Imprint: Triarchy Press
Published: November 2021
List Price: £12.50​
Format: paperback, ePub, Kindle
Extent: 120pp.
ISBN: 978-1-913743-43-7​

Tags: Cultural theory, cultural materialism, cultural studies of technology, waste and media archaeology, new media art, performance art, sexuality in digital culture

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Deserted Devices and Wasted Fences
Everyday Technologies in Extreme Circumstances

Dani Ploeger

​How can we imagine a technologized life that deviates from globalized norms and standardization and from our collective obsession with endless growth?
 
​In Deserted Devices and Wasted Fences, artist and cultural critic Dani Ploeger examines everyday technologies found in places and circumstances that are usually unforeseen by their designers, manufacturers and marketers.
 
He travels through second-hand markets in sub-Saharan Africa, the frontline in the Russo-Ukrainian War, desert landscapes in the Middle East, anti-immigration fences on the EU border and many other sites of turmoil, disruption and surprising convergences.
 
Examining the ways in which technologies that were intended for use in everyday consumer culture start to (mal)function, gain new meanings and are appropriated in these liminal spaces can give us hints at what alternative techno-cultures could look like.

This collection of essays provokes unusual perspectives on how technologies might be developed, used and reappropriated in support of people’s personal, local and regional lifeworlds and lifestyles.

Readership

Researchers, students and teachers in the fields of cultural theory, technology and materialism, as well as anyone looking for ways to understand everyday digital culture in relation to globalization, cultural diversity and liminal practices.
Read a sample chapter.

Reviews

From Leonardo
“The introductory and first part of the publication –the front cover if one prefers– insist on a program that is rather close to a classic topic of technology and society studies: the reappropriation of technological artefacts in unforeseen and not always programmed situations and contexts as well as the creative reuse that people can make of thinks by giving them new forms, but also new functions and functionalities...  Foregrounding the theoretical stakes of his research rather than a commentary of his own works, Dani Ploeger unfolds a fascinating collection of technological objects out of joint, such as for example old-fashioned smartphones used to avoid police surveillance, outdated computers finding a second life  in African ICT shops, or no longer functioning slide projectors that are nevertheless sold and bought as … slide projectors.

Very rapidly, the key notion that comes to the fore is that of waste, not only waste as what consumers and companies in the Global North tend to write off and discard and what is then often very smartly recycled in the Global South, but as the symptom of the larger economic and ideological disruption of the traditional cycle of innovation, consumption, obsolescence and disposal by the hegemony of a new cycle of endless and permanently faster and always increasing consumption that tend to dispose of objects and technologies even before the moment where they can no longer be of any use....

Yet the more one progresses in Ploeger’s book, the more a second program emerges. This program is overtly activist.. Indeed, some of the technologies studied in the second part of the book are not really waste items getting a second life, but examples of modern technology that simply do what they are meant to do, even if their user’s manual and the public discourse that goes along do not refrain from a different and purposively deceptive message. For instance, the new types of barbed wire used to discourage unwanted immigration in the EU and other parts of the Global North (but one can easily imagine their use in certain parts of the Global South as well) represent a technology whose form and function perfectly coincide with their intended outcome, even if they also aim to further advance ideas of immateriality and invisibility.

... Deserted Devices and Wasted Fences is an interesting contribution to the critical reflection on modern consumer technology. While always closely focusing on specific objects, Ploeger makes an excellent use of theoretical references and powerfully shows the possibilities of translating general insights in very specific and concrete reappropriations, both in real life and in art and technology/science research projects." 
Read the full review
Reviewed by Jan Baetens in Leonardo, July 2022
“Highly recommended for all scholars, thinkers, artists… well for anyone with an interest in stuff, things, technology, waste, bodies, consumerism, and so much else that’s going in our crazy, divided and imperilled world. Delivered in wonderfully erudite and insightful, not to mention often plainly hilarious, bite-sized chunks of smart observation and edgy practice across a myriad quotidian but often less visible lives and situations  - and all entangled with enough theoretical sophistication to inspire critical reflection in any reader, without drowning them. In this book Ploeger and his diverse collaborators offer an exciting, and sometimes disturbing reflection upon some of the key issues of our time. Not to be missed.”
Joost Fontein, Professor of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg

"I very much recommend this very captivating read of Ploeger’s endeavour to highlight not only the wastages of our ‘throwaway’ society, but also globally explore and posit innovative ways that already exist or could exist to rethink and reappropriate technology, at the same time producing new significatory ways of technological being."
Susan Broadhurst, Professor Emerita of Performance and Technology, Brunel University London / Chair, Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts (DRHA)

“This book is gritty and provocative, asking us to review technologies through a radical vision. The festival, the event and the everyday come together in an enticing assemblage. Exceptional in terms of intellectual contributions and vantage point.”
Yasmin Ibrahim, Professor of Digital Economy and Culture, Queen Mary, University of London

Contents

Introduction
1. Tactical Transgressions: Bashar al-Assad’s phone
2. E-Waste in Cling Film: The symbolic order of technological progress
3. Hi-Tech Everything: A report from the heart of techno-consumerism
4. Eerie Prostheses and Kinky Strap-Ons:  Mori’s uncanny valley and ableist ideology
5. The Dirt Inside: Computers and the performance of dust
6. Orodha: The ultimate fetish commodity and its reversal
7. Frugal Phone / Material Medium
8. Positioning the Middle of Nowhere: GPS technology and the desert
9. Sounds of Violence: The affective tonality of high-tech warfare
10. Smart Bombs, Bulldozers and the Technology of Hidden Destruction
11. Smart Technologies and Soviet Guns: The dialectics of postdigital warfare
12. Techno-Mythology on the Border: The Pandemic Risk Society
13. Camera Surveillance and Barbed Wire
14. The Smart Fence is the Message: EU border barriers as violent media
15. The Deluxe Anti-Terrorist Barrier
16. Struggle and Expand: The Delta Works as colonial technology
Postscript: Artificial techno-myths
Acknowledgements
Bibliography