issues. I would like to reanalyze that and compare it to wind farms in Mexico.

At the end of the book, the authors state "in our view, there will be no 'renewable energy transition' worth having without a more holistic reimagination of relations in which we avoid simply greening the predatory and accumulative enterprises of modern statecraft and capitalism." A great example of this is the Ixtepec wind farm. Yansa's plan was a new model for Mexico, one in which the authors show full support for because it reduces the extractiveness and exploititiveness of the current wind farm plans. Other chapters in the book talk about how only landowners seem to benefit from wind farms, which is something the Yansa plan was hoping to address.

I'm curious to see how the wind farms turned out. On top of this, I feel like the book didn't go into as much technical detail on how wind farms work, but I suppose this is something I will have to research on my own. I would love to learn more about the culture of the indiginous groups as well, maybe more specific details about non land owning residents. I think details on how the interviews were conducted could have helped aid us in our own interviews. Overall, I was not left with too many questions, but the ones above are important.