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Digital Neutrality: Agnès Varda, Kristan Horton and the Ecology of the Cinematic Imagination

The free-market democracy of industrial and now post-industrial culture is enabled by the ability, if not the right, to inconsequently dispose of our personal and collective undesirables. As Thorstein Veblen theorized in his pioneering sociological study of economics, Theory of the Leisure Class, conspicuous waste is, like its companion conspicuous consumption, a social and political demonstration of status, power and sense of personal freedom. Veblen’s basic (and oft-cited) premise intuits how the goods that enable our lives, drive our economies and facilitate competition between social groups are made according to the enduring principle of planned obsolescence and, therefore, disposability. But what now urgently needs to be foregrounded are not just the social, economic or cultural consequences excess consumerism; because goods are typically composed of materials (plastics, glass, compressed metals) that have been engineered and refined to the point that they will simply not degrade, the ecological ramifications of conspicuous wastage must be factored in as well. The commodity goods that itemize our culture, from plastic packaging to architecture to digital cameras, are designed to eventually self-destruct, but not decompose; break, in other words, but not break down. Indeed, as philosopher Barry Allen observes, “the most impressive thing about our trash in how well made it is” (198). The democratization of digital technology and its cinematic capabilities further extends the prestige and privilege associated with displaying commodity consumption and wastage. Typically characterized by its relative affordability and total ubiquity, what really esteems digital photography and/or cinematography is how generously it forgives the user’s technical missteps. As such, digital’s innovation resides not so much in the ability to quickly and cheaply capture a perfect picture, but that it allows the practitioner to instantly delete, erase or otherwise throw an imperfect one away. As the digital image’s capacity for casual dispensing is matched by the steady decrease in the price of its cameras, the digital image cannot but be included within the broad, indeed totalizing, cultural category of “consumptive waste”, or, more succinctly, disposability. So it is that the tangible result of the digital democracy is a tidal wave of electronic waste or e-waste, the most abundant and toxic form of garbage produced today (Rogers 201). Indeed, the average “industry-projected” life span of a personal computer is a mere two years (202); this hyperactive circuit of development and obsolescence that is responsible for the 3.2 million tons of unwanted electronica that is junked every year in the United States, leaching lead and PCPs into the earth’s groundwater (202). Such, then, is the inconspicuous reality of so-called digital immateriality or dematerialization; though digital technology is equipped with the capacity to erase and/ or recycle