Page 35 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

1 CARBON, CAPITALISM, COMMUNICATION 17

devices. The environmental consequences of this hyper-production cycle
are crippling, with the majority of CO 2 emitted by such devices being
produced at the manufacturing stage. Meanwhile, advertising is becoming
increasingly integrated into the flow of media content promoting rampant
consumerism and extolling the pleasures of consumption as a balm to any
environmental impact.
In Chap. 5, Xin Tong explores the other end of the chain of production
and disposal, detailing how the dumping of electronic waste in sites on the
periphery of Beijing has provided the basis for a thriving microeconomy of
scavenging and salvage, generating tensions with plans for urban redevel-
opment and forcing the waste industry further and further out of the city as
land is reclaimed for housing and business.
The two other chapters in this section examine the increasingly central
part played by control over data in organising corporate responses to
emerging challenges and opportunities.
In Chap. 6, Jo Bates details the increasing corporate capture of data and
analysis on weather patterns and the advantages this bestows in devising
responses outside the domain of pubic intervention and action. In Chap. 7,
following on from his 2014 book, To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent
World, Vincent Mosco details how command over comprehensive stores of
‘big data’ on every aspect of daily life coupled with the ability to analyse it is
combining with cloud computing and the Internet of Things to build the
essential foundations for a new communications system, the Next Internet.
While the development of the present Internet was nothing short of
game-changing, the Next Internet is already proving even more disruptive.
The cloud has become a data analytics factory rather than a simply a storage
utility, using the mostly qualitative information available from digital giants
like Facebook to find patterns in sample sizes numbering billions and
churning out analytics for the use of marketers, accountants and govern-
ments. Meanwhile, the Internet of Things produces everyday objects with
the ability to monitor their own performance and report to a central sys-
tem. This new internet is monopolised by a handful of American corpo-
rations with concentrated ownership and control structures, sharpening
tensions between their pursuit of corporate expansion, escalating demands
on resource and energy use and the consequences for climate change.