In 1999, or thereabouts, photographer Karel Kravik stood on the northern Estonian coast and pointed his lens out across the Gulf of Finland. The image we are left with shows dry earth, coarse vegetation, and a curious expanse of smooth ground, appearing almost lung-like, before a band of sea and sky beyond. The decade at its close had been one of rapid upheaval for Estonia, following its independence from Soviet occupation in 1991. Throughout this period, the country’s northern coast—almost the entire length of which faces Finland directly—proved an important axis of transition. In part, a collaborative corridor of shared cultural affinities, linguistic kinship, and economic interests; in part, a comparative yardstick of technoeconomic disparities. Perhaps there was a touch of both tangible in then President Lennart Meri’s oft-repeated challenge: what was Estonia’s Nokia? If his reference was to the rapid rise of the well-known Finnish telecoms company throughout the 1990s, then his more fundamental point was the horizon itself: the desire for an idea larger than the present moment.
Photograph by Karel Kravik, c.1999. Sillamäe Radioactive Waste Storage Facility (karelkravik.com)
In fact, Estonia did not attempt to establish a competing digital industry to those of its Nordic neighbours—within whose electronics supply chains a significant percentage of its own labor was then being assimilated. Rather, as detailed by political scientists Rainer Kattel and Ines Mergel, attention focused instead on developing what they describe as a “general-purpose technology”1 whilst politically advancing IT as a fundamental “socioeconomic skill.”’2 Supported by both public and private actors, these efforts have had the most sustained and substantial impact within the emerging field of “e-governance.”
The state’s own official account of its “digital journey” can be found on the website e-Estonia.com. Here, between a statistical overview of achievements thus far, and a two-part film introducing the “ambitious future,” a vertical timeline threads together a neat and tidy narrative.i This starts with such early initiatives as a nationwide computing education and access programme “Tiger’s Leap” (1996) and the transition to online tax declaration (2000). From these events, we progress towards gradually bolder infrastructural solutions and services, the backbone of which has been “X-Road” (2001), a “distributed data exchange layer” spanning numerous public and private information systems.ii We might also note Estonia’s leading international role on the issue of cybersecurity, or, more recently, the exploration of an extrovert dimension to its digital profile via “e-residency” (2014), a programme inviting the remote registration of businesses by global entrepreneurs.
However, if increasingly expansive, then this profile has also become more carefully and consistently curated under the direction of Brand Estonia, a design platform established in 2016. As a result, we now encounter “e-Estonia,” which is touted as being home to a “digital society,”iii and accompanied by a toolkit harmonizing the content and conduct of all official state communication. This branding actively promotes Estonia’s digital reputation as more than the sum of its infrastructural parts. It illustrates what might be best described in terms of a particular developmental disposition, prioritizing a supportive base for high-tech investment, research, and entrepreneurship: the so-called digital “ecosystem.”iv It is very much from within this mindset that the FINEST Twins smart city initiative has emerged, a recent urban project that directs our attention squarely back to the (north-facing) horizon of Kravik’s photograph.
Developed initially through the PhD of e-governance scholar Dr Ralf Martin Soe, in 2019 it received a 32 million euro grant, co-financed by the European Union and Estonian Government, in order to establish a Smart City Centre of Excellence. The Centre is to be based at Tallinn University of Technology and to operate closely with Finnish partners Aalto University and Forum Virium Helsinki. Underpinning this project is a shared premise that the pursuit of the next digital frontier should be substantially urban in form, rooted in a more collaborative approach to a more regional vision. Geographically situated between the Estonian and Finnish capitals, in narrative terms this is framed as “A Tale of Two Smart Cities.”
Soe’s digital Dickensian riff is a popular refrain amongst tech-inclined urban writers, eager to establish their own “superlative ... comparison” of the best and the worst of the “smarter” times to come.v The FINEST version offers a choice between either “horizontal” or “vertical” digitalization, specifically: co-creation between neighbors of a cohesive digital macro-region, or else the individual pursuit of smart agendas, resulting, effectively, in digital urban islands.vi Soe advocates the “horizontal” scenario, characterizing it as the virtual double to another long-standing planning proposal: a Tallinn-Helsinki tunnel for high-speed rail. Sidestepping debates as to the pros and cons of the rail option itself, he argues that the development of interoperable digital infrastructures (Finland has already adopted X-Road) connected to networks of urban sensors, will form an equally valuable corridor of communication and economic advancement.vii This figurative “virtual tunnel” could be pursued “as part of ... or even instead of” its physical (rail) counterpart.viii However, it is important to stress that, if engaged through its urban particulars, a FINEST future is, in and of itself, very much a physical tale, the logic of which eventually returns us to Kravik’s photograph, although not quite the way we left it.
Material Returns
Soe effectively outlines a threefold transformation of the city and its subjects, whereby “civic zones” are reconfigured as “responsive environments,” inhabitants recast as “actuators” and their “many electronic devices” recruited as a sensing population of things.ix In doing so, the digital is promoted as an ever-more dispersed, intimately embedded, and immediately responsive aspect of our lived physical realities. The point here is less the differentiation between physical and virtual attributes, and more the melding together of these things. We might note that, in practice, touch-screened interface with a regional parking app, or encounters with a “smart” lamp post, may well prove underwhelming when compared to all the digital fanfare. Yet, it is partly that mundaneness, the unassuming nature of material proximity, which gives a deeper power to these developments. Especially given that the point is to sense or influence our habitual behaviors.
We might at this point turn to the wording of Dickens’ own two-city tale, and its long opening line, which is cited in full by Soe. Here we find pendulous swings from one polarity to another, from “Light” to “Darkness”’ and from “hope” to “despair,” the temporal anchors of which are “the season,” “the epoch,” “the period.”x Despite its popularity amongst smart-city advocates, Dickens’ prose tends to figure as simply a frame for their own comparative pairings. If, instead, we question the relation between Dickens’ words and those of smart urbanism, things become more complicated. The broader strokes of the “smart” narrative, its pioneering advances towards bold digital frontiers, fit well with Dickens’ dramatic staging. By contrast, though, when broken down to more functional descriptions such as real-time flows, or seamless interoperability, then a sort of temporal depthlessness emerges, which contrasts sharply with Dickens’ great epochal opposites. Critically, it is this flattened dimension within which our actions and affects are translated as we negotiate the physical-virtual environments described above. A condition that we might describe, in the language used by legal scholar Antoinette Rouvroy, as algorithmically governed.
Rouvroy claims that what it is being produced by these transitions is a loss of the “transversal dimension” of knowledge production.xi This is the result of our reflective and critical capacities being continuously bypassed by the supra-intelligence of big data; a form of “knowledge” that is, by definition, beyond individual expression. As we rely increasingly on its methods of profiling, prediction, and pre-emption for making authoritative sense of the world, then, according to Rouvroy, we elevate what amounts to a second, “algorithmic reality.”xii Operating as something like a protracted risk-calculation, this diminishes the “virtual dimension of potentiality.”xiii Put otherwise, it is the production of a horizon that neither arises from, nor recognizes, our status as emergent, desiring subjects.
Clearly, these are neither the terms Soe uses, nor the ends he promises. Rouvroy’s contribution, however, is to addresses digitalization through a broader lens, by posing the question: where, cumulatively, does all this lead? Whilst taking seriously the logic of her argument, it seems equally important to caution against a reactionary response in the form of a return to defend the—single, sovereign, and centered— horizon. Here, again, I would advocate turning to the material. On the one hand, we must do this because we find materiality situated at the crosshairs of the often banal powers of physical-virtual transformations. On the other, we can explore how the material, in its physical presence, maintains its own distinct form of virtuality at the intersection of nature and labor. That means acknowledging the elements responsible for its current composition, and the information this carries about other subjects and contexts than those immediately present. In this way materiality can be an opening to multiple horizons, a move away from diametric oppositions towards an understanding of how one reality is made through another.
Returning to the particulars of Kravik’s photograph, here we find a powerful intersection of all these characteristics. In the image’s emphatic horizontality—which echoes important aspects of Soe’s own argument—it soon becomes apparent that the taut band of blue where sea meets sky, is just one of the many possible horizons we could trace through its sedimented layers. As for the bald expanse of ground, when studied closely, we find that it is materially related to the digital transitions noted above, at the same time as demonstrating the limits of the narrative thread of e-Estonia we have been tracing thus far.
Another Tale...
Central to the photograph is the covered top of a radioactive tailings pond, situated on a coastal outcrop, some 180km east of Tallinn and 20km short of the Russian border. The pond contains roughly 800 tons of thorium and 1200 tons of uranium,making it one of the most substantial instances of industrial waste on the Estonian territory.xiv It stands as the result of the long-term processing of uranium, but also rare metals. In his notes to the photograph, the photographer indicates a small vertical shadow in the bottom right-hand corner, cast, he explains, by one of the twin chimneys of what is today known as the Silmet plant, to which the tailings pond belongs. Both lie to the edge of his native town of Sillamäe.
Together, plant and town were developed during the early years of Estonia’s Soviet occupation from two pre-existing, and formerly distinct, village settlements (Sillamäe and Türsamäe). The purpose of this development was originally to establish a major site for uranium production and mining in the midst of the atomic arms race. Given the strategic value of the materials to be handled there, the site was top secret. Initial work on the mine and factory was conducted by forced mass labor, and the resulting urban-industrial enclave forcibly excluded ethnic Estonians. Unsurprisingly, Sillamäe’s relation to the territory upon which it stands is a particularly complicated one: whilst it was an aggressive act of territorial appropriation by an occupying force, for the thousands who migrated for work from across the Soviet Union—by 1950, the population was already 10,000—it was also the site of their everyday lives.
Kattel and Mergel have noted that Estonia’s digital transformation has in many ways been defined by the country’s rejection of its inherited Soviet industrial base, despite being at the technological and economic forefront of the Soviet Union. This rejection was intimately connected to environmental protests during the 1980s, the so-called “Phosphorite War” of 1987, which laid important foundations for elites’ commitment to an economic future based upon “something completely different.”xv The protests were sparked by “plans for even more investment into resource-intensive heavy industry and mining—and fears of new waves of immigration”—an issue which had come to prominence in relation to the large migrant labor supporting Estonia’s expanded Soviet industrial base.xvi
During the 1990s there would be direct political conflict over immigration and citizenship. Authorities decided not to extend automatic citizenship rights to ethnic minorities post-1991, given the illegality of Soviet occupation and claims that the state should therefore return to the same form as during the interwar republic. This led to great uncertainty for those who had no meaningful access to this “return,” but had nonetheless spent many years—if not decades—living in Estonia. These tensions would intersect with calls for regional autonomy by certain political actors, both in Sillamäe and the nearby town of Narva. Political scientist David J. Smith has described referenda held on the issue in 1993, stressing the contrast between the posturing of key actors, and apparently ambiguous position of most of the towns’ inhabitants.xvii
Sillamäe still tends to be associated with its (closed) nuclear past and a degree of otherness. However, the plant’s continuous work since the 1970s with the rare metals tantalum and niobium, and an array of rare earth elements (REEs), constitutes a less well-known, but in many senses “digital” history of its own. Whereas all uranium-based activities terminated in 1989, the plant’s highly skilled metallurgical and chemical workers have continued their work with these new materials, supporting its successful transition from command to market conditions. In doing so, they have maintained Silmet’s somewhat unique position within much wider material histories.
In digital terms, this history is integral to the physical transformation of computing: from mainframe systems to personal computing, and now the mobile devices integral to “smart” environments. For Silmet, it has been experienced as major reorientations from the relative security of its Soviet-era material linkages, to negotiation of uncertain trade through various stages of domestic ownership, and later complete integration within North American corporations. The latter phase has also seen Silmet, somewhat unexpectedly, move center-stage in one of the major narratives of the REE industry itself: the story of its radical transformation during the 1990s from US-led to Chinese leadership. In 2011, Silmet was bought by Molycorp Minerals LLC as part of its major attempt to resuscitate the US’s REE industry. The failure of this has led to Silmet’s current position within Canadian multinational Neo Performance Materials, a company with unique Chinese production ties. As such, the plant’s horizons remain part of a much larger infrastructural whole, but, both in terms of ownership and the wider industry, the orientation of those horizons has fundamentally shifted.
Under the greater narrative arcs of industrial and geostrategic transitions, the tailings pond itself reminds us that, viewed otherwise, these histories start to flatten the diverse temporalities of the materials themselves and the territorial relations they sustain. During the second half of the 1990s, a NATO special research workshop on Sillamäe’s pond initiated the process that Kravik captured, namely the stabilization, covering, and closure of the pond.3 In a sense, this also marked another form of closure: Estonia’s reestablishment of the right to determine the future of its territory. Digital transformation has in part emerged from, and certainly supported that trajectory. It is unclear how “closed” a story like this can be: if you follow that waste, today it appears to have been shipped to the White Mesa Uranium Mill, Utah, whose waste management has a poor track record, threatening the air and long-term water safety of the Ute Mountain Ute tribal community which resides some three miles from the mill.4 In May 2019, the community marched for the future safety of their land, protesting what we might characterize as another form of digital horizon that neither emerges from, nor recognizes, their desiring subjecthood. It is a horizon shared by many who deal with the radioactive footprints of digital leaps forward.
A cross-border narrative seems to be a necessity, but how exactly to frame it is a persistent and restless question. On the one hand, we are left to confront the question of identifying the diverse narratives that criss-cross this space, of how wide to draw our nets, as researchers, commentators, or practitioners. On the other, we must also ask ourselves how we are to articulate, conceive of, and change these dominant stories? This essay has set out a tentative sketch of how “material” might be taken as a point of departure rather than an outcome in critical explorations of our digital present. Transversal, material explorations are, in other words, crucial to clarifying what we think we mean by “a digital future.” ●▮
Jennifer Jackson
Notes
1. R. Kattel, I. Mergel, Estonia’s Digital Transformation: Mission Mystique and the Hiding Hand. UCL, Institute for Innovation and Public Policy Working Paper Series (IIPP WP 2018-09), 2018, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2018/sep/estonias-digital-transformation-mission-mystique-and-hiding-hand (accessed 10 January 2020), p.4.
2. Ibid.
3. See: C. K. Rofer, “Averting a Baltic Sea Disaster. – Doomed to Cooperate: US-Russian Lab-to-Lab Cooperation Story,” https://lab2lab.stanford.edu/e-archive/welcome-e-archive/beyond-lab-lab/cheryl-rofer/averting-baltic-sea-disaster (accessed 18 March, 2020).
4. Grand Canyon Trust, “White Mesa Uranium Mill,” (2020), https://www.grandcanyontrust.org/white-mesa-uranium-mill (accessed 14 January 2020).
i. e-Estonia – https://e-estonia.com/ (accessed April 11, 2020).
ii. Ibid.
iii. Ibid.
iv. Ibid.
v. R-M. Soe, “A Tale of Two Smart Cities: How Virtual Walls Between Cities can Fall” (Doctoral Thesis, Tallinn University of Technology, Ragner Nurske Department of Innovation and Governance), 2018, https://old.taltech.ee/institutes/ragnar-nurkse-department-of-innovation-and-governance/research-67/phd-dissertations-4/ (accessed 20 March 2020), p.8.
vi. Ibid.
vii. Ibid, p.98.
viii. Ibid, p.8.
ix. Ibid, p.99.
x. Ibid, p.8.
xi. A. Rouvroy, “The End(s) of Critique: Data-Behaviourism vs. Due-Process” (Pre-publication version of chapter) in Ed. M. Hildebrandt, E. De Vries, Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn: Philosophers of Law Meet Philosophers of Technology, Routledge, 2012, p.2.
xii. Ibid.
xiii.Ibid, p.10.
xiv. E. Lippmaa and E. Maremäe, Uranium Processing at Sillamäe and Decommissioning of the Tailings. – Turning a Problem into a Resource: Remediation and Waste Management at the Sillamäe Site. Eds. T. Kaasik, C.K. Rofer. Estonia Series: Nato Science Partnership Subseries: 1, 2000, vol. 28, p.10.
xv. Ibid.
xvi. R. Kattel, I. Mergel, Estonia’s Digital Transformation, p.5.
xvii.See: D. J. Smith, Narva Region within the Estonian Republic: From Autonomism to Accommodation – Regional & Federal Studies, 2002, vol.12 (2), pp. 89–110.
