After Bliss: Visual Infrastructures of Technostalgia

After Bliss : Visual Infrastructures of Technostalgia Anirban Gupta-Nigam Theory & Event, Volume 24, Number 3, July 2021, pp. 816-840 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2021.0044 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/797951 [ Access provided at 20 Jul 2021 01:38 GMT from University of California @ Irvine ] After Bliss: Visual Infrastructures of Technostalgia Anirban Gupta-Nigam Abstract This essay interprets ecologies and histories surrounding Bliss, the iconic desktop wallpaper in Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system. Locating the calm, idyllic photograph of natural beauty within the longue durée of agrarian capitalism in California, and optimistic visions of technological futurity in post-Cold War America, it describes some mechanisms by which liberatory visions of electronic futures leverage nature as timeless and eternal. Through readings of the image alongside a 1995 book co-authored by Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, the essay argues that technostalgia invokes and promotes a generic, stock view of nature that, in turn, produces a sense of normality amidst turmoil. Bliss at the End of History In 2014, news reports proliferated about an image titled Bliss— Microsoft’s default wallpaper in its XP operating system.1 The company, it was reported, was planning to replace the iconic photograph of rolling green hills against resplendent blue clouds with a different image during its next system upgrade. Suddenly, people were overtly interested in a photograph they had spent much time with for years, either in conscious contemplation or (more likely) as unthought background. In the news, Bliss was habitually referred to as the “most viewed photograph in the entire world.”2 The circumstances in which the image was captured were narrated repeatedly once the media got hold of the photographer, Charles O’Rear, who claimed he couldn’t “get away from it. It’s everywhere.” Adding: “Even in a place like North Korea … there’s the Microsoft picture.”3 O’Rear captured the scene in 1996 on the Napa-Sonoma county line when he was driving on Highway 121 after visiting his wife Daphne, who he was at the time “courting.”4 Having shot it, he deposited the image in a stock photography archive, Corbis, which was owned by Microsoft. At some point, the company informed him that they “were looking for a photo that would illustrate the philosophy of their 2002 operating system,”5 and had chosen Bliss. Having earned a “low six figures” from Microsoft for the image, O’Rear found it impossible to deliver because no courier would transport it. Eventually, Microsoft Theory & Event Vol. 24, No. 3, 816–840 © 2021 Johns Hopkins University Press Gupta-Nigam | Visual Infrastructures of Technostalgia 817 bought him a ticket to fly out to their headquarters and deliver Bliss in person. When the Napa Valley Register published this story, they asked the photographer a question many others hadn’t: what is it about vineyards that fascinates a man who has clicked pictures of thousands of things and scenes around the world? “They’re beautiful, and I love the outdoors,” he responded. Then: “They have strong design patterns. They’re the most organized crop in America. I come from a rural area so I’m familiar with agricultural and rural settings.”6 Several points of intersection are worth noting from the paragraphs above: that Bliss was produced as a result of O’Rear’s fortuitous courtship ritual (it is what set him on that road on the day in question); that the beauty of the image, its appeal, draws from its composition and emptiness (produced by regimes of deep control and organization in agriculture); that the image was kept in a stock photography archive and derives its distributional power from it (buffered, in no small part, by Bill Gates); and finally, that the photograph was taken in 1996 (right in the middle of the decade when post-Cold War America discovered a new frontier in the form of the internet). I suspect that these connections are not plainly coincidental. Or, to the extent they are, they are still underwritten by a historical logic that requires disentangling. It is worth remembering that the 1990s were a peculiar time in American, and indeed global, history. It was a time that sometimes appears evacuated of historicity, suspended between other events of world-historical significance: the Cold War on the one hand, and the War on Terror on the other.7 I want to suggest that this odd sense of suspended temporality at the end of the putative “American century” is precisely what characterizes the historical temperature of the decade in question. Now, following famous declarations about the end of history, ascendant postmodernism, and triumphalism surrounding visions of liberal democratic futures in times to come, one could suddenly begin to imagine an “exit” from history—an exit that rendered temporal coordinates of past, present, and future precarious. Where critics like Fredric Jameson diagnosed a “nostalgia for the present,” historians and social scientists became increasingly preoccupied with trauma and memory. Commenting on how these tendencies accelerated from the 1980s and finally came to a boil in the postCold War period, Geoff Eley suggests that “representations of the past, personal and collective, private and public, commercial and uplifting become both therapy and distraction, a source of familiarity and predictability, even as the actual ground of the present ceases to be reliable. Such nostalgia spells the desire for holding on to the familiar, for fixing and retaining the lineaments of worlds disconcertingly in motion, of landmarks that are disappearing and securities that are unsettled.”8 818 Theory & Event In his work on the aftermath of the Grenada revolution in 1983, David Scott approaches the time in question by suggesting that the failure of postcolonial, socialist revolutions on the one hand, and the supposed victory of liberal democracy on the other, created a sense of “the present as ruined time.”9 Also gesturing to preoccupations with memory and trauma, he argues “curiously, it is precisely when the future has ceased to be a source of longing and anticipation that the past has become such a densely animated object of enchantment.”10 While once, the past may have been considered something to be “overcome” and superseded, “now, by contrast, the past has loosed itself from the future and acquired a certain quasi-autonomy; far from being dependent upon any other time, it seems now to exist for its own sake, as a radiant source of wisdom and truth.”11 Of course this does not mean that an individual or society’s relation to the past is uncomplicated. If nostalgia and memorialization occupy one end of the spectrum in how societies engage the past, then trauma situates itself at the other. As a result, the past is also a “wound that will not heal. What the past produces now are inward, psychic harms and injuries to an individual sense of self and a collective sense of identity.”12 With these dimensions of unsettlement and affective experience in mind, in the following pages, technology and nostalgia collaborate to facilitate one kind of narrative about the suspension of time, or the precarity of a present that has come unstuck from past and future. In the following pages I will argue that technological frontierism has turned backward to a nostalgic, idealized past—to a time “prior”—to authorize technocratic futures. I will suggest also, that eternal, timeless images of nature authorized technostalgia. Through a detailed reading of a 1995 book co-authored by Bill Gates and the near-simultaneous creation of Microsoft’s stock photography archive, Corbis, I will posit that technological fantasies of electronic frontiers depended crucially on conceptualizing “nature” as a generic, stock resource. Locating Bliss in the history and geography excised from its popular reception demonstrates how its timeless and apparently universal appeal flowed, on the one hand, from its implication in the nostalgic politics of techno-futurity, and on the other, from its being bound to geographies overrun by capitalist intensification. By reading Bliss as an artefact of settler nostalgia and agribusiness, I hope to show how at the very time when political theorists proclaimed the end of history and the limitless expansion of liberal democracy, longstanding ideals of agrarian idyll and wilderness became unconscious ground for establishing (dare we say settling on?) visions of prosperous futures. In other words, the subject who wanted to transcend history, to disappear into the euphoric ether of cyberspace, was still very much confined by the weight of time and human form. Gupta-Nigam | Visual Infrastructures of Technostalgia 819 As will become clear below, in my view the positioning of nature as a generic or stock resource is not incidental to tech-utopian epistemology. It is not a coincidence that Gates’s harkening back to pristine settler ecologies, Bliss’s placid timelessness, and the proliferation of stockness through image databanks like Corbis occurred almost concurrently with environmental scholars like William Cronon pointing out that nature is itself an anthropogenic construct (cf. footnote 14). Put another way: in the very historical moment when scholarship cautioned against therapeutic recourses to the transparency of nature, transparency is precisely what was invoked in technostalgic discourse. Attempting to disentangle this knot and think through the meanings of stockness, I also discuss Corbis’s acquisition of the works of Ansel Adams, arguably America’s most famous nature photographer, in conjunction with Adams’s work at Manzanar, a concentration camp where Japanese American citizens were incarcerated during the Second World War. I argue that though he was disturbed by the excesses of the camp, Adams did not necessarily view the camp itself as excessive, readily invoking nature’s timelessness to normalize it. Adams, as will be evident soon, is a critical hinge in my explication of stockness: that after Corbis, Adams’s photographs begin to look quite like stock images carries its own implications for art, which I touch on here. More substantially, I claim that generic stockness normalizes the status quo; that invocations of pristine, nonanthropogenic, and transparent nature turn on the repression of the anthropogenic exploitation of lands and peoples—a project in which Corbis is as complicit as Ansel Adams, and of which Bliss is an exemplification. Repressing Infrastructure Writing with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson in The Road Ahead, Bill Gates sets out his vision for the future of the internet. “There is never a reliable map for unexplored territory,” the authors announce in the foreword.13 The text—authorship of which I will accord to Gates for sake of convenience—can be read, interpreted, and critiqued from a number of angles: from its retelling of the history of computation to its predictions about online worlds in years to come. As a canny entrepreneur plugged into the technological knowhow required by the chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft, Gates took the pulse of the moment. Problems notwithstanding, therefore, many of the things he and his co-authors wrote about have come to fruition in recent years. Mine is not an exhaustive survey of such claims. I draw out, instead, a certain view of the environment and history informing this work that is also symptomatic of many contemporaneous writings about the internet.14 820 Theory & Event Throughout the book, Gates expresses a dislike for “information superhighway” as a descriptor of the internet. The term, he writes, was popularized by then-Senator Al Gore, “whose father sponsored the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act.”15 On one level the comparison is a sensible one—connecting a massive, distributed network of computers across the nation can look very much like connecting different parts of that nation through complex, arterial systems of highways. However, “the highway metaphor isn’t quite right” because “it suggests landscape, geography, a distance between points, and it implies you have to travel, to move from one place to another,” whereas “this new communications technology will eliminate distance.”16 Moreover, highway imagery suggests there is only one route everyone can take. Gates prefers to think of the internet as “a system of country roads” where “everybody can take his own route, at his own speed, in his own direction.”17 He is also skeptical of the highway metaphor because it indexes the presence of federal government regulation. “But the real problem with the highway metaphor,” he writes, “is that it emphasizes the infrastructure rather than its applications. … A metaphor I prefer is the market. … The interactive network will be the ultimate market.”18 On reading this, one could sensibly ask: in what universe do roads and markets evade either statecraft or infrastructure? But, of course, Gates’s juxtaposition relies less on (country) roads and markets as physical entities than elements of American mythologies of entrepreneurialism and freedom. A similar question arises about the elimination of distance: roads still refer to travel, to “landscape, geography, a distance between points.” Why, then, make the case for a different metaphor? If highways and roads (and to some extent, markets) serve similar functions—or represent similar infrastructural possibilities— then why does Gates care to figure the internet as a road? The market as a mediating concept between highways and roads might well be the key to unpacking his investment. It is what roads enable that really enchants Gates: that “everybody can take his own route, at his own speed, in his own direction.” A “system of country roads” seems unrestricted, less governed, more open to individual will and a spirit of adventure. The road is a space suffused by the spirit of the market in its idealized neoliberal form: an unregulated space of possibility from which the state has withdrawn, allowing individuals to make the most of what they can. Note the ahistoricity of this formulation that takes a late-twentieth-century disposition (neoliberalism) back to the era of nineteenth-century settler conquest. Or, rather: brings a romantic nineteenth-century settler sensibility forward to flesh out a vision of neoliberalism. In contrast to country roads, the highway system—with its overtones of federal bureaucracy, welfarism, mid-twentieth-century Gupta-Nigam | Visual Infrastructures of Technostalgia 821 big government, and legislation—connotes a form of control antithetical to the ideal of markets providing services to users. No one can go their own way on a highway. The highway is a “map” for “unexplored territory.” On highways, the pioneer spirit cannot sustain. It must be reined in by external forces outside its control—by infrastructure, in short. Which leads to a third question: why is infrastructure the “real problem” with the highway metaphor? To say infrastructure obscures the function of applications is only half the story. The other half is the market. The “real problem,” then, could be that infrastructure stinks of publicness, and of all the nightmarish connotations that “the public” has for an entrepreneur looking to strike it rich in supposedly undiscovered geographies. Infrastructure, Bruce Robbins helpfully reminds us, smells: “the smell of infrastructure is the smell of the public.”19 He points out that while capitalism (as in Gates’s case) is often conjured as a wonderworld of material plenitude and commodification, “infrastructure belongs to capitalism as well— it makes possible the production and distribution of these commodities—while it also sustains life functions like the provision of clean water …”20 Whether infrastructure as a “public thing”21 lives up to its promise of sustaining life is a different matter. For now, it is sufficient to note that the smell of infrastructure, to the extent it calls attention to publicness anchored by sociality and community, threatens entrepreneurial ideologues like Gates. For Gates, the market is a “better” metaphor because it allows one to forget “infrastructure belongs to capitalism as well”; it allows one to project infrastructure outward—to the realm of the state, regulation, bureaucracy. The system of country roads offers a different ideal where rampant individualism and unregulated movement becomes a way of controlling ones future. The ability to make this move is critical in writings from the early days of the information revolution when conversations about virtual Wild Wests and electronic homesteading often anchored the fantasies of savvy businessmen who saw themselves as pioneers reincarnated in a borderless world. On multiple levels therefore, what the Gold Rush was to California in the nineteenth century,22 the internet was to entrepreneurial subjects in the late-twentieth. Curiously, a few pages on in The Road Ahead, these claims surface again, this time in a far more jarring (and somewhat contradictory) fashion: In keeping with the highway metaphor, the Oregon Trail might even be a good analogy for the Internet. Between 1841 and the early 1860s, more than 30,000 pioneers rode wagon trains out of Independence, Missouri, for a dangerous 2,000-mile journey across a wilderness to the Oregon Territory or the gold fields of California. An estimated 20,000 people succumbed to marauders, cholera, starvation, or exposure. You could easily say that the 822 Theory & Event route they took, the Oregon Trail, was the start of today’s interstate highway system. It crossed many boundaries and provided for two-way vehicular traffic. The modern path of Interstate 84 and several other highways follows the pioneers’ trail for much of its length. But the comparison between the Oregon Trail and the interstate does break down. Cholera and starvation aren’t a problem on Interstate 84. And tailgating and drunk drivers weren’t much of a hazard for wagon trains—though drunk cowboys might have been.23 Lest we think Gates is backtracking by calling the Oregon Trail a “good analogy” for the internet, we would do well to remember that it only becomes a good analogy when that trail—identified as the origin of the modern interstate system—can be temporally located in a moment prior to all the bad connotations of state control. This is the settler fantasy of split temporality in the frontier that I try to discern throughout. In this case, a bad analogy becomes good when mobilized in the service of nostalgia. Here we find Gates as pioneer. The point at which the comparison fails is efficiency. Unlike the Oregon Trail, the modern interstate isn’t plagued either by disease or “marauders” (a coded reference, no doubt, to nonwhiteness in the fledgling American West). What of the trail itself, though? If trailblazing and pioneering exploration is the thrust of what makes it a “good analogy,” then Gates’s choice of good analogy is a poor one because it reflects the logic of a settler unconscious poetically well. In a careful interpretation of the cultural legacy and textual connotations of The Oregon Trail, “the most widely distributed computer game of all time,”24 Katherine Slater points out that from the mid-1980s, for twenty years, “tens of thousands of public elementary schools across the United States purchased educational product bundles for their shared computers”25 that included copies of The Oregon Trail. In the game, players take on the identity of a wagon train leader guiding groups of settlers through unfamiliar terrain. It was often the first encounter American schoolchildren had with histories of westward expansion. The game’s protagonist (“you”) “is presumed to be white and male.”26 Slater argues Trail interpellated players into a white supremacist view of the world on an ideological as well as geographical level: “The force overlay of player and character helps to normalize whiteness and masculinity while acting in potential conflict with the heterogenous identities of players.”27 Apart from an unmarked, transparent, white masculine subject being the central character, the game also focalizes a narrative of “Native otherness through language and indirect comparison.”28 For instance, one section asks the player “what” they would like to read about—the options being “Animals of the Plains,” “Animals of the Mountains,” and “Arapaho Indians.” The Gupta-Nigam | Visual Infrastructures of Technostalgia 823 equation of Native life with nonhuman nature aside, this comparative range speaks to settler investments in the wilderness-idyll fantasy. I want to underscore how, in Gates’s text as in The Oregon Trail, forwardlooking narratives of settler conquest are anchored in or authorized by nostalgic notions of wilderness and idyllic open space. Both visions draw from a similar affective reservoir, ensuring the settler subject’s infatuation with linear pioneer narratives is premised on what I earlier referred to as a temporal split. Caught in this split, even as a subject stands tall, surveying untamed (to acknowledge the sexual politics at play, let us say undomesticated) land before him, behind him an entire region of rural, natural plentitude opens out. I am suggesting that in The Road Ahead, this kind of split occurs by forgetting—or more accurately, repressing—infrastructure.29 The book’s emphatic claim that the internet be conceptualized as “application” and “market” therefore goes beyond the matter of infrastructural publicness. More fundamentally, repressing infrastructure leads to a frictionless world where every-body will be synthesized into a kind of “oneness” by technocratic power. A 2008 Microsoft campaign titled “Windows vs Walls” offered exactly this sort of vision. In it, a man stands in the background with his back to the viewer, holding a power saw and looking out through a hole he has presumably cut in the wall. Its shape replicates the Windows logo and through it, our eyes glimpse an expanse—green fields and white clouds, not unlike the Bliss image. The text accompanying the visual reads, in part: … The thing that gets us out of bed every day is the prospect of creating pathways above, below, around and through walls. To start a dialogue between hundreds of devices, billions of people and a world of ideas. To lift up the smallest of us. And catapult the most audacious of us. But most importantly, to connect all of us to the four corners of our own digital lives and to each other. To go on doing the little stuff, the big stuff, the crazy stuff, and that ridiculously necessary stuff. On our own or together. This is more than software we’re talking about. It’s an approach to life. An approach dedicated to engineering the absence of anything that might stand in the way … of life. Today, more than one billion people worldwide have Windows. Which is just another way of saying we have each other. Much of this is, to not put too fine a point on it, gibberish written as what Keller Easterling calls “managementese.”30 It isn’t clear at all what is meant by “stuff”—necessary, little, big, or otherwise. Nor is it evident what it is that Microsoft is selling (other than its new Windows Vista upgrade, the release of which was the occasion for this campaign). At the same time, visually, the juxtaposition of windows and walls simultaneously frames walls as obstructionist architectural 824 Theory & Event devices and windows as the means for overcoming obstruction. In so doing, the ad underplays the fact that windows can’t exist without walls. So, what explains Microsoft’s aversion to walls? The image seems to suggest that unlike walls, windows provide a transparent view of the outside; of open space, of unlimited horizons (thereby rearticulating the nostalgia/futurism bind I have been tracking). That the protagonist stands heroic, with his back to the reader, wielding a powerful machine in one hand; that his gaze (which we cannot see) seems fixed on some point in the distance; that he stands in the debris of a dark, sparsely decorated apartment, and looks out to the source of light, of illumination—these elements together foster a sense of futurity, a sense that whatever is to come will be seen “through” Windows. By positioning Windows (and windows) as a source of light, knowledge, and information, the ad cuts against cultural tropes of windows as transparent frames. Here, it is implicitly acknowledged that the outside is not transparent so much as produced by the frame one looks through. The shape of the window indicates that it isn’t merely enough to look out. One must look out this way. In her later work on the window in cultural discourse and production, Anne Friedberg wrote persuasively about how for Microsoft, windows represented “multitasking environments,” not transparent points of access to a world outside. She argued that “the ‘windows’ trope is emblematic of the collapse of a single viewpoint; it relies on the model of a window that we don’t see through, windows that instead overlap and obscure, and are resizable and moveable.”31 In this new, hypermediated environment, work still occurs seamlessly and without interruption. Users toggle between windows, switch across applications, and keep busy without recognizing the multiple tasks they perform at the same time. I supplement Friedberg’s account by pointing out that the particular axis of looking produced by Windows was rooted in an interplay between freedom and control mapped onto nature and the state respectively. Rearticulations of the technological in the 1990s were, then, founded on idyllic memories of a past that never was. While the windows in Microsoft’s narrative are not transparent, it is the transparency of the white subject that underpins the edifice of multitasking environments. This subject, in turn, becomes a vector for suturing the world in the image of whiteness: “Today, more than one billion people worldwide have Windows. Which is just another way of saying we have each other.” Repressing infrastructure is critical to this architecture of technological futurity. I do not want to take the easy track and ask who constitutes the “we” Microsoft summons. Nor do I want to press the point of asking what “having each other” might mean in this context. The gesture to “one billion people” is, obviously, racialized in the spirit of Gupta-Nigam | Visual Infrastructures of Technostalgia 825 liberal multiculturalism as a politics based on fantasies of inclusion.32 I am interested in these invocations for a different reason. The image of oneness and global coexistence referenced here is, in my telling, enabled by the effacement of infrastructure and celebration of applications and markets. On this point, discourses of liberal multiculturalism dovetail nicely with the mid-to-late-1990s rhetoric of the internet as a space of immateriality.33 The idea that the information superhighway as ethereal, global, and unrestricted by national boundaries or laws is a quintessential product of the repression of infrastructure. Gates is important to this story because, like the unnamed protagonist-player of The Oregon Trail, his transparent whiteness can afford to repress infrastructure, and relegate maintenance, repair, and worldmaking to the realm of statecraft. It can lead him, like the unnamed protagonist-player of The Oregon Trail, to think nostalgically about settler-colonial patterns of transit and conceive of them as a “good analogy” for late-twentieth-century capitalist form. The nostalgic politics at play here can, from one direction, be telescoped by Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of the “future anterior,” where actions taken in the present are judged from the perspective of a future interpreter.34 For Povinelli, the future anterior sacrifices the present in the service of a time-to-come, leading one to overlook, repress, or suppress conflicts constitutive of the moment one is in now. The “durative present” disappears from view.35 The Road Ahead eloquently rehearses the logic of this argument by twinning the Oregon Trail to the modern interstate after having emphatically distanced itself from the highway as an effective or desirable metaphor for information technology. This move is enabled in part by the location of the trail in a past settler colonialism rendered open for interpretation in the grammar of a future anterior; i.e. what happened “back then” is—or will be—justified by a person yet-to-come. The future anterior can, in this way, justify colonial conquest as one node in the long history of civilizational progress—a narrative that clings to a sense of premodern naturalism as the ground on which it continuously unfolds. Jodi Byrd, in her sharp critique of figurations of “the Indian” in Western literature and philosophy, argues that: “As a philosophical sign, the Indian is the transit, the field through which presignifying polyvocality is re/introduced into the signifying regime … And the Indian is a ghost in the system, an errant or virus that disrupts the virtual flows by stopping them, redirecting them, or revealing them to be what they are and what they have been all along: colonialist.”36 Her point—that even as “the Indian” is summoned by philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari as a source of freedom from structure, she can reveal the colonial foundations of such summoning—is relevant to the claim I am teasing out. Not that Bill Gates and Microsoft, in any 826 Theory & Event conscious manner, enact settler violence. Rather, I take Byrd’s insight as: when properly attended to, we might find even in the most liberating rhetorics, traces of violence forgotten, erased, or overlooked. Ansel Adams in Manzanar To get a further flavor of the political uses of nature, a short historical detour is in order through Manzanar, a concentration camp in California’s Owens Valley, located at the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, where 110,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during the Second World War from 1942–45. That the name “Manzanar” translates as “apple orchard” in Spanish is not incidental to the therapeutic deployment of nature against histories of violence that I am tracking. Ansel Adams went to Manzanar because the government’s Interior Department commissioned him to produce photographic murals to be placed in the agency’s offices. Adams was excited because, as Jonathan Spaulding writes in his biography of the artist: “The importance of nature in his own life had convinced him of its importance for society as a whole.”37 Adams’s work at the camp is significant because he was politically largely sympathetic to those imprisoned: “He tried to stress that the prisoners at Manzanar were loyal American citizens … and that they were engaged in productive work at the camp—creating small businesses and farms, gaining confidence and a sense of self-sufficiency that, he felt, would enable them to successfully integrate with the general society after the war.”38 Two other photographers were there while Adams was present: Toyo Miyatake, who was incarcerated in the camp, and Dorothea Lange, a great social realist photographer of twentieth-century America.39 Miyatake’s approach, including his interest in taking pictures of group activities and social life at the camp, was shaped by his implication within the imprisoned population. He was not taking pictures of the “other” so much as producing a language of selfhood and community. Lange, for her part, “did not share Adams’s view about the inspirational qualities of the site or the social benefits of life in the camps.”40 His views can be discerned from at least two photographs he produced during his stay: Mount Williamson, the Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California (1944), and Winter Sunrise, the Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California (1944). Both are evacuated of human presence. In the former, the viewer is confronted by rocks and boulders in the foreground and led into splendid sights of the mountains in the background, with clouds and radiant, almost Biblical, light breaking through the sky. The low angle adds to the sublimity and majesty of the scene, giving the frame an ethereal, spiritual quality. The path paved by rocks perhaps evokes a Gupta-Nigam | Visual Infrastructures of Technostalgia 827 journey toward light. The latter, one of Adams’s best-known works and one he considered emblematic of “the role that wilderness played in American culture,”41 contains a strong play of light and dark, illumination and shadows against mountains looming behind. Writing of the “romantic and modernist styles” in this image, Spaulding calls it a “unified and powerful statement.”42 Adams, he says, believed that “nature’s enduring beauty had ‘strengthen[ed] the spirit of the people of Manzanar. He felt it could do the same for the entire nation’.”43 Consider this statement. It gives us a helping hand, moving us from nature to a scene of incarceration to the nation as a whole— signaling registers of affective transference between nature, history, and violence. Nature stands in for spirituality, community, and renewal even as the history of place is evacuated and erased. Nature’s beauty is “enduring”; a not entirely innocent word. Part of Adams’s temptation to mythologize survival as an act of heroic stoicism by citizens who had been wronged emerges from his temptation to elevate their suffering into realms of enlightened nobility. We see this dynamic in many other images Adams took during his time at the camp where people are seen working on fields, playing sports, walking to school, painting and the like. In these photographs we discern the development of a grammar of stockness: generic, everyday activities that reinforce a sense of normality, of things going on as usual. Stockness visually normalizes the camp by turning our eyes to its everydayness, its familiarity, its intimacy with more familiar, less distant regimes of domesticity (which offer their own forms of torture, too). To compare life here with nature’s capacity to “endure” is perhaps a little vulgar, a little too innocent of the violence inherent in the equation proposed. Adams’s view of Manzanar—that good and hardworking Americans unjustly held prisoner there resiliently renewed their pledge to a nation that had betrayed its pledge to them—relied on a liberal politics of racial sympathy. In a sense, it posited that the dignity of the incarcerated somehow dignifies the camp while rendering it mere error and excess—a departure from the principles of the settler state. It’s almost as if we should look at the familiar stockness of Adams’s photographs and think “they seem to understand life goes on. Shouldn’t we?” Now recall that this chain of associations begins with a claim around “nature’s enduring beauty,” which speaks, apparently, to peoples’ capacities to endure injustice. Just as nature withstands the calamities unleashed upon it, so we might aspire to endure what we are subjected to. I draw attention to these movements to show that spaces subject to intensified extractivism, profiteering, and death are often the ones to also suggest idyllic and timeless qualities of nature. Think of the many stock images of the poppy fields of World War I. Think of Ansel Adams in Manzanar. Think of Bliss. 828 Theory & Event Towards the end of The Road Ahead, Gates briefly talks about the art that will adorn his high-tech future home: “I’ll be the first home user of one of the most unusual electronic features in my house.”44 He is referring to Corbis, a stock image company that at the time owned over a million images in its database. In the plugged-in home one would be able to browse this archive and “call up” any of the images it contains to adorn walls. In 1996, Corbis acquired exclusive digital rights to the work of Ansel Adams. Corbis was established as a stock image company that would acquire such collections, protect the rights of artists and producers, and eventually feed into a trend of online image browsing. As Paul Frosh writes, stock photography is characterized by “overlooked” images to which viewers rarely pay much attention. They are a part of the “visual content industry,” a term that Frosh argues “emphasizes the centrality of an industrialized system of image-production to our everyday visual world…”45 Only a handful of major agencies control the entire global distribution network of images kept in stock and “duplicated, filed, and cross-referenced” before being classified in generic categories like “family,” “nature,” “abstract,” “people,” and “lifestyle.”46 Frosh dates the rise of the modern form of the industry to the 1970s in Europe and the United States, especially through the establishment of two agencies: The Image Bank and Comstock.47 Beginning in the 1990s, the industry underwent a phase of transformation caused by “rapid and radical fiscal, organizational and technological change, corporate and cultural disorientation, fragmentation, restructuring and consolidation coupled with massive growth and global wealth-generation, partial dislocation from the immediate imperatives of the advertising industry and the construction of alternative (including consumer) markets, and an experimentation with the style, and to a lesser degree the content, of images.”48 Unsurprisingly, the accelerated changes during the 1990s caused one author to liken the moment to the California Gold Rush.49 That Bill Gates expressed faith in Corbis as both gatekeeper and museum for the future of global art was, unsurprisingly, a cause of concern for many. Thus, Geoffrey Batchen excoriates Gates’s understanding of history and aesthetics, taking aim at Corbis for acquiring electronic rights to the Adams catalog.50 His nervousness about Corbis in general and Gates in particular centers on two issues: first, a potentially totalitarian sketch of the future where Gates controls the means and content of popular communication; and second, the implications of such control for publicness and aesthetic practice.51 “What exactly is Corbis buying and selling? What is a digital image?”52 Microsoft’s assumption, Batchen argues, is that in the future electronic reproductions will subsume their analog originals, and that the reproduction Gupta-Nigam | Visual Infrastructures of Technostalgia 829 will be the only thing worth possessing. Part of the problem here is that “Corbis’s photogenics runs against the grain of photography as Ansel Adams understood and practiced it.”53 The other, related, problem is that after Corbis acquires an image like Adams’s Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, it churns out one version of an electronic copy to be distributed to buyers. However, Batchen informs readers that he has “seen at least half a dozen different versions by Adams based on this particular negative.”54 The deeper anxiety in his critique is that in such conditions “an image is no longer distinguishable from a piece of datum.”55 An image indistinguishable from datum is, in turn, one way of describing stockness. If we were to cast our eyes momentarily back to Manzanar given all I have pointed out, it could now be clearer how Ansel Adams as digital image, as photograph in the Corbis repository haunts the temporally fractured historical period under consideration, showing how ideas of nature become therapy for violence the psyche cannot confront. Looking at the Manzanar photographs in a post-Corbis world, one could be forgiven for mistaking them for stock images. The visual content industry has extracted the sublime and extraordinary from such documents to render them banal, non-singular, and reproducible. Now nature exists on desktop backgrounds, in online repositories, and popular media as an empty, generic sign of placidity, calmness, and a change of pace. A mountaintop reaching for the sky here, a field of flowers gently straining against sunlight there. We rarely inquire after their locations, much less their histories. That even Manzanar can be enlisted to this end illustrates how corrosively and powerfully genericness (stockness) can infiltrate the mind. My point is not that there is no beauty in Adams’s images. Nor that there is something wrong in identifying them as such. It is that the everydayness of the camp in his photographs draws nature near, makes it familiar, situates it within a domain of intimacy. Domesticates it. Wilderness—especially settler wilderness—combines temptation with danger, escape with capture. Horror cinema, for example, often inhabits this territory. Stockness eradicates one side of the coin, giving us temptation and escape without danger or capture. In stockness, by becoming utterly and entirely obvious, the image transcends history; or tries. Cue Bliss. Bliss and Generic Images Where exactly does the appeal of this image lie? Everyone knows it, recognizes it, is able to mourn its disappearance from desktop backgrounds. But the investments people have in it are decidedly muted. Removing Bliss during a system upgrade is not an event imbued 830 Theory & Event with world-historical significance. No one really fixates on the photograph. Bliss lives (lived) in the background, hangs around in peripheries of vision, sits on desktops, and is made visible when many open windows are minimized. It gains a minimally therapeutic quality by presenting viewers with a domesticated, idyllic landscape that is nonetheless removed and at a distance from them. Without specificity, blue sky and green hills satisfy any desire directed their way: from fantasies of open space to the minor relief of logging offline. Its placid, subdued, and yet exuberant indexing of nature “out there” represses geographical and historical realities framing the circumstances of its production. Consider, first, Bliss—a timeless photograph that has spread across the planetary epidermis over the years—as a product of industrial capitalism and its intense exploitation of land. Bliss as a version of what George Henderson calls “rural realism.” In his reading of a crop (pun intended) of novels set in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century California, Henderson argues that the conventions of rural realism represent the spread of capital into hitherto unconquered areas. The novels he discusses—set in the San Joaquin Valley (1880), Southern California (1890), and the Imperial Valley (1905)—showed “capital in terms of its spillage into new rural frontiers” and these frontiers “in terms of capital mobilization.”56 The rhetorics of these works either saw capital redeeming nature by infusing wasteland with value, or nature redeeming capital through processes of idealization.57 Within the narrative space of rural realism, capitalism was “chaotic, alienating, elusive, and riddled with crisis, while nature is eternal, holistic, and morally empowering. By this very logic, the union with nature is the path back to capital—though now a cleansed and tamed capital, shorn of crises stemming from debt, bankruptcy, and overproduction.”58 Henderson’s study is useful for thinking about an image like Bliss because its conventions are not too dissimilar from those of rural realism. Here, too, we find redemptive views of nature hiding the fact of intensified exploitation. Here, too, we find delineated a “path back to capital” from natural hinterlands devoid of human presence. To get at specific contours of this more precisely we might locate Bliss within histories of racialized agrarian labor in California. Henderson takes note of this dimension of rural realism with the pithy observation that “agriculture—capitalist agriculture, in the form of waged bodies—was an opportunity to further (and further specify) the idea and practice of race …”59 Fred Glass points out that as early as 1857, at least a hundred Chinese workers toiled in Sonoma on wine pioneer Agoston Haraszthy’s fields. By 1869, he writes, “the Chinese had planted most of the area’s 3.2 million vines …”60 Japanese workers began arriving in the 1890s, and by 1896, over eight thousand were employed on farms.61 Other historians and geographers gesture to the invasion of “petro-farming” in postwar California, which brought on Gupta-Nigam | Visual Infrastructures of Technostalgia 831 flighty dreams of mechanizing production and eliminating workers from the agrarian economy of the state.62 As Curtis Marez explains, postwar “agribusiness efforts to design a future free from conflict between capital and labor actually reproduced and extended such conflicts.”63 Instead of getting rid of workers, mechanization, for instance, “enabled the exploitation of low-wage, noncitizen Mexican guest workers or braceros”64 who were “employed as generic labor”65 moving from one kind of work to another in a flexible and unregulated manner. Although the fantasy of transcending the conflict between labor and capital never came to fruition, in Bliss nature overcame this contradiction (among others) by eliminating visual tension from a landscape governed by illuminated flatness. Marez’s identification of flexible, insecure employment as “generic” labor offers an intriguing parallel track to Bliss as generic image. Generic labor—the mobility, replicability, and dare we say, replaceability of workers—has a stock quality. Workers stand in for each other, and are assigned tasks that purportedly require no skills beyond the mere possession of labor power. Like stock images, workers move across any number of roles without imbuing them with specific significance. If the generic image demands we love wilderness for its familiarity, its distant nearness from society, then generic labor maintains this demand out of sight. I will return to this point in conclusion. Consider, now, the sheer, effervescent greenery of Bliss. It leads many to wonder if O’Rear photoshopped the image. The answer, according to Abigail Cain, is that he didn’t. The reason the fields look so green is that through the 1990s the Napa Valley was fighting off phylloxera, “a microscopic pest” that had devoured close to fifty thousand acres of vineyards by the time it was warded off in 1999.66 Phylloxera, historian Steven Stoll reminds us, is an insect “that can sit on the head of a pin, lives inside the roots of grapevines where it eats away at the water absorbing tissue.”67 The 1990s were not the first time they invaded this terrain. Although that infestation took about half a billion dollars to contain, “the landscape of Northern California had never looked more idyllic. Endless rows of grapevines had been replaced by a lush carpet of grass, dotted here and there with wildflowers.”68 Bliss appeals largely because of the infestation. Lush greenery thrown into relief against vibrant blue sky with hovering clouds and flowers in the foreground yields a mix of agrarian idyll and wilderness. In this context, O’Rear’s words, quoted at the beginning—that he admires vineyards because “they have strong design patterns. They’re the most organized crop in America. I come from a rural area so I’m familiar with agricultural and rural settings”69—indicate how what looks like eternal landscape devoid of human presence is, in fact, produced by labor, agribusiness, and extraction. 832 Theory & Event With an eye on histories of agrarian labor and capitalist interventions, the conjunctions between historical, aesthetic, temperamental forces become apparent. If part of the appeal of Bliss lies in its capacity to disavow its industrial-agrarian origins in favor of an idea of nature’s timelessness, this appeal flows from its status as a stock image in the Corbis archive—as an image that can make a timeless appeal because it is generic (and not specific to particular situations). In light of its environmental history, then, it is useful to return to O’Rear’s fascination with vineyards because although they can give the impression of idyllic wildernesses, they are in fact controlled agrarian landscapes. Julian Myers-Szupinska extends the implications of O’Rear’s view (without referencing his claim) in an essay on Henri Lefebvre and abstract space that touches on Bliss. Briefly, for Lefebvre, abstract space refers to techno-capitalist production of spatial homogeneity, causing space to become abstracted from conditions of ordinary life.70 Suburban America, Myers-Szupinska writes, is a good example of how this sort of abstraction is produced by replicating generic forms not embedded in the social fabric or ecology of a place. Even as capitalism makes abstract space an “interconnecting, totalizing force,” it also causes spatial fracturing following generalized social division of labor: “industrialized agriculture, administrative subdivision, technical specialization, and real estate speculation.”71 Myers-Szupinska illustrates this process through a video art project by Swedish artists Goldin+Senneby, titled After Microsoft (2007). In the video, after narrating the circumstances of its production, the artists restaged Bliss. They rehearsed the history of the vineyards and phylloxera infestation, pointing out Microsoft didn’t discover the infestation till late in the process. The photograph, however, “fortuitously matched the brand’s predetermined color scheme of blue and green, and ‘the reality of real life’ (as the video puts it) thereby came to serve as an aesthetic alibi for globalized production.”72 Myers-Szupinska points out that in Goldin+Senneby’s version, with the landscape depicted devoid of phylloxera, the picture loses its shine as wine production returns. As the photograph becomes obsolete, he writes, the land enters circuits of production, exchange, and value generation.73 I inflect my account a little differently in suggesting the photograph doesn’t quite become obsolete. It becomes data, it becomes stock. And in so doing it transcends geography and history, appearing to viewers not as this specific territory but as generic visual content open to receiving whatever wish, desire, or fantasy is projected onto it. At a certain level, one’s appreciation of Bliss is not very different from one’s admiration of national parks. On this point, Margaret Grebowicz claims that national parks establish a “continuity between domesticity and wilderness.”74 Gupta-Nigam | Visual Infrastructures of Technostalgia 833 Commenting on pictures taken in national parks that often “exclude the other cars, and indeed any signs of other people,”75 she sees them as sites for enacting “emotions surrounding collectivity.”76 Extending Freud’s 1901 suggestion that American nature reserves show “what happens in the formation of fantasy, a realm split off from reality and governed entirely by the pleasure principle,”77 she writes: “Nature not only becomes a useful locus for the democratic ideal; it allows us to imagine that democracy is not a form of modern politics, but some original human state.”78 If the wilderness is a “collective hallucination,”79 then the words of a park ranger and crime writer featured in a film Grebowicz discusses, capture the mechanism poetically: “I think we require national parks for our psychic stability and sanity. We need national parks because we psychologically need to have a place to go when we can’t be ‘here’ anymore.”80 In his substantial work on the psychic structure of American individualism, Michael Rogin similarly anatomized the deep attachment European settlers had to wilderness as that which had to be “civilized,” and as a space where masculinity could regenerate itself through imperial and capitalist expansion. 81 Stockness, as I have been writing of it, resolves tensions between here and there as they appear to the park ranger. Overcoming space and time (in a word, context), Bliss is a forerunner to hundreds of websites and mobile applications that, today, promise mindfulness, calm, and relaxation by simulating the sights and sounds of nature (in a word, atmosphere). This abstract atmosphere, cloven off from its milieu, appeals because of its abstraction, because it is mere empty visual content. Counterintuitively, abstraction draws nature near, rendering it close and familiar. Disembedded from context, generic images are repositories of fantasy. They become what viewers want them to be; or what they don’t. Expelling traces of life, Bliss allures through formal elegance and association with other stock images, other concepts of nature as comforting and therapeutic. On this count, my idea of stockness drawing nature near is substantially indebted to Stanley Cavell’s thought. Since I do not have space to address the fullness of his work here, I will mark only a slice of it. When, in The Senses of Walden, Cavell writes “we have put nature in bondage, bound it to our uses and to our hurried capacities for sensing, rather than learning of its autonomy,”82 I take him to mean: we do not know how to accept our separation from nature, nature’s distance from us. We know and experience nature through our instrumentalization of it, our subjugation of it; by turning nature toward our ends. Rather than accept distance, escapist and extractivist wishes, desires, and fantasies pull nature towards us—as abstract image freed of geography and history, erasing its autonomy and transforming into an empty receptacle for our designs. 834 Theory & Event Stockness, in Conclusion In concluding, I want to supplement what I said above by returning to Marez’s reference to the “generic” labor of Mexican workers on farms, and to the reinforcement of the norm as a form of the generic in Ansel Adams’s Manzanar photographs. While these two modalities can overlap, they need not. The generic laborer is mobile and circulates across a set of tasks without being tied to a specific one—like a stock image that moves from context to context without being sutured any of them indexically. The generic photograph, though similarly mobile without index, normalizes by domesticating wilderness. This latter generic, the normalizing impulse, covers things up; it engages in acts of forgetting and erasure. Analysts of stock photography, from Paul Frosh to David Machin,83 agree that stockness reinforces sameness, distributes commonality, and participates in flattening global culture. Bliss exemplifies this argument. Bliss: the image that effaces its own conditions of production, that is visible everywhere from California to Delhi and North Korea, that appears photoshopped but is actually infested by pests, that organizes the symbolic logic of a company aiming to take over a new frontier for the generation of value. Bliss is what Ansel Adams would have shot if he was let loose in California at the turn of the century. Bliss is stock in the sense that Marez means when, writing about the work of Mexican American activist and litterateur Ernesto Galarza, he says: “Corporations continued to look forward to a time when technological progress would, in Galarza’s ominous phrase, ‘eliminate people from production,’ or at least eliminate farm workers who resisted, made demands, and organized.”84 The elimination of people, workers, and dissidents is the work of stockness as settler nostalgia, of the latter generic, the normalizing impulse. It is also in this space that the therapeutic function of images like Bliss takes hold. Landscapes, pictures of unspoiled nature, and open environmental horizons serve a therapeutic function by effacing history, providing a grammar of the future anterior, and aiding the repression of infrastructure. This is what allows Bill Gates to refuse the highway as a metaphor for the internet. It is what leads Ansel Adams to conceive of a concentration camp as a space where the enduring beauty of nature can reenergize the nation and its peoples. The work of stockness as normalizing represses ruptures, alleviating settler consciousness beyond the finitude of historical temporality: no genocide of Indigenous peoples, no agribusiness, no exploitation, no environmental damage. Only nature as we want her (and yes, decisively her85) to be. However, I want to suggest that this normalizing impulse doesn’t exhaust the capacities of stockness. Other generics are possible, such Gupta-Nigam | Visual Infrastructures of Technostalgia 835 as generics gestured to by labor as a stock signifier or quality or energy that can be attached to different kinds of work. Marez excavates the impressive, critical media practices of Californian farm workers, examining how activists, artists, and trade unions generated counternarratives challenging technological fantasies of agribusiness. My attention, though in agreement with him, turns to genericness not as a point resistance but as a space from whence forms of what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call “fugitivity”86 emerge. Speculating on this register of experience, AbdouMaliq Simone writes: “the generic refers to a condition of insufficiency … The generic is an infrastructure outside the incessant need to divide things, outside the fundamental epistemological maneuvers that cut the world into specific existent conditions and then bring in the analytical tools needed to account for them.”87 He argues that where we normally tend to think of infrastructure in terms of connection, combination, and accretion, we might also consider infrastructure as “subtraction as exclusion or segregation.”88 This reading of the generic—as the capacity to subtract, hide, camouflage—owes, for Simone, a debt to Blackness and its study. Refusing both the normalizing and oppositional impulse, genericness of this kind finds gaps within an existing order to exploit or inhabit (without being seen because it is so obviously there before our eyes). “Generic blackness,” Simone writes, “is not a place where a person resides, that can be known; it is not a project waiting to be realized. Rather, it points to the uninhabitable in all that makes itself known as exemplarily inhabitable. It extracts from what has long been viewed as uninhabitable—the slum, the wasteland—materials that can be used to enact a different sense of ‘home’.”89 This other spin on the generic, this other view of stockness, falls to the side of normalizing impulses. It doesn’t quite resist the status quo, but points to the fact that there is a lot else going on—a lot more “stuff”—that we don’t attend when we look at landscapes and events. Without taking up cudgels against the order of the day, and without giving in to a language of exposure or revelation, this other register of stockness unsettles the un-inhabitable. This requires, simultaneously, a capacity to think spaces of violence and death as ones where some form of life can exist (perhaps even flourish), and a capacity to think how, in those spaces where its signs are erased, violence and death persist as a faint hum in the background of the everyday. In making a case for this other generic, I have, of course, no image to offer as a counterpoint to Bliss. And that is the point. There is no image or readily available image for generic Blackness. It exists as a kind of supplement, a tear in the fabric of consensus that requires, on our part—on the part of the viewer, the reader, the consumer—the cultivation of a different mode of attention. Depending on how one 836 Theory & Event views it, Bliss normalizes as well as disrupts the normalizing drives of technostalgia. Taken as a window to a past from which the future can be projected, Bliss becomes tethered to the white unconscious after the end of history, reproducing in image-form the body’s desire to escape context on-and-off-line alike. But, following Cavell, we could try—as I hope I have done—to return Bliss to its context. Locating it, once more, as a geography where scattered remains of colonial and capitalist intensity lie buried on the surface, we find Bliss unsettling what exists, what “is,” and what might otherwise be. Acknowledgements For Ashish Yechury (1986–2021), who was indiscriminately generous and understood photographs better than me. Notes 1. Mark Hachman, “The Story of the Windows XP ‘Bliss’ Desktop Theme—and What It Looks like Today,” PCWorld, April 8, 2014, https://www.pcworld. com/article/2140802/the-story-behind-the-windows-xp-bliss-photo-andwhat-it-looks-like-today.html; Victor Luckerson, “Meet the Guy Who Took the Most Famous Desktop Photo of All Time,” Time, accessed May 20, 2018, http://time.com/59521/windows-xp-desktop-photo-bliss-explained/; Lily Hay Newman, “The Most Famous Desktop Wallpaper Ever Is a Real, Unaltered Photo,” Slate, April 11, 2014, https://www.slate.com/blogs/ future_tense/2014/04/11/charles_o_rear_is_the_photographer_who_ took_the_windows_xp_wallpaper_photo.html. 2. Cynthia Sweeney, “Say Goodbye to ‘Bliss,’” Napa Valley Register, March 26, 2014, https://napavalleyregister.com/star/lifestyles/say-goodbye-tobliss/article_2c485132-b504–11e3–85ef-0019bb2963f4.html. 3. Sweeney, “Goodbye to Bliss.” 4. Sweeney, “Goodbye to Bliss.” 5. Sweeney, “Goodbye to Bliss.” 6. Sweeney, “Goodbye to Bliss.” 7. We might note, tangentially, a series of near-contemporaneous academic reflections on this moment. I am thinking primarily of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s influential book, Empire, published in 2000, as a node around which many discussions of post-historicity, sovereignty, reconfigurations of capitalism, and other such questions unfolded. For a representative sample of these debates—oscillating in the broad realm of matters that do concern me in the pages that follow—see: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Jodi Dean and Paul Passavant, eds., Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri (New York: Routledge, 2003); Malcolm Bull, “You Can’t Build a New Society with a Stanley Knife,” London Review of Books, October 4, 2001; George Steinmetz, “The State of Emergency and the Revival of American Imperialism: Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism,” Public Culture 15, no. 2 (May 1, 2003): 323–46, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363–15–2–323. Gupta-Nigam | Visual Infrastructures of Technostalgia 837 8. Geoff Eley, “The Past Under Erasure? History, Memory, and the Contemporary,” Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 3 (July 1, 2011): 556, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022009411403342. 9. David Scott, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 12. 10. Scott, Omens of Adversity, 13. 11. Scott, Omens of Adversity, 13. Emphasis in original. 12. Scott, Omens of Adversity, 13. 13. Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, and Peter Rinearson, The Road Ahead: Completely Revised and Up-to-Date (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), xiii. 14. Many of the tendencies I point to in my reading of Gates’s book below are representative of wider tendencies in writings on the internet at the time. In short, it is interesting to note how, at a time when critics like William Cronon were putting pressure on the concept of “nature” as a pristine ideal external to human history, writers like Howard Rheingold, John Perry Barlow, and others leaned so heavily on precisely those tropes of pristineness—mapped onto nostalgic histories of settler colonialism—to push an agenda of liberatory informational futures. Hence, the preponderance of references to “electronic frontiers” and “homesteading” in virtual spaces. Critics like Fred Turner have convincingly shown how these backward-looking future-projections were often embedded in the biographical histories of the personalities involved. This is not the moment to address those issues, but for an overview of the trends I am gesturing to, see: William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 7–28, https://doi.org/10.2307/3985059; James Morton Turner, The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 ([Seattle]: University of Washington Press, 2013); Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 15. Gates, Myhrvold, and Rinearson, The Road Ahead, 7. 16. Gates, Myhrvold, and Rinearson, The Road Ahead, 6. 17. Gates, Myhrvold, and Rinearson, The Road Ahead, 6. 18. Gates, Myhrvold, and Rinearson, The Road Ahead, 6. Emphasis added. 19. Bruce Robbins, “The Smell of Infrastructure: Notes toward an Archive,” Boundary 2 34, no. 1 (February 1, 2007): 26, https://doi. org/10.1215/01903659–2006–025. 20. Robbins, “The Smell of Infrastructure,” 25. 21. Bonnie Honig, Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 22. Gerald D. Nash, “A Veritable Revolution: The Global Economic Significance of the California Gold Rush,” California History 77, no. 4 (1998): 276–92, https://doi.org/10.2307/25462518. 23. Gates, Myhrvold, and Rinearson, The Road Ahead, 139. 838 Theory & Event 24. Katharine Slater, “Who Gets to Die of Dysentery?: Ideology, Geography, and The Oregon Trail,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 42, no. 4 (November 10, 2017): 375, https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2017.0040. 25. Slater, “Who Gets to Die of Dysentery?,” 375. 26. Slater, “Who Gets to Die of Dysentery?,” 375. 27. Slater, “Who Gets to Die of Dysentery?,” 377. 28. Slater, “Who Gets to Die of Dysentery?,” 382. 29. Elsewhere, I add another layer to this analysis by reading Annie Leibovitz’s photograph of Gates on the cover of the book in conjunction with these concerns. See: Anirban Gupta-Nigam, Other Frontiers: Administrative Media and Intimate Domains of American Settler Futurity (UC Irvine, 2018), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/52j0468k#author. 30. Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2016). 31. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 229. 32. Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield, eds., Mapping Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Anne Phillips, Multiculturalism without Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 33. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Vintage, 1996); William J. Mitchell, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004); M. Christine Boyer, Cyber Cities (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997). 34. Elizabeth A Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 7. 35. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 12. 36. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 19. 37. Jonathan Spaulding, Ansel Adams and the American Landscape: A Biography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 182. 38. Spaulding, Ansel Adams and the American Landscape, 203. 39. For a general account and overview, see: Hayashi, “Transfigured Patterns”; Phu, “The Spaces of Human Confinement.” Phu, especially, offers a powerful critique of Adams’s practice in Manzanar, comparing his vision to that of Dorothea Lange and Toyo Miyatake. Where Lange went for a hardened, almost urban aesthetic, according to Phu, Miyatake’s photographs are an interesting counterpoint to Adams’s because they survey the land in similar ways but with radically different outcomes. Both produced a corpus of pastoral works, but Miyatake’s images strained to show how the land was an “imposition” on imprisoned bodies. Adams, by contrast, looked to Manzanar as an opportunity to extend the landscape genre—to sing praises of the outdoors and produce a spiritual image of pastoral space. Phu’s insight is entirely relevant to the critique I offer of the photographs Adams took at the camp. Gupta-Nigam | Visual Infrastructures of Technostalgia 839 40. Spaulding, Ansel Adams and the American Landscape, 205. 41. Spaulding, Ansel Adams and the American Landscape, 207. 42. Spaulding, Ansel Adams and the American Landscape, 207. 43. Spaulding, Ansel Adams and the American Landscape, 207. 44. Gates, Myhrvold, and Rinearson, The Road Ahead, 257. 45. Paul Frosh, The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Content Industry (London: Berg, 2003), 3. 46. Frosh, The Image Factory, 4. 47. Frosh, The Image Factory, 26. 48. Frosh, The Image Factory, 36. 49. Frosh, The Image Factory, 45. 50. Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 147. 51. Batchen, Each Wild Idea, 148–50. 52. Batchen, Each Wild Idea, 151. 53. Batchen, Each Wild Idea, 152. 54. Batchen, Each Wild Idea, 152. 55. Batchen, Each Wild Idea, 157. 56. Henderson, California and The Fictions of Capital, 119. 57. Henderson, California and The Fictions of Capital, 120. Emphasis in original. 58. Henderson, California and The Fictions of Capital, 121. Emphasis in original. 59. Henderson, California and The Fictions of Capital, 91. Emphasis in original. 60. Fred Glass, From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016), 108. 61. Glass, From Mission to Microchip, 111. 62. Richard A. Walker, The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California (New York: The New Press, 2004). 63. Curtis Marez, Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 21. 64. Marez, Farm Worker Futurism, 21. 65. Marez, Farm Worker Futurism, 22. 66. Abigail Cain, “The Story Behind the World’s Most Famous Desktop Background,” Artsy, July 3, 2017, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-story-worlds-famous-desktop-background. 67. Steven Stoll, “Insects and Institutions: University Science and the Fruit Business in California,” Agricultural History 69, no. 2 (1995): 224. 68. Cain, “The Story Behind the World’s Most Famous Desktop Background.” 69. Cain, “The Story Behind the World’s Most Famous Desktop Background.” 70. Julian Myers-Szupinska, “After the Production of Space,” in Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics, ed. Emily Eliza Scott and Kirsten J. Swenson (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 22. 840 Theory & Event 71. Myers-Szupinska, “After the Production of Space,” 23. 72. Myers-Szupinska, “After the Production of Space,” 24. 73. Myers-Szupinska, “After the Production of Space,” 28. 74. Margret Grebowicz, The National Park to Come (Stanford, CA: Stanford Briefs, 2015), 6. 75. Grebowicz, The National Park to Come, 9. 76. Grebowicz, The National Park to Come, 15. 77. Grebowicz, The National Park to Come, 20. 78. Grebowicz, The National Park to Come, 41. 79. 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