{EC} The Gyrecene
Here, we borrow a lens from the oceanic accumulation of microplastic pollution to understand our epoch as one of converging forces that trap people, systems, artifacts, and communities in a swirling gyre. Through spatial media and text, we argue that four key forces in this Gyrecene are capital, plastic, shipwreck, and surveillance, and that these ‘currents’ interact in fascinating — and often disastrous — ways.
We conceptualize “Shipwreck” (sometimes referred to as Naufrag) both as a force of colonization representative of early expansionist efforts by European countries and as a shorthand for today’s entangled pollution-climate-environmental-injustice crisis — the heart of the gyre. We employ maps and diagrams, alongside quotes and other multimedia elements, to explore how the forces of colonization, surveillance and capital, all of which have been exacerbated in a plastic world, create a system of currents locking us in a state of shipwreck.
Whereas anthropocene narratives tend to, on some level, present humanity as a monolithic driving force behind the epoch, we wanted to offer a framework that positions human-centric systems as the ‘creators’ and ‘architects’ of crisis. We are interested in how economic systems like capitalism, technical modes like plastic, and pervasive (largely western) cultural structures like surveillance and colonialism interact to create a moment where humans are centered, but no longer able to control or break the cycle of these systems, as in surveillance capitalism.
Mentz’ comment that epochal claims require a confluence of models underscored our framework for this project:
“Epochal claims work better if they are forced to share the spotlight with other models. It may be that beheading Anthropos is the only way to let real variety in…The basic conundrum lies in the attempt to regularize or schematize temporal change, to make sense of the fleeting touch of lived experience. All epochal claims are false in that they force disparate local experience into homogenizing structures, but the desire to categorize experiences, to fix them in place with exact and meaningful names, flowers with each new story about our shared past.” (Mentz, xii-xiii)
The gyre not only reflects the “sharing of spotlight” between our four ‘cenes, but proposes a model for understanding their interactions. Our media does not include many obvious antagonists and protagonists — but that is part of the point. While there are plenty of bad actors in the Gyrecene, one quality of the gyre is that people, firms, and communities caught in its slush have much less agency than they think they do. In other words, actually ‘opting out’ is not an option for most participants.
One idea we wish to set up is that often, societies employ “shipwreck” narratives to characterize the ends of eras or moments of crisis. In other words, many of the stories we tell about ourselves — including those that have been key to the evolution of capitalism, plastic, colonization, and surveillance — emerge from what we tend to term watershed moments: think of the Columbian exchange, the 2008 financial crisis, the invention of the iPhone, or 9/11. But these instantaneous shipwreck stories do not seem to apply in the context of global environmental change.
Instead, our project contends that while Western culture frequently talks about a coming environmental tipping point — an impending shipwreck — it fails to put forth a more useful narrative: one that situates ourselves and our culture as in the midst of a crisis that unfolds without a clear beginning or end, with symptoms that latch onto and exacerbate socio-political and environmental processes that have occurred throughout recorded history: storms, illness, floods, extreme weather.
Every storm, flood, and passing ‘drawdown deadline’ feels like it will become a watershed moment — but there’s always another, and we’ve yet to see a shipwreck narrative about global pollution, extinction, or climate change that sticks.
With this project, we want to provide a shipwrecked narrative of this current epoch, and specifically to envision the shipwreck as an inevitable result of a plasticine culture fixated on capital, colonial expansion, and surveillance. We draw from quantitative and qualitative data in an attempt to represent both the quantifiable elements of our epoch (such as plastic consumption and relative surveillance of difference communities) as well as less tangible aspects, such as gradual change in how we map the world and the plasticity of an era defined by rapid, tangled changes.
Point of Life Diagram:
Gyres have captured our imagination since the beginning of story-telling. From the Greek’s Charybdis to Poe’s Maelstrom, we have been fascinated with the sheer force and mystery of whirlpools, likely due to our historic reliance on sailing and oceanic voyage. Gyres had the power to throw us off course, tear our vessels apart, and leave us stranded — in other words, they caused Shipwreck. Despite our detailed maps and well-plotted routes, the reality of the turbulent ocean meant that societal rupture and unplanned contact often occurred, as landings were made in unexpected places. The Point-of-Life diagram above displays this gyrating process of planning, unexpected mixture, and consequences according to a broader, process-oriented framework.
In the center is a pared-down map of actual oceanic gyres. The water has been replaced with idealistic images of the various processes forming our constellation epoch: the marketplaces of capitalism, the utopian advertising of early plastics, the innovation of the panopticon, and the potential of the New World. However, these Eurocentric, hierarchical views caused many of the negative, complicated, and intermixed processes we see today, represented by the circular images along the edges of the gyre map. From top right and proceeding clockwise, we see the systems of the Atlantic slave trade, the transfer of inmates between private prisons in America, the movement of plastic through ocean currents, and the flow of oil around the world. The arrows surrounding each process correspond to a gyre on the central map. The images that the gyre overlaps with shows a relationship between those ‘cenes and the process shown on the periphery. The slave trade gyre connects the Capitolcene, the Naufragocene, and the Surveillocene, since the transfer of enslaved peoples was prompted by unchecked perusal for capital, facilitated by the colonization of the New World, and resulted in hierarchical structures of power and surveillance.
The interplay between the structures of the Old World and the resulting processes of catastrophe come together to represent our chimeral ‘cene: one of capitalism, surveillance, plastic, and Shipwreck.
Naufragocene:
The Naufragocene. The Age of Shipwreck. This ‘cene uses the ecological and social catastrophes brought about by transoceanic voyage to contextualize globalization and modernity. I’ve chosen to represent this on the map using both narrative and geographic elements; by combining a New World map from 1607 with data of modern shipwrecks and shipping routes, plus the raster layer of cumulative human impact on marine environments, I hope to capture the multidimensional, turbulent nature of the Naufragocene. The idea of Shipwreck Modernity furthered by the Naufragocene replaces the concept of a single “swerve” into modernity with narratives of disorienting but survivable disaster. The collision of the Old and New World ruptured environments and societies and rendered maps obsolete, and this catastrophe continues through to today. Our modern shipwrecks are the products of globalization and capital flow, and they result in devastating harm to our marine environments. Steve Mentz, the original creator of the term Naufragocene, summed up the ‘cene well:
“Shipwreck stories…narrate catastrophe in order to endure catastrophe. Shipwreck stories represent the human experience of natural hostility, narrating humankind’s failed attempts to navigate an uncertain world. By using shipwreck to examine the ecological crises occasioned by the early stages of globalization, this book aims to reconsider the cultural changes associated with early modernity.” (Mentz, xxv)
The collision of old and new, past and present, human and natural, and terrestrial and marine are all central to the Naufragocene, as well as the broader gyre that our constellational epoch represents.
Surveillocene:
The surveillocene is an epoch defined by the rise of surveillance as a means of consolidating power. Themes of policing, dataveillance, and security are central to the understanding of the surveillocene. A practice that combines many of the aspects of the surveillance is predictive policing, which “uses computer systems to analyze large sets of data, including historical crime data, to help decide where to deploy police or to identify individuals who are purportedly more likely to commit or be a victim of a crime” (Lau 2020, 1). Predictive policing codifies underlying biases into policy, while masquerading behind the idea that data does not lie. Andrea Miller expounds on the involvement of private data companies in public policing and the evolving role of predictive policing in Shadows of War, Traces of Policing. She rejects the idea that data is benign:
“Situating these spatial practices of preemptive policing with and alongside each other, it becomes possible to understand policing as integral to the colonial project of nation-building, an ongoing and incomplete process of enclosure and expansion whose continuation is perpetually articulated through a language of counterinsurgency and threat prevention.” (Miller 2019, 87)
Similarly, American Artist’s 2015 installation piece, “My Blue Window,” explores the theme of predictive policing from the visual perspective of a police officer using the technology. The video displays a POV view from the driver’s seat of a police car as it responds to a prediction for a crime. The car drives at top speed, rolling through red lights in order to investigate the potential act. When the car arrives, no crime has been committed and the officer drives away seemingly satisfied that they had successfully prevented disaster. My Blue Window straddles the themes of predictive policing and deterrence policing, both of which employ surveillance to marginalize communities of color.
The map above delves into the ideas of surveillance and policing by analyzing security camera locations and their correlation with communities of color. The base layer visualizes the percentage of non-white residents per census tract. Overlaid is a visualization of security cameras. Every intersection where there are one or more cameras is represented by a circle. The circle is 200 meters to represent the view of a standard camera and is colored based on the number of cameras at the intersection. There are so many cameras that the data is difficult to visualize with just color, so the opacity of the symbology also corresponds to the number of security cameras. This allows areas with high security camera density to be more visible. The cloud of security camera vision simultaneously conveys the pervasiveness of surveillance across the city, while highlighting the over policing of communities of color. The security camera dataset comes from an Amnesty International Project advocating against the adoption of facial recognition by the NYPD. As a part of the project, they invoke data from the stop-and-frisk era that shows a strong correlation between stops and census tracts that are over-surveilled. This reciprocal relationship between surveillance, policing, and power is central to the surveillocene.
Synthetic Map:
In the above synthetic map, all of the aspects of the gyrecene are explored through the concept of offshore tax havens. The tax haven represents a focal point of the manipulation of global capital. The surveillance is not only concerned with those being surveilled, but also those evading surveillance. Corporations and wealthy individuals who utilize surveillance in order to accumulate capital then use offshore tax havens to evade the surveillance of government taxation. The ever increasing spiral of capital accumulation that is levied through tax havens is exactly a shipwreck scenario of the naufragocene. These themes are represented through the corporate tax haven index (CTHI), which utilizes a bevy of financial indicators to ascertain the extent to which each country is a tax haven. The CTHI is represented in shades of red, with a high CTHI and deep red color corresponding to a country that is a top tax haven. Additionally, the equal area projection of this map is distorted into a cartogram by using the CTHI of each country to weight its area. This results in some countries that have minuscule areas, like the British Virgin Islands, to be inflated several times its base area. To give context to these distortions, the undistorted map is overlaid at low opacity on top of the cartogram. The plasticene is represented conceptually by the plasticity of the map. The contortion of the land area to represent the CTHI is deeply plastic.
Capitalocene:
The Capitalocene proposes that we have entered an epoch where capital is the major force that shapes the natural environment. As an alternative to the Anthropocene, it emphasizes capital’s capacity for endless regeneration. Humans, on the other hand, are subjugated and merely serve the need of capital. As Fraser interpreted Marx, “capital itself becomes the Subject, [and] human beings are its pawns, reduced to figuring out how they can get what they need in the interstices, by feeding the beast” (Fraser, p.58). Capital, imbued with its own agency, undertakes systematic environmental transformations that radically change land, the atmosphere, the ocean, and the plant and animal life that inhabits them.
In this visualization, I attempt to show how economic “achievements” brought about by capital regeneration are offset by environmental impacts, and how the unequal distribution of those impacts reflects an ongoing process of primitive accumulation.
The night-time lights of this visualization, one might think, seems to be from a century ago. Only North America and Europe are lit. Large parts of the supposedly populated regions around China, India, UAE, West Africa, and Southeastern Asia seem to be undeveloped at all. Yet the night-time light dataset is from the 2016 Black Marble dataset. What happened to our populated cities?
The answer is that the night light data is masked by another raster dataset on annual PM2.5 pollution. Where pollution is high, an opaque black color covers the night lights so that they cannot be seen. This presentation not only reflects the spatial dimensions of atmospheric pollution (particles are in the air while settlements are on the ground), but also suggests that so-called economic developments are achieved at environmental costs so significant that the costs could overshadow the developments.
The lighted areas on the map, or areas that are both developed and unpolluted, mainly lie within North America and Europe — both historical colonial powers. This reflects the outflow of pollution-intensive industries from western countries to less developed countries. Importantly, the celebrated sustainability results of western societies is not actually achieving sustainable development, but externalizing the costs to other countries, especially those that have historically suffered from colonial injustice. The pollution persists but is rendered invisible.
One could say that “exporting” pollution appropriates the natural environment of less developed countries for the interest of capital. Such dispossession not only deprives the impacted peoples of their means for production, but more radically, destroys the very means for their survival. As such, it is a form of modern “primitive accumulation” as framed by Fraser, and it can serve as evidence for her claim that “‘primitive accumulation’ is an ongoing process from which capital profits and on which it relies” (Fraser, p.59).
The ocean layer and the shipping routes in the map are intended to highlight precisely the highly post-colonial nature of air pollution distribution. They remind the viewer to not take the level of pollution for granted as merely national phenomena. Instead, environmental destruction under capitalism is the result of international processes that include trade, the flow of capital and commodities, and the externalization of ecological costs. The dotted lines on the oceans, then, are not merely shipping routes, but they also abstractly represent the flow of capital and the international movement of pollution-intensive industries and the environmental costs that go along with them.
Hexagraphy:
In the synthetic “hexagraphy”, I interrogate our notion of nature with the lens of the capitalocene, the surveillocene, the plasticene, and the naufragocene.
Nature is an invention of modern society. Only after the Industrial Revolution did nature take up its place in the latter part of the human — non-human dialectic. In pre-Industrial Revolution societies, nature as a category did not take up a place that is radically opposed to the category of human. As Durkheim observed, nature plays an important role in the worldview of “primitive” societies. Humans, totemic animals, plants and celestial objects alike occupy equal statuses in the universe as perceived by tribal peoples.
The capitalist mode of production and reproduction, however, at once engenders and requires a fundamentally different conception of nature, one that separates it from humans and subjugates it.
This important conceptual shift is reflected in Romanticist landscape art, which directly proceeds the proliferation of industrial mass-production, that idealizes nature and “the countryside” as clean, pristine, and tranquil, as opposed to the highly polluted, mundane, and crowded life in an industrial-capitalist city-town. This conceptual distinction, one could argue, is reflective not only of real environmental transformations undertaken by capitalism, but also of real desires of entrapped individuals to seek refuge from an overwhelming order of production and its power of control, surveillance, etc.
Yet this nature-human distinction is not only a product, but also a precondition for capitalism to carry out its regimes of extraction. For capital to exploit nature, it first has to render this exploitation legitimate. This is achieved through rendering nature as the Other, the inessential object that exists to serve the interest of human beings as Subjects. Animal and plant lives, for example, are conceptualized not as subjects of existence in their own rights, but as objects that are fundamentally different from and subjugated by us, as a resource that is there to be exploited and made use of. Nature is given plasticity and is gazed at by us. This view of the nature-human distinction as a relation between the Other and the Subject bears striking resemblance to highly racialized and patriarchal modes of thinking: just as Beauvoir famously claimed that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, we might as well say that “Nature is not born, but rather becomes, a resource”. By shaping our knowledge, therefore, capitalist asserts its power over nature.
Even in the progressive discourse surrounding climate action, this otherization of nature persists. The argument for saving the planet, frequently, is not that the planet or its life should be cherished in their own rights, but that our survival depends on them. Ultimately, this is an argument that places nature at a place below us, subjugating it as a tool for our survival. What this discourse does not capture is the possibility that the conservation of nature, its living and even non-living elements, might be an end in itself. This amounts to granting nature its subjectivity, an alternative attitude towards conservation. This possibility, however, is rendered invisible through systematic surveillance, propaganda, and other forms of mass control.
The innermost ring of this hexagraphy contains six different examples of production (clockwise, from upper right): offshore oil pipelines, petroleum refineries and pipelines, coal deposits and mines, Atlantic shipping routes, west Pacific underwater Internet cables, and offshore fishing sites and fish resources. They depict how nature is viewed as either a resource to be used or a difficulty to be overcome.
The middle ring reflects modern attempts to account for the externalities generated by the capitalist mode of production. From right, looking clockwise, they are: some forest preserves in the greater Chicago area, banks in DC and the Whitehouse Oval (indicating those attempts are made by usually highly intertwined corporate and government institutions), and nuclear power plants in Europe. Ultimately, they are all superficial attempts to correct a systematic problem. Yet they reflect the powers that shape our knowledge and give us illusions of positive climate action.
Finally, the outer ring consists of attempts that view nature as a “dumping ground” for waste. Starting clockwise from the right, the sites of dumping are: land (suburban landfill sites), the Atmosphere (global PM2.5 air pollution), and oceans (plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean). Yet the capacity of nature to serve as a dumping ground is limited. The excessive amount of waste generated by capitalist production, which self-expands endlessly, is exceeding the natural threshold. Due to problematic conceptions of nature, we are increasingly approaching an eventual shipwreck that will destroy Earth’s natural environment as we know it.
Plasticene:
The plasticene reflects an epoch built out of plastic: a lightweight material so durable that every piece of plastic ever made remains somewhere in the ecosystem. Importantly, however, plastic is not just a noun, but also an adjective. The plasticene is defined by the quality of plasticity — that is, it is fundamentally moldable, characterized by its own capacity to be shaped by new technologies, political powers, and cultural movements.
Haram et. al. offer the following, useful definition of the Plasticene: A noun and adjective describing an era in Earth’s history, within the Anthropocene, commencing in the 1950s, marked stratigraphically in the depositional record by a new and increasing layer of plastic (Stager, 2011, attributed to Matt Dowling). (Haram et. al. 2020).
Plastic wouldn’t be epoch-defining if it didn’t assert itself in the archaeological record. And that it does. Christina Reed illustrates a vision of the Plasticene — as viewed from the future — beautifully in her 2015 paper, “Dawn of the plasticene age”:
One million years from now, geologists exploring our planet’s concrete-coated crust will uncover strange signs of civilisations past. “Look at this,” one will exclaim, cracking open a rock to reveal a thin black disc covered in tiny ridges. “It’s a fossil from the Plasticene age.” (Reed 2015)
But it’s important to complement this definition of the Plasticene with the understanding that plastic is not just a material marking our depositional record, but also a force behind economic and social change. Plastic has enabled technology that shapes how we do everything, from production of consumer goods to the waging of war. It is everywhere in hospitals and laboratories — but also in prisons and weaponry. Furthermore, the plastic cycle affects nearly every environment on earth. Our Gyrecene thus draws on plastic not just as a physical material, but as a current of change that exacerbates other forces, including our other three ‘cenes of focus.
But importantly, plastic is not just a destructive material — plastic items and upcycled plastic waste contribute enormously to medical and human rights advancements, as well as to art, fashion, and architecture.
This house, for example, is built primarily from plastic bottles by the artist Veronika Richterová. It is primarily designed to serve as shelter in refugee camps and other places where building more permanent, durable structures is a challenge.
Of course, before plastic ends up in the geological record, it circulates in the environment and often wreaks havoc on the health of animals, ecosystems and humans. Today, plastics have broken down to form nanoplastics, pieces so small (about 5 nanometers in width) that they can pass through cell walls (Gehrke 2019). Meanwhile, the world’s oceans contain at least five major gyres — swirling masses of macro- and micro-plastics that occupy the full water column.
In this ‘cene-specific map, we juxtapose data on national road infrastructure with national daily plastic consumption in order to tell a story about how relative ‘development’ of transport infrastructure, strongly related to national wealth, clearly correlates with countries’ plastic consumption. Interestingly, the relationship is different when per capita mismanaged plastic waste is considered: that is, countries with more road infrastructure have less mismanaged plastic waste, even when they consume more plastic (Jambeck et. al. 2015). The gyres are shown in order to highlight the accumulation of plastic following their lifespan as land, and to remind the viewer that plastic used day-to-day on land often eventually becomes the plastic that chokes marine ecosystems and enters our own food supply via seafood (Reed 2015).
Synthetic System:
This diagram illustrates how plastic, a natural progression of capitalism, winds up a driving force behind the progression of colonization, surveillance, and capitalism through material contributions to technology, fostering a culture of disposability, creating (even more) toxic working environments, especially in poor places, and enabling ever-more-advanced technologies of surveillance and capital accumulation, from credit cards to iPhones.
Here, we want to show how plastic is both material out of which much of this current epoch has been literally molded and represents a mode of mass production that accelerates other systems. This project argues that plastic, which emerged commercially in the early 1900s and exploded mid-century, exacerbates existing forces of surveillance, capitalism, and colonization in such a way as to swirl us into a state of shipwreck.
With that in mind, this ‘tour’ of key emblematic plastic artifacts is designed to show how plastic has built on itself and strengthened other currents over the last century.
I chose the artifacts to include here by exploring archival photographs, mostly from national museums, of plastic goods from the last century that interplay with surveillance, capital, and colonialism: for instance, how plastic army men from the 1930s capture a post-World War I militarism and nationalism that has come to define America’s foreign policy. I wanted each artifact to build upon the last and towards the next. For instance, while the army men capture the normalization of plastic goods, the credit card stamping machine reflects the eventual ubiquity of plastic manufacturing in the postwar period. From the stamping machine emerges the credit card itself, which came to define modern capitalism as well as surveilled consumerism, and which engages in colonial power dynamics (as shown in the synthetic map of offshore tax havens). The credit card then gives way to a mobile phone, which did not replace credit cards, but certainly transformed the role of consumption, banking, and currency by introducing cash apps, portable and instantaneous stock market updates, many new digital marketplaces, and algorithms that both keep track of and ultimately shape what, when, where, and how we buy things.
In this diagram, I leave the question of the exact dimensions and components of today’s shipwreck intentionally open, instead ending on a question: What now? How do plastic, surveillance, capital, and colonialism culminate in 2022? I explore some possible answers to that, including the rise of cryptocurrency as an environmentally destructive mode of capitalism reliant on apparent data security but requiring careful tracking of capital movement, the use of algorithms to predict and influence consumer behavior, and the normalization of hacking as a military strategy between major powers.
In the final box, I include text from Yeats’ The Second Coming, which begins
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
I included this because Yeats’ words are an excellent qualitative description of the state of gyre and shipwreck we are working to capture in this project. While plastic gyres and melt play a significant role in our maps and diagrams, these lines also serve as a sort-of tagline for our ‘cene because they reflect the chaos and all-consuming nature of a gyre formed by systemic and cultural currents.
Works Cited:
Surveillocene:
My Blue Window, American Artist (2015). https://vimeo.com/522937748
Miller, Andrea. 2019. “Shadows of War, Traces of Policing:The Weaponization of Space and the
Sensible in Preemption.” In Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and
Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, edited by Ruha Benjamin, 0. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478004493-006.
Capitalocene:
Fraser, Nancy. 2014. “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode.” New Left Review, no. 86 (April): 55–72.
Beauvoir, S., Borde, C. and Malovany-Chevallier, S., 2010. “The Second Sex.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Plasticene:
Galloway, Tamara S. “Micro-and nano-plastics and human health.” In Marine anthropogenic litter, pp. 343–366. Springer, Cham, 2015.
Hollóczki, O., Gehrke, S. Nanoplastics can change the secondary structure of proteins. Sci Rep 9, 16013 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-52495-w
Linsey E. Haram, James T. Carlton, Gregory M. Ruiz, Nikolai A. Maximenko, A Plasticene Lexicon,Marine Pollution Bulletin, Volume 150, 2020. 110714. ISSN 0025–326X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2019.110714. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X19308707)
PBC — Pallet Bottle Cabin designed for use in refugee camps. Veronika Richterová. https://www.veronikarichterova.com/en/no-mad-design/
Data Sources:
Point of Life Diagram:
Eltis, David, and David Richardson. n.d. “Trans-Atlantic — Introductory Maps.” Accessed May 6, 2022. https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/maps#introductory-.
Kennicutt, Mahlon. 2017. “Water Quality of the Gulf of Mexico.” In Habitats and Biota of the Gulf of Mexico: Before the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, 55–164. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3447-8_2.
Kirby, Holly. 2013. “Locked Up and Shipped Away: Interstate Prisoner Transfers & the Private Prison Industry.” Grassroots Leadership. November 19, 2013. https://grassrootsleadership.org/locked-up-and-shipped-away.
Knox, Patrick. 2017. “Blue Planet II Reveals How 28,000 RUBBER DUCKS Lost at Sea 25 Years Ago Are Still Washing Ashore around the Globe Today.” The Sun. November 21, 2017. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4963360/blue-planet-ii-28000-rubber-ducks-lost-sea-25-years-ago-still-washing-ashore/.
Naufragocene Map:
Mercator, Gerhard. 1607. “America Sive India Nova.” David Rumsey Map Collection. 1607. https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~323990~90093247:America-sive-India-Nova-.
“U.S. Office of Coast Survey.” n.d. Accessed May 6, 2022. https://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/data/wrecks-and-obstructions.html.
Human Impact on Marine Ecosystems: class data
Shipping Routes: class data
Surveillocene Map:
Julien, Cornebise, Swetha Pillai. BanTheScan Data. 2020. Amnesty International. https://banthescan.amnesty.org/decode/
U.S. Census Bureau (2020). Race for the Population 18 Years and Over. https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=race&g=0400000US36%241400000&tid=DECENNIALPL2020.P3.
Census tracts: class data
Synthetic Map:
Tax Justice Network (2021). Corporate Tax Haven Index. https://index.taxjustice.net/cthi/2021/world/index/top.
Country Shapefile: class data
Plasticene Map:
World Roads: class data
Jambeck et. al. 2015. Chemosphere. (data sets: “plastic waste produced,” “coastal population,” “mismanaged plastic waste.” Volume 298, July 2022, 134267
Systems Diagram:
Credit Card Imprinter, United States, 1960s. “Consumer Era: Charge It.” National Museum of American History. 69.235.53
American Express Credit Card, United States. 1970. “Consumer Era: Charge It.” National Museum of American History. 1992.3046.01
Nokia Mobile Phone, Kenya. 21st Century. “Online Collection.” National Museum of American History. 1992.3046.01
Townsend, Allie. “All-Time 100 Greatest Toys.” Time. Time Inc. Accessed May 7, 2022. http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2049243,00.html.
