Deep Digitality: Transpacific Critique of Cold War Informatics

Principle Investigator：Ding-liang Chen

Modern information technology has fabricated planetary networks of communication and computation since the Cold War era. While this logistical and infrastructural expansion has taken various global south societies as experimental sites and nodal points, current scholarship tends to focus on Western laboratories and their scientific communities. This project thus calls for a critical examination of transpacific information infrastructures across Southeast Asia and Oceania. Investigating the rise of informatics in local societies—including fiber optics, satellite technologies, data centers, and algorithmic governance—allows an inquiry into the material and geopolitical conditions that have supported and organized our contemporary planetary media system. To further theorize Cold War informatics and its lasting legacies, this project will center on what I call “deep digitality” to interrogate the deep histories of digitality and its material affordances. Taking cues from discourses on the Anthropocene, “deep digitality” bears dual meanings in the context of my research. On the one hand, it foregrounds how the advancement of information technology has been rooted in the intersection of ecological extraction, colonial governance, and racial capitalism; on the other, it highlights an indigenous standpoint for envisioning decolonial futures. Through analyzing a collection of historical archives, field research, literary and cultural productions, cinema and new media art, and social activism, this project endeavors to challenge the emerging discursive formation of the new Cold War across the Asia-Pacific region and to salvage critical digital practices in the peripheries that have been subject to critical neglection.