Katheryn M. Detwiler
In 2003 a stone was placed on the llano de Chajnantor, a high-altitude plateau in the Chilean Andes. This stone designated Chajnantor as the site of one of the most ambitious astronomical projects on Earth: The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA). Completed in 2013, ALMA is the $1.4 billion dollar joint project of The European Southern Observatory (ESO), which comprises fifteen European member states, the US National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Natural Sciences of Japan.
Both ESO and the US have been dominant presences in the development of observatories in the Atacama Desert since the early 1960s, when mid-twentieth century European and US astronomy’s southern hemisphere ambitions and shifting post-war geopolitics first took astronomers and site testers to the arid mountains of northern Chile. Chajnantor joins a patchwork of observatory sites in the Atacama operating since the 1960s as non-Chilean territories, with the rights and immunities of diplomatic embassies. From these sites data ‘flow’, as one observatory director put it to me, ‘from photons to petabytes’.
At 16,500 feet above sea level on Chajnantor, ALMA is a telescope made up of sixty-six radio antennae synchronized to observe as one. From light collected at the boundary of the radio and infrared portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, ALMA generates massive amounts of astro-data. These data circulate from Chajnantor to an archive at ALMA’s headquarters in Santiago, then on to a data centre at ESO’s headquarters in Garching bei München, Germany. Finally, moving as the intellectual property of particular astronomers for a period of one year, these data are dispersed through access points at ALMA Regional Centers, or ARCs, in the US, Europe and East Asia.
From its high perch on Chajnantor, ALMA is proximate to and nearly equidistant from two other giant technoscientific installations: the Chilean state copper corporation, Codelco’s, Chuquicamata copper mine, one of the world’s largest open-cast copper mines; and the Sociedad de Quimica y Minera (SQM or Soquimich) lithium mine, one of the largest producers of lithium in the world. Soquimich is one of two lithium mines operating on the Salar de Atacama, the salt flat that is overlooked by the high peaks of the Andean cordillera in which both Chuquicamata and ALMA sit.
Atacama lithium mine. Photograph by Katheryn M. Detwiler, 2017.
Chuquicamata, over a century old in its industrial incarnation, is in the midst of being converted from an open pit to an underground mine. The underground expansion will extend the life of the mine for thirty years, enabling Codelco to reach what remains of the ore body beneath the existing pit. The Soquimich lithium mine describes itself as a ‘living mine’, where solar irradiance is used to distill hyper-saline brines, pumped from subsurface aquifers, into a variety of industrial products. The last salt to be harvested in this process is lithium, a highly reactive alkaline metal, commodified as electro-mobility.
My fieldwork in the Chilean altiplano moved amongst this triangle of technoscientific installations. Each is a point of intensification of multiple temporal and material scales where energetic Earth forces are put to work as productive forces, evoking what architect Godofredo Pereira’s describes as an ‘axiomatic Earth’ – every dimension a strategic domain. Transforming ore, brine and light into copper cathode, lithium carbonate and astronomical data, these installations are nodes in coordinated circuits of extraction, commodification and circulation so extensive that they render the Atacama Desert, as Martín Arboleda has described, as a ‘planetary mine’.
Sublime in scale, these engineered worlds are planetary in their networked extents, organized around concerns with maximal production, efficiency and supply chain optimization as well as with those of ubiquitous computing, prediction, automation, simulation and continuous functioning. Even diurnal rhythm doesn’t disturb ALMA’s production of astro-data. Because the ALMA telescope operates in the sub-visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, it is not dependent on nocturnal dark to function. The aspiration toward continuous functioning is an aspect of what makes Soquimich a ‘living mine’. Perpetual monitoring generates a continuous flow of data about the changing ionic specificity of the salar and of the brines being concentrated in evaporation pools. These data feed hydro-geological models that enable risk modeling and near and long-term projections of brine compositions. ALMA employs atmospheric models, climate monitoring stations and radiometers to measure water vapour present in the line of vision of each antenna. These distorting atmospheric effects, along with those of temperature flux, wind speed and other variables, can later be corrected. Noise is ‘cleaned’ from datasets in increasingly automated ways. Chuquicamata’s new underground mine aspires to be ‘smart’, as mine conditions and miners’ activities will be monitored by ubiquitous underground and wearable sensors, the data from which can trigger automated decision making about mine safety and productive activity.
These are logistical worlds that, as Ned Rossiter has written, are typically ‘distant from metropolitan imaginaries and suffer intrusions of materiality in ways that unsettle the abstraction of information’. Rossiter describes the ‘smooth-world systems’ to which logistical worlds aspire. Logistical ‘nightmares’, then, are contingencies that need to be controlled, doing ‘whatever is required to get the machine up and running again’.
Automation and predictive modeling are deployed as partial solutions to these unpredictable disruptions. They are tools of what Benjamin Bratton has called the ‘subtractive modernity’ of counter-industrialization, variously called ‘logistical’ or ‘surveillance’ or ‘supply-chain’ capitalism. Refining older techniques for taming worker resistance and material recalcitrance, these techniques are marked above all by aspirations toward the capture of contingency, the containment of disruption, or what Bratton identifies as the ‘automation of the exception’.
ALMA, Chuquicamata and Soquimich each take the non-finality of landscapes as a condition of possibility and a form of permeability that introduces the problem of contingency. As each giant of science or industry acts technically and infrastructurally, territorially and categorically, to operationalize Atacama substances and Earth forces – tectonic, hydraulic, atmospheric, meteorological and electromagnetic – the disruptions with which they contend are many.
The capacity to halt these smooth-world systems of non-stop production manifests in desert forces of earthquakes and weather events. Codelco’s operations are interrupted with some frequency by labour strikes and, not infrequently, by slope collapses that can become political flashpoints regarding the danger of the masculinized labour of mining – and that can devastate production. Strikes mounted by ALMA’s Chilean workforce have twice halted the array, once including their occupation of the observatory itself. The observatory’s science operations were halted during the massive social protests that engulfed Chile in October 2019, when outrage about the ongoing authority of Pinochet’s constitution bloomed at a scale not seen since the formal end of Chile’s dictatorship. In 2019, Soquimich’s plan to expand production on the salar was halted by a campaign of resistance mounted by Indigenous Likan Antai collectives, their legal complaint upheld by a Chilean environmental court. As I write, all ALMA operations have been stopped by the fearsomely disruptive effects of a pandemic virus.
So-called ‘next-generation’ observatories like ALMA strive toward remote-operation and the full automation of observation and data-analysis. Meanwhile, Chilean astro-data are themselves deployed in fostering an emergent ‘subtractive modernity’, in which unpredictable disturbances can be managed with ever-greater efficiency. Astronomy’s complex datasets, which contain traces of highly contingent events like supernovae, provide proving grounds for the development of new algorithms for the automated prediction of, in one example, slope collapse – an algorithm developed on Chilean astro-data and put to work at Codelco’s mines.
As of 2019, Amazon is partnering with the Chilean state to web-host Chilean astro-data, creating a data lake for a so-called Data Observatory that will ‘consolidate, analyze in real-time and archive astronomy data streams from all wavelengths across all Chilean observatories in the Atacama Desert’. The transversality in which Chilean astro-data are instrumentalized to better mine the Atacama underground, along with the instrumentalization of astro-data as they are ‘uploaded’ to the cloud, represent ways in which, on the terrain of the Chilean sky, extractivism and governance are becoming ‘smart’. As the Minister of the Chilean Economy put it, it is the ‘volume, quality, speed and diversity’ of astro-datasets – cosmic complexity itself – that make them valuable for state, industrial and private enterprise.
As the installations at Chuquicamata, ALMA and Soquimich forge interactions among the underground, surface and sky, they also articulate with a parallel and enmeshed world – one not organized by the extractive view – that they must know and manage as a matter of logistical efficiency. Chajnantor is also Thaknatur, translated from the Kunza language of Likan Antai collectives as ‘the place of departure’ or ‘the place of flight’. Thaknatur is involved in an Andean ecology of practice defined, most prominently, by the ring of stratovolcanos that surrounds ALMA, Chuquicamata and Soquimich. This triangle of giants that, in their networked extents, exceed mere proximity is then also surrounded, ringed by agencies that exceed them.
This parallel world is organized through Likan Antai relations of ayllu, or collectives of human and non-human actors that include plants, animals, the elements, landscape features and people. Here, mountains are not only mountains but are agencies in in-ayllu kinship networks. In 2002, just one year before ALMA laid its ‘first stone’ on Chajnantor, in-ayllu representatives successfully sued Codelco for the removal of a radio antenna on the summit of the mountain (but not only a mountain) Kimal, which sits opposite Chajnantor across the salar de Atacama, and additionally secured reparations for ontological harm. These agencies, then, though ‘impossible as matters of political concern’, under what anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena describes as the ‘coloniality of modern politics’, in fact have a regional precedent of manifesting politically.
The dynamism of landscape and the disruptive potentials of Indigenous territorial claims that are rooted in dissent from the terms of sameness through which extractivism operates – everything an extractable resource – incite projects of institutional management that join the array of hydro-geological, atmospheric, environmental and mineralogical data and models employed at ALMA, Chuquicamata and Soquimich in order to manage risk.
Prior to coming into full operation, ALMA sponsored an extensive regional ethno-astronomy project, used to substantiate the observatory’s eventual claim that Likan Antai cosmology and radio astronomy are continuous with each other – fundamentally ‘the same’. ALMA aligns its opening of the spectral window into the dark universe with the status of Thaknatur as ‘the place of departure’ in order to rationalize the observatory’s emplacement. Ethno-astronomy is used to position Likan Antai ontologies in ALMA’s account of its own inevitability. Anthropology, in Elizabeth Povinelli’s terms, is used to make difference ‘doable’ and therefore manageable and thus makes anthropology an extension of a liberal logic.
In effect, once alterity is brought under the frame of sameness and once difference is flattened, Indigenous claims to in-ayllu hybrid kinship are undercut, making ‘nature’ separable and thus a commodity alienable from more-than-human ecologies. ALMA’s arrangement of Indigenous ‘Andean cosmovision’ as continuous with radio astronomy is at once a way to accrue legitimacy through multicultural respect, while also a way of garnering innocence to its spectral and territorial occupation. Among other effects, this obscures astronomy’s entanglements with multi-purpose projects of data-mining the Chilean sky, including the instrumentalization of astro-data to better mine the Atacama underground. In this sense, ALMA cloaks itself in the language of anthropology while inflecting the extractive logics of its mining neighbours.
The difference that inheres in Andean ontologies of place is a potential logistical nightmare for ALMA – should Thaknatur ever manifest politically. For anthropology, this difference is resolved as a potential dream, suggestive of possibilities beyond modernist homogeneity. But for ALMA, the political and ethical positions that dissent from sameness and register that which ‘the state cannot recognize’ are not taken as inherent threats to the Chilean state, capitalist modernity or scientific progress, or even added to the long lists of fears that torment modernist projects – of regression, feudalism, inefficiency, mess, contestation, savagery and refusal. What inheres in Chajnantor’s status as Thaknatur is, for ALMA, a potential disturbance to be accounted for and managed with institutional dispatch. Ontology isn’t the same as contingency, but insofar as it poses a disruption to a smooth-world system of production, it is a contingency, a liability.