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How underwater mediation has transformed deep-sea spaces into resource-rich frontiers
 

Green energy technologies such as windmills, solar panels, and electric vehicles may soon depend on material found at the seabed. How did a space once imagined to be empty and unfathomable come to be thought of as a treasure trove of resources? Lisa Yin Han traces how contemporary developments in underwater sensing and imaging materially and imaginatively transmogrify the ocean bottom into a resource frontier capable of sustaining a digitally connected global future.

Set against the backdrop of climate change, energy transition, and the expansion of industrial offshore extractions, Deepwater Alchemy looks at oceanic media and its representation of the seabed in terms of valuable resources. From high-tech simulations to laboratories and archives that collect and analyze sediments, Han explores the media technologies that survey, visualize, and condition the possibility for industrial resource extraction, introducing the concept of extractive mediation to describe the conflations between resource prospecting and undersea knowledge production. Moving away from anthropocentric frameworks, she argues that we must equalize access to deep ocean mediation and include the submerged perspectives of multispecies communities.

From the proliferation of petroleum seismology to environmental-impact research on seabed mining to the development of internet-enabled seafloor observatories, Deepwater Alchemy shows us that deepwater mediation is entangled in existential hopes and fears for our planetary future. As the ocean bottom becomes increasingly accessible to people, Han prompts us to ask not whether we can tame the seafloor, but, rather, why and for whom are we taming it?

An in-depth look at life in the “smart” city

Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. But today’s “smart” cities look little like what experts had predicted. Aaron Shapiro shows us the true face of the revolution in urban technology, taking the reader on a tour of today’s smart city. Along the way, he develops a new lens for interpreting urban technologies—logistical governance—to critique an urban future based on extraction and rationalization.

Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps us peer through cracks in the smart city’s facade. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for “free,” ad-funded WiFi, finding that it ultimately serves the ends of commercial media. He also builds on his experience as a bike courier for a food delivery startup to examine how promises of “flexible employment” in the gig economy in fact pave the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his eye toward hot-button debates around police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are really the answer to reforming our cities’ ongoing crises of criminal justice. 

Through these gripping accounts of the new technological urbanism, Design, Control, Predict makes vital contributions to conversations around data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro brings much-needed empirical research to a field that has often relied on “10,000-foot views.” Timely, important, and expertly researched, Design, Control, Predict doesn’t just help us comprehend urbanism today—it advances strategies for critiquing and resisting a dystopian future that can seem inevitable.

The modern era of digital communication dates to Claude Shannon’s three seminal papers appearing in 1948 and 1949 in the Bell System Technical Journal. Digital communication advanced rapidly in the following years and generated a large number of technologies, including cell phones, Wi-Fi, fiber optic communication, MP3 players, JPEG-encoded photographs, high-definition television (HDTV), etc. With increasing demands for remote and high-speed digital access to data and real-time video, advances are likely to continue for the foreseeable future. The topics covered in this book constitute a “first course” on digital communication because with a few exceptions, primarily related to the multipath propagation effects and fading, only the point-to-point additive white Gaussian noise channel is considered. This was one of the first channels to be seriously studied in the modern era of digital communication that began with Shannon. From a practical perspective, modulation and coding for the deep-space channel motivated much of the early work in this field. The material covered in this textbook is still widely used and forms the basis for subsequent and ongoing advancements in the field. Broadly speaking, the fundamentals covered in this textbook are the notion of information, entropy, lossless data compression, error-correcting methods in the presence of noise, the fundamental limits of reliable communication, channel capacity, optimum decision theory and optimum receiver principals, common modulation types, the relationship between bandwidth and dimensionality, system performance using modulation and coding, and the fundamental trade-off between energy-efficiency and bandwidth-efficiency.