Uneven Development and Bootleg Aesthetics

In “Fixed Flow: Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructure”, Nicole Starosielski’s description of how network speed and quality differ for the media users who rely on undersea cables seems easily connectable to our continuing discussion of neoliberalism or maybe more generally the dynamic between capitalism and media technologies. In “Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development”, David Harvey argues that under neoliberalism (or even just capitalism) one space or group of people will be always better off or get more at the expense of another space or collection of individuals (rather obvious). With the undersea cables, some media users will get fast network speeds and quality while others will not for various geographical, political, and socioeconomic reasons. Starosielski writes, “Cable routes are locations where media and communications are not only materially disrupted but can be actively surveilled or censored” (63). As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, Harvey cites surveillance as a major symptom of neoliberalism, and these undersea cables also move across national borders. Border-crossing, globality, or transnationalism also frequently appear in discussions of neoliberalism’s connection to the modern media age. Starosieski mentions that the border-crossing physical status of undersea cables leave the content they carry vulnerable to surveillance, “Because cables extend through national territories, the media that transit them are susceptible to the monitoring capabilities and infrastructural power of these nations- even if control is not sent or received from there” (63).

Both Starosielski in “Fixed Flow” and Jonathan Sterne in his “Compression: A Loose History” mention Lucas Hilderbrand’s work on ‘bootleg aesthetics’, which seems to be a relevant notion for analyzing creativity and mediated representation in relation to media technologies. Recounting Hilderbrand’s arguments, Sterne writes, “Blurred images and distorted sounds could serve as material traces of a video’s illicit circulation, adding a potential thrill or at least a call to identify with countercultures of circulation”. Hilderbrand has explicitly referred to Todd Haynes’s “Superstar” in his work on bootleg aesthetics. Haynes did not have the rights to the Carpenters songs used in “Superstar” (or the approval of Karen Carpenter’s brother) so for many years the main way to view “Superstar” was through bootleg VHS copies. The griminess of the copied and recopied bootleg versions of “Superstar” created the “illicit” aesthetic that Stern mentions (as well as relating to the dark subject matter of “Superstar”). Starosielski argues that in the same way that there are the ‘bootleg aesthetics’ of VHS, there are also “aesthetics of lag” (61) when digital videos are buffering, and which Joe also found intriguing. I’m really intrigued by how bootleg or videotape aesthetics and lag aesthetics are so easily discernible by media users that they are even painstakingly recreated in narrative films to evoke the feeling of watching something on VHS or online. There are any number of found footage horror movies that replicate the VHS or bootleg aesthetic as well as the (also horror) movie “Unfriended” which is presented entirely as the view of a computer screen and includes the lag aesthetics (buffering, alternating high and low-resolution) that Starosielski describes.