The Geology of Grids: Decolonial Digitality in Southeast Asia

What if the history of digitality began in landscapes instead of laboratories? This essay proposes the geology of grids as a method for tracing the entanglement of empire and ecology in Southeast Asia as the infrastructure of global connectivity. Centering on the region's first fiber-optic cable, I examine how Rithy Panh's documentary The Land of the Wandering Souls evokes elemental thinking of media infrastructure beyond Western epistemologies. Exhuming buried remains of war and genocide, the grounding of cable grids not only epitomizes racial capitalism of digital modernity but evinces the earth as a contested archive of ghostly matters. I argue that these geologic intimacies expressed through Cambodian cosmologies and ontologies enable a decolonial lens for conceptualizing critical information studies in Global Asias.