Elemental Internet

by Kelley O’Leary

The internet is an elemental entity. This isn’t a poetic or metaphorical assertion but rather a recognition of the internet’s material nature that is vital for a complete understanding of its physicality within a planetary ecosystem. While the internet is all too often misrepresented as an intangible, amorphous idea, a mystical and infinite space that transcends physicality, the reality is quite contrary. 

I’ve recently begun to visit the internet. There, I’ve found cement, metal gates, water tanks, miles of solar farms, buzzing wires, fiber optic trenches, and towers. Data centers, often hidden from the everyday ‘user,’ house rows of blinking servers containing the vast contents of our digital lives. Inside these electronics lie conductive materials, silicon, and rare-earth minerals. We learn of the internet’s components through a series of metaphors: The Cloud, portals, sites, streams, and superhighways. They draw on the physical world yet negate any direct ties to the earth, or the concrete material infrastructure that supports the internet’s existence. In an age of ecological collapse, bridging the gap between the abstract notion of “The Cloud” and its tangible, physical form becomes critical.

Course Objective

In this course, we will develop an embodied, cosmological model of the internet together. Each week we will explore one classical element as it relates literally and poetically to the internet. We’ll use this foundational Western philosophy as a rubric to understand the internet as an elemental entity in the planetary ecosystem. With the idea that matter strongly determines the imagination, we will probe how it attributes substance, principle, and character to the poetic image.

The Four Elements

The concept of the elements has deep historical and cultural roots, appearing in various forms across different civilizations throughout history. Four elements—earth, water, fire, air—serve as fundamental building blocks in many ancient philosophical and religious traditions (though the number of elements and their identification vary slightly).

For the purposes of this course, we will focus on the elements as they were conceived in ancient Greece by Empedocles and later Aristotle, as the internet was born in the West.

The four elements were already a part of common belief in ancient Greece. But in his writings On Nature, Empedocles created a framework for interpreting the cosmos and understanding physical change. All matter, he proposed, is made up of a combination of these elements which are constantly undergoing cycles of mixing (love) and separating (strife). Each element possesses distinct qualities and characteristics that determine their behavior and interactions. Earth is associated with the qualities of heaviness and dryness, water with heaviness and wetness, air with lightness and wetness, and fire with lightness and dryness. 

Empedocles thought that if allowed to move naturally, the elements would each move to their natural resting place in a straight line. Earth’s natural resting place is at the center of the universe. If you take a piece of earth and let it go, it will move in a straight line towards the center. Imagine holding a rock in your hand and dropping it to the ground—it would be another 2,000 years before Newton called that gravity. Water’s natural resting place is above earth. If you mix earth and water together, earth will eventually sink to the bottom, and water will rise to the top. Air’s natural resting place is above water. If you force air below water, it will naturally come bubbling to the top. Fire’s natural resting place is above air. When you light a candle or make fire, the flames reach up, trying to rise up above the air. 

Informed by Empedocles’ work, Aristotle developed his own systemic framework to understand the universe. Earth occupied a central and unique position as the heaviest element, the middle of the universe, followed by water, air, and fire and surrounded by concentric celestial spheres. These spheres carried the celestial bodies, such as the moon, sun, planets, and stars, in circular orbits. Each celestial body was composed of a combination of the four elements, and their motions. Aristotle went on to propose the existence of a fifth element, aether to account for the observed motion of celestial bodies, such as the stars and planets. Unlike the terrestrial elements associated with change and decay, aether was considered immutable and the substance of the celestial realm.

EARTH

Earth permeates every aspect of the internet’s existence, from trenches dug deep underground to lay intricate networks of fiber optic cables, to buried crypt-like vaults safeguarding internet crossroads, to the extractive, violent mining practices fueling the production of our digital devices. Crystalline sand, originating from Earth’s mantle, forms the concrete walls of data centers and screens, and powers the chips within our computers. The physical afterlives of our devices will be seen in the geologic record as electronic waste overflows landfills and poisons the land and its inhabitants.

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Watch:

Read:

Look at:

Do: Meditate on becoming earth this week. Realize every idea, print out your readings, there is no win or fail there is only make, be literal, make a concrete poem, stand your ground, dig a hole and lay in it, put an ear to the ground, bury something, “Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” , construct a foundation, sit with your router, follow your internet cable outside

WATER

Water and electricity may be a dangerous combination, but water plays an essential role in the internet’s viability. Steady streams of water are pumped to cool acres of fevered servers generating heat while processing vast sums of data. We surf the web, a sea of blue links, stream a video, our computer freezes. Clouds are water droplets suspended in the atmosphere. Thousands of miles of cables stretch along the ocean floor. Water is a conductor and our own bodies, reservoirs, are antennas. 

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Read:

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Do: Meditate on becoming water this week. Take the shape of your container, trust your intuition, record the hum of air conditioning units at your local data center, wash a dead device in soapy water, observe clouds, become liquid, 

AIR

Air, the weightless counterpart to grounded earth, is not an empty expanse but a medium for transmission. We divine messages from this invisible domain. Wifi towers, the liaisons between realms are set atop mountain peaks, hidden inside church steeples, and along highways disguised as trees. As the move towards a more sustainable internet grows more urgent, wind is called upon, in part, to power its immeasurable components.

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Watch: 

  • Lo and Behold, Werner Herzog (2016)
  • “The Dark Side” segment about the National Radio Quiet Zone in Green Bank, West Virginia 
  • Born in Flames, Lizzie Borden (1983)

Read:

Look at:

  • Open-Weather co-led by Sophie Dyer and Sasha Engelmann, is a project exploring Earth’s weather systems through DIY community tools and amateur radio technologies
  • Earth-Moon-Earth, Katie Paterson

Do: Meditate on becoming air this week. Observe the sky, watch the satellites pass by, notice the birds on the wires, intercept a signal, breath, notice when you stop breathing, visit a communications tower, travel to the nearest highest point, get a bird’s eye view, become an antenna, study to get your amateur radio license, spend a day on airplane mode

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FIRE

The sun, our star, is a vital energy source for the modern internet and yet it looms as a threat capable of annihilating the entire network (see, The Carrington Event). The sun’s fire not only powers the internet but also manifests as light, coursing through hidden fiber optic cables, where it carries information in data packets. As this light emerges on the other end of the cable, it glows upon screens, illuminating faces like the flicker of static campfire.

Watch: 

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Do: Make shadow puppets in the glow of your computer screen, wake up and watch the sun rise, watch it set too, record the sun’s position, light a candle, cook and eat a warm meal, burn, singe, collect the ashes, illuminate, use a projector, work through the night

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AETHER

Aether, the fifth element is quintessence. Breathed by deities, it is the impalpable matter that separates one planetary body from another. It is at once vacuum, a void, and infinity. While its description may sound enticing, its true essence is a menacing one, reminding us of the precarious line between wonder and doom. Every Earth Day, we are bombarded with a deluge of visual stimuli, capturing moments that we effortlessly consign to the aether, uncertain if we’ll ever revisit them. When we are constantly engulfed in the infinite expanse of the internet, a kind of disconnected connection, we risk drifting too far into its cold depths.

Watch:

  • The Fifth Element, Luc Besson (1997)
  • Sun Ra: Space is the Place, John Coney (1974)

Read:

Look at:

Do: Meditate on becoming aether this week. Visualize floating through space, save your work for the future, consider becoming a cyborg, work with the lights off, turn your phone off, learn to play the theremin, work in silence, empty something, make something that is empty, use only what is there, pose a question without an answer

You are invited to add your own observations of elemental internet on this collective Etherpad