What’s New Yesterday is Old Today

Described in Nick Dreyer-Witheford’s socio-interactive essay “Digital labor, species-becoming and the global worker,” the contemporary age is one in midst of the “Anthropocene,” (Dreyer-Witheford 486). This separation between man and environment perpetuated into one where the man-made is part of nature finds itself apparent in a few points in Hari Kunzru’s tale of global-information-transmission-gone-wrong, Transmission. In the plot, Arjun Mehta, the enthusiastic and naive computer engineer migrates to the U.S. where the the aforementioned point by essayist Dreyer-Witheford is seen. In a montage reminiscent to a wanderer in a desert, Arjun is first depicted as a boy walking in new land, in which the landscapes include, “a low concrete barrier, where the Taco Bell ended and the Staples lot began. Beyond Staples was a Wal-Mart and beyond that a road junction,” (Kunzru 37). By use of buildings, chains, and the concrete milieu, agriculture, farmland and what Dreyer-Witheford cites as the “Holocene” (Dreyer-Witheford 486) are replaced by new “crops,” these being the product of suburbia.

In Guy Swift’s case, we see another aspect of the Anthropocene invading the Holocene, most flagrant with where he presides; In Vitro. Described as in the Archon magazine, the In Vitro edifice is “one of absolute calm, a heavenly sense of floating free of the cares of the world,” (Kunzru 110). The problems of the world, which can be arguably reduced to base struggles, as those describes in the Holocene, that of agriculture, survival, tools and the like, are separate from contemporary problem. The problems in the realm of heaven In Vitro resides in and its inhabitants is that of reaching the top floor, and in a ponder Guy notes “A garbage barge went past, headed for the downriver landfill site. As usual, though he loved the view, he found himself thinking how better it would be from higher up,” (Kunzru 113). The feeling is a level of superiority from new-age thinking and working people in their regards to the natural settings around them.