Media Materialties: For A Moral Economy of Machines

The infrastructures and assemblies of machines that constitute the digital communications environment are constructed from a range of resources, which are transformed into artefacts through chains of production, maintenance, and disposal. These background conditions of everyday use, however, remain a blind spot for much mainstream communications inquiry. This paper asks why, and argues that the increasing centrality of digital technologies to the organization of advanced capitalism, coupled with the rapid expansion of the Internet of things and artificial intelligence, propels the materiality of media to the center of analysis, raising major ethical questions about their social and environmental costs that call for the development of a new moral economy of machines.