The Internet of Animals: Human-Animal Relationships in the Digital Age

Abstract

In The Internet of Animals, Deborah Lupton investigates how other animals fare in the frames of contemporary cyberspace. I don't think it's a spoiler to reveal her findings: not all that well. Her path to this conclusion explores how animals are affected by this new mode of media that is—to state the painfully obvious—fundamentally of no use or appeal to them.By and large, human animals are inconsiderate toward, and exploitative of, other animals in almost every way that we have interacted with them, so it doesn't come as a surprise to learn that digital media sustain those attitudes and, indeed, exacerbate them. Perhaps to disguise this antipathy to other life-forms, or perhaps out of sheer cluelessness, people appropriate natural discourse when we discuss new media: the cloud, viruses, a tsunami of data, a worldwide web. If such ecological metaphors seem to comprise a “biophilic language” (pp. 2–3), in Lupton's words, that belies many actual consequences of the digital turn—vastly increasing levels of nondegradable e-waste and other landfill toxins.Semiotically, Lupton notes, the internet objectifies other animals, sometimes vilifying them. It thus becomes all the more difficult to learn to see our planetary cohabitants as we should and to reform our overconsuming cultural habits in the quest to achieve a better ecosystemic empathy. As it does in so many other ways, the internet's hypercharged presence and impact, boosted by its nested influencers, distort our perceptions of reality, dooming us to an accelerated hurtle down the slope of ecocidal ruin and making it all the more difficult to turn around the massive battleship of our expanding carbon footprint. (Though this is more my own individual screed than Lupton's, it emanates from the research and analysis she compiles.)Just as human bodies and habits have become heavily “rendered into digital formats, thereby creating reams of digital data about them,” Lupton writes, “so, too, animals’ bodies and lives are increasingly digitized and datafied” (p. 3). As this “Internet of Animals” proliferates, and as humans monitor other animals’ lives and locations obsessively, we amass ever more pervasive control over them. Lupton doesn't invoke the Foucauldian/Benthamite panopticon, perhaps because it goes without saying that the internet is a modern-day perfection of the nefariously far-reaching surveillance they described.There are bots that allow birders and watchers of other animals to share their sightings, which may seem like a harmless enough way to advance a kind of human-animal interaction, as long as the watchers are unobtrusive. But their account names give me pause—@BirdPerHour, @PossumEveryHour, @HourlyLynxes, @gatordaily—and suggest that they are acquiring and accumulating these animals voraciously and infinitely as well as figuratively consuming them in a way that may encourage literal consumption (p. 53). While portrayals of “wild animals online as part of enthusiast networks can promote conservation efforts, they can also result in harmful consequences for these animals,” such as aiding networks that poach and traffic animals for their commercial value (p. 55).Lupton's title invokes the “Internet of Things”—the profusion of (so-called) “smart” devices connected digitally. Her “Internet of Animals” presumes that animals have become one more “thing” in our corpus of greedily arrayed appurtanences. She states that “a huge variety of animals are imbricated in and with the latest digital technologies” (p. 6) and then lists them: memes, GIFs, drones, surveillance cameras, livestreaming services, robotic devices. Other animals are now made to live in our new “smart homes” and “smart cities” along with—and I cannot overstate how Orwellian I find this term—“smart farms” (p. 7), where sensors monitor water, soil, and other growth/production input to measure, in the sublime amorality of the pixel, the animals’ progression toward the desired industrial outcome, the commodity oth