Like Todd, I am straining to think of an example similar to Nakamura’s example of the Navajo’s cultural artifacts being used by Fairchild for giving the work to people of that culture. The coltan that goes into our phones is mostly mined in Central Africa, but do the companies try to say there is something about the Congolese that makes them especially natural fits for mining? Does Foxconn believe that there’s something essential about the Chinese that makes them good at manufacturing iPhones? I don’t think so, but it’s also worth keeping in mind that the Fairchild Plant existed in the 60s and 70s when the ideology of racial essentialism was rarely challenged by the general public. Yet, I think a residue of that ideology can be found in the way even liberals often talk about Mexicans as “hard workers” like there’s some essential trait of the Mexican that makes them better at manual labor.

However, the bigger point I took from Nakamura is the “platform,” the thing we take for granted (or aren’t even aware of) that makes our technological objects work. Scott, Noah, David, and me talked about game engines while playing Journey. Or the black boxes that Scott has provided for us for many of our p5js projects. There’s a saying that garners a lot of confused looks this far north that “Nobody wants to know how the sausage is made.” We don’t want to see the labor that goes into the chip and the tech companies have been kind enough to keep all of that covered up for us so that we just think of the laborers are faceless clean room dancers instead of people for which anti-suicide nets have to be set up for when the hours and pay lead them to want to jump off the roof of the plant they work at.

But this is not unique to computer chips, is it? Nakamura talked about Fairchild’s focus on Navajo textiles as part of what made them well-suited to make computer chips but what about the Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysian workers who actually make (almost) all of our textiles now? Their labor is just as hidden from us as those who work for Apple or Intel, so what makes the computer laborers different? That isn’t rhetorical as I have no answer.

I also wanted to pick up on Aden’s response to Sterne. I’m especially fond of the fact that he brought up Superstar, which we watched in Shaviro’s class last semester. There really was something that felt cool about seeing this banned video and part of that aesthetic experience absolutely was that the quality was shitty. The VHS copy of a copy tracking lines and contrast so low that the boundaries between objects on the screen are made ambiguous, all of this makes it feel more like seeing something that “they don’t want you to see.” There’s something I would mistrust about an bluray of Superstar. In fact, Aden mentions the found footage genre and I honestly lose all immersion when the clarity of high-end 1080p equipment is plastered on the screen.

Sterne’s bootleg aesthetic also brought to mind the 90s Calvin Klein ads that were staged like stag films and which caused so much controversy that Calvin Klein pulled the ads. You can see them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZVk21Pco-c. In them, you have a person standing in some shady basement with gauche wood paneling and a dingy carpet, being shot on what looks like low-grade 16mm film stock, which all gives it a 1970s vibe. You have an unseen man interviewing the actor/model with porn-like interviewing skills “Where are you from? What are you wearing?” and amateur responses like “I’m not sure what to do?” Meanwhile, the camera zooms in and out and pans without purpose, as if somebody is testing the settings while shooting. The aesthetic was intentionally “lo-fi” as a move away from the avant garde black-and-white ads like the 1987 “Obsession” ad that Saturday Night Live lampooned. (original ad here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de1vyikBnsg SNL spoof here: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/compulsion/n9633) In this way, CK’s stag ads are not unlike the glitch art that Sterne mentions at the end of his chapter: “For in practice, they consider a limit as something that produces representation, rather than interfering with it” (48). There’s something of a punk “authenticity” to the refusal to use the highest fidelity technology available. Detroit’s own Jack White is the epitome of this, insisting on using anachronistic performing and recording technology. The argument is that such refusal for high-fidelity is verisimilitude. But it is not a result of the FCC restricting frequencies or poor implementation of networking blades causing internet traffic to slow down, but an aesthetic choice, which doesn’t seem to work within Sterne’s interweaving of compression and infrastructure.