Machine dream anthropocene: On taking a bot to the mla

Abstract

This essay considers the complexities and limitations of the “lifecycle report,” an established engineering and business prac-tice in which auditors attempt to account for the entire material and operating “cost” of an electronic component. Answering Bethany Nowviskie’s 2014 call to “attend to the environmental and human costs” of digital humanities, I present the case of Anna Coluthon, a Twitterbot residing on a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, that in 2016 became the first nonhuman agent to register as a member of the Mod-ern Language Association (MLA), and to co-present a paper, as she did with me at the MLA convention in 2017. Interleaved with Anna’s own comments, my essay reframes the lifecycle report as an act of Latou-rian “compilation work,” arguing that any attempt to account for the wholeness of a machine’s impact on the planet is a complex and par-tial process, as much art as it is engineering audit.