Just so you can’t say I didn’t mention the clouds 111 4. Sensing the Clouds Figure 6 – Smoke cloud over the city of São Paulo, resulting from the Amazon rainforest fires, August 20, 2019. Source: Época. The element of the cloud, both as an environment and as a medium, helps us understand phenomena related to mate- rialities, both internal and external to communication, as well as technological, social, political, and especially ecological process- es (Durham Peters, 2015). An illustrative example is the dark cloud that, in August 2019, resulted from fires in the Amazon rainforest in northern Brazil and obscured the city of São Paulo, located in the southeast, in broad daylight. Suddenly, the day turned into night. This soot cloud is at once a tangible indicator of the material destruction of the forest, a symbol of the devas- tating policies of the Bolsonaro government (2018-2022), and a signifier of that government’s eco-necropolitical imaginary. The dark cloud circulated these material and symbolic mean- ings across thousands of kilometers, creating a shared common sense of the event itself first as news reports in various media, and then interpreted as ideological discourse. On social me- dia, narratives of environmental protection circulated with the hashtag #SOSAmazônia, while, on the other hand, the Bolsonaro government propagated climate denialism, with the environ- ment minister claiming it was fake news. Wisnik (2018) argues that the cloud, or more precisely, the fog, is “a crucial metaphor for thinking about the transforma- tion of everyday life by technology” (p.22). He exemplifies with the incessant movement of the financial capital over the world, which can also be understood as occurring in a movement of multiple levels of “cloud” formations (p. 22). This metaphor can be extended to data clouds, formed by a complex of actors
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjEzNzYz