Introducing contagion design

How is contagion designed? How do labour, migration, economies, habits and data configure contagion? Across a program of four weeks of discussion and debate from October to November 2020, the international symposium Contagion Design: Labour, Economy, Habits, Data explored the current conjuncture through these vectors to critically address issues of rising unemployment, restricted movement, increasing governance of populations through data systems and the compulsory redesign of habits. Design logics underscore both biological contagion and political technologies. Contagion is redesigning how labour and migration are differentially governed, experienced and indeed produced. Habits generate modes of exposure and protection from contagion and become a resource for managing biological and social life. Data turns contagion into models that make a virus actionable and calculable. New modes of sociality and collaboration provoke forms of contagious mutuality. But can the logic of pre-emption and prediction ever accommodate and control the contingencies of a virus? The essays in this small book explore these issues and their implications for cultural, social and political research of biotechnological conditions. If contagion never abandons the scene of the present, if it persists as a constitutive force in the production of social life, how might we redesign the viral as the friend we love to hate

Contagion Design: Labour, Economy, Habits, Data

How is contagion designed? How do labour, migration, habits and data configure contagion? Analyzing the current conjuncture through these vectors, this book critically addresses issues of rising unemployment, restricted movement, increasing governance of populations through data systems and the compulsory redesign of habits. Design logics underscore both biological contagion and political technologies. Contagion is redesigning how labour and migration are differentially governed, experienced and indeed produced. Habits generate modes of exposure and protection from contagion and become a resource for managing biological and social life. Data turns contagion into models that make a virus actionable and calculable. New modes of sociality and collaboration provoke forms of contagious mutuality. But can the logic of pre-emption and prediction ever accommodate and control the contingencies of a virus? Taken as a whole, the essays in this small book explore these issues and their implications for cultural, social and political research of biotechnical conditions. If contagion never abandons the scene of the present, if it persists as a constitutive force in the production of social life, how might we redesign the viral as the friend we love to hate

Public service media in Australia : governing diversity

In October 2008 the Australian government’s Department of Broadband Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) launched an inquiry into the future of Public Service Media (PSM). The discussion paper informing this inquiry was titled ‘ABC and SBS: Towards a Digital Future’. It invited submissions on the complex and wide-ranging issues facing public broadcasting in the twenty-first century, with the aim of enabling policy to be developed that would allow ‘national broadcasting to thrive in a digital, online, global media environment’ (DBCDE, 2008: 1). In seeking to review the functions and future of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), in a fully digitised environment, this inquiry identified several key issues. These were: how to harness new technologies to enhance charter objectives; how to expand the amount and diversity of Australian content; how to extend the impact of news and current affairs to better inform all Australians; and how to develop the capacity of these media in enhancing social inclusion and the governance of cultural diversity

Plastic and presentism : the time of disposability

How did a material as tough and durable as plastic became classified as transient and disposable? This is a temporal question that wrestles with the paradox of how plastic's material endurance and synthetic immortality have been obliterated by economic and cultural practices driven by single use. Disposable plastic things generate a distinct temporality characterized by being immediately present and ephemeral. These things seem to be most definitely in the flow of time: barely there before they are gone, but what does this presentism affirm? How does this material realise the present as without history or origin, and endlessly replaceable? To pursue these issues, historical and sociotechnical accounts of plastic and philosophical explorations of the relations between time and materials are put into dialogue. In historical approaches plastic is recognized as being in time, in the sense of being caught up in the dynamics of historicity and changing contexts, but it is not recognized as being of time: as actualizing new temporal ontologies. Process philosophers provide key insights into the intersections between plasticity and temporality and show how materials are simultaneously in and of time

The skin of commerce : governing through plastic food packaging

Is it possible to say that we have become governed by plastic? This paper uses the introduction of plastic packaging into food markets in the post-Second World War Australia to pursue this question. This empirical foray is informed by recent debates about the ‘government of things’ and explorations about how political and ontological processes interact. Making plastic packaging into a mundane market device involved the development of accountability relations that established the ‘responsibilities’ of the package: what it was obliged to do across various networks from production to self-service. Equally important were processes that attached consumers to this new material and provoked changed practices. This history shows how the normalisation of plastic packaging changed the ontological status of food in markets. Plastic provided a new point of articulation between the natural and the synthetic in relation to governing the life of food that also conditioned the governance of consumers: convincing them that food wrapped in plastic was better across numerous registers. What the case of mundane plastic packaging shows is that ‘government’ does not exist first and enrol technologies to achieve its aims. Rather, that devices and technologies can become capable of introducing new conducts into markets and everyday life

Mobile drinking : bottled water practices and ontological politics

In her groundbreaking analysis of the ways in which different medical specialisms variously configure a disease and the body that suffers it, Annemarie Mol foregrounds the relationship between objects and the realities they enact. This chapter takes up this approach to investigate the rise and political effects of a new practice: carrying and sipping water from plastic bottles whilst on the move in urban space

Resilience : the resurgence of public things

What would it mean to think of resilience as an eruption of public devices that framed precious environmental resources as things in common rather than things we destroy or exploit for private gain? Let me explain using the example of bottled water. Over the last twenty years markets in single serve pet bottles of water have grown phenomenally. In many places in the world this is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the beverage industry. The reasons for this growth are complex, and also particular to the context in which these markets operate. However, what links them is the framing of drinking water as a branded market thing, as something provided by corporations. For many people this mode of delivering water troubles sacrosanct principles about water as an essential and shared resource; as something that is fundamental to the biopolitical support of populations and the realization of social bonds. In response to these concerns a huge variety of activist campaigns have emerged contesting bottled water markets and exposing their damaging effects on the ongoing struggle for water security and safe public supply. These campaigns deploy an enormous variety of strategies and are a testament to the inventive and experimental nature of much environmental politics. One, in particular, captures what resilience means to me

(The mobile drinking's logistics : bottles and drinking water fountains)

This essay investigates the relatively new practice of carrying bottled water as a personal health accessory. The focus in on how this practice emerged and how it can be challenged. It would be easy to assume that pedestrians began carrying water because of the decline of clean, public water fountains in urban space. There is little evidence to support this. Instead, it seems that carrying bottled water is much more linked to new marketing discourses on hydration and health. In the transformation of thirst into ‘daily hydration needs’ consumers were advised to drink water constantly, this could only be achieved by having a personal supply on hand at all times. The other key factor was the rise of the PET bottle. This lightweight unbreakable container was the perfect device to format a new drinking conduct. Carrying bottled water is a consumption practice that has developed in relation to new discourses about health and water, and new packaging materials. In the second half of the essay I investigate how this carrying practice has been challenged by the reintroduction of water fountains. In investing in free supplies of water in urban space, we see how a ‘public thing’ such as a water fountain challenges a carrying practice. This public thing creates a water commons of all those who are implicitly linked by the act of sharing, rather than carrying, water

Governing litter : habits, infrastructures, atmospheres

This chapter explores how the problem of littering is, and is not, configured as a habit in attempts to govern it. In the Tosser campaign, littering is tethered to problematic identities but they are presumed to be capable of changing their habits, of acquiring internal capacities for self-consciousness and self-restraint through the development of better habits. How do investigations of the mundane material and technical infrastructures of littering reveal both the plasticity of habits and the role of environments and atmospheres in configuring them? If littering is a habit, then what the library car park study reveals is that environments, public visibility and atmospheres appear to play a far more critical role than individual dispositions. Keep Australia Beautiful played a significant role in making up the litterbug and giving this persona life as an object of popular concern and regulation

Plastic materialities

You see it walking into the supermarket: an image of a plastic bag with a big black cross over it and the words SAY NO TO PLASTIC BAGS emblazoned above. The message is clear: bags are bad. How did it come to this? How did this flimsy, disposable thing acquire such a shocking reputation? How did using one in public come to mark the shopper as irresponsible? How did this humble object come to have such a claim on us? As the supermarket poster shows, bags have changed. They have become contested matter: the focus of environmental education campaigns designed to demonize them and reform human practices. In this version of public pedagogy, there is no room for ambiguity about the meanings or affects of plastic materiality. As scientists discover marine life choking on bags and environmental activists document the bags' endless afterlife in landfills, plastic bags are transformed from innocuous, disposable containers to destructive matter. Say-no campaigns deploy a command morality designed to remind shoppers that bags are now problematic, yet another thing to register in the circuits of guilt and conscience that enfold us within forms of rule