Image and text circulation materially drives the climate crisis through its physical substrates

Evidence

It is because of our indifference and negligence towards this second ground that Bengal is at immediate risk of seeing alternating floods and droughts destroy its multi-millennial civilization. As we watch the rain fall on the Calcutta pedestrians in Rajarshi Mitra’s watercolour, we must learn to see how the circulation of images and texts, along with the circulation of barrels of oil and rare metals, contributes to the climate imbalance that threatens to engulf this city, one of the most exposed in Asia. It is only by adapting our way of seeing and our intelligence to this second material ground that the politics to come will be able to unite the ecology of attention with a real attention to the ecology. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 558

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: tracing the physical supply chain of a single book or screen — from Bengal watercolour pigments to sulfur hexafluoride emissions — as a materialist account of cultural production.
• ADDENDUM: Extends ‘Grafting & Growth’ by uniting symbolic-cultural material (images/texts) with the physical/ecological substrate, showing the two cannot be separated.
• XREF: connects to: Digital immediacy obscures the material extraction beneath it — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 331; The cloud metaphor actively shapes rather than merely describes social reality — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 171

Broader Connections

• Digital immediacy obscures the material extraction beneath it #expands (0.85) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 331
• The cloud metaphor actively shapes rather than merely describes social reality #expands (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 171