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Exploring the connections between energy and media—and what those connections mean for our current moment

Energy and media are the entangled middles of social life—and also of each other. This volume traces the contours of both a media analytic of energy and an energy analytic of media across the cultural, environmental, and economic relations they undergird. Digital Energetics argues that media and energy require joint theorization—not only in their potential to universalize but also in the many contingent and intermeshed relations that they bind together across contemporary informational and fossil regimes. Focusing specifically on digital operations, the coauthors analyze how data and energy have jointly modulated the character of the materiality and labor of digital systems in a warming world.

Anne Pasek provides a brief energy history of the bit, tracing how the electrification and digitization of American computing propelled a turn toward efficiency as both a solution and instigator of parallel crises in the workforce and the climate. Zane Griffin Talley Cooper traces these concerns within cryptographic proof-of-work systems and the heat they necessarily produce and seek to manage. Following heat through the twinned histories of thermodynamics and information theory, he argues that such systems are best approached as a paradigmatic, rather than exceptional, example of computing infrastructures. Cindy Kaiying Lin focuses on the practical and political frictions created as database and management designs move from the Global North to South, illustrating how the energy constraints and software cultures of Indonesia open new spaces of autonomy within environmental governance. Finally, Jordan B. Kinder offers a theorization of “platform energetics,” demonstrating how public energy discourses and settler land claims are entangled in the digital infrastructures of data colonialism in Canada.

Can human social evolution be described in terms common to other sciences, most specifically, as an energy process? The Eighth Day reflects a conviction that the human trajectory, for all its uniqueness and indeterminism, will never be satisfactorily understood until it is framed in dynamics that are common to all of nature. The problem in doing this, however, lies in ourselves. The major social theories have failed to treat human social evolution as a component of broader natural processes.

The Eighth Day argues that the energy process provides a basis for explaining, comparing, and measuring complex social evolution. Using traditional ecological energy flow studies as background, society is conceived as a self-organization of energy. This perspective enables Adams to analyze society in term of the natural selection of self-organizing energy forms and the trigger processes basic to it. Domestication, civilization, socioeconomic development, and the regulation of contemporary industrial nation-states serve to illustrate the approach. A principal aim is to explore the limitation that energy process imposes on human social evolution as well as to clarify the alternatives that it allows.

Richly informed by contemporary anthropological historicism, sociobiology, and Marxism, The Eighth Day avoids simple reductionism and denies facile ideological categorization. Adams builds on work in nonequilibrium thermodynamics and theoretical biology and brings three decades of his own work to an analysis of human society that demands an extreme materialism in which human thought and action find a central place.