Temporada 1 · Rizomas en Combustión · JVV-T1-09

Neomaterialism: giving flesh to the code

I Prologue: when the electronic dust asks for muscle

There was a moment—circa 2010—when we believed the “cloud” was an immaterial, weightless realm.
But every ping beats in a mineral, every NFT sweats lithium, every algorithm chews kilowatts.
The Neomaterialism breaks in to remind us that the digital world does not levitate: it embeds, wounds, erodes, fertilises.
Its mantra: “software is solidified sweat.”
And its ambition: to rewrite cultural critique and technological practice from density—of atoms, of bloods, of thermal cycles.

II Fingerprints of the new material

Mineral epistemology
—Knowing where a smartphonebegins: the Atacama salt flats, Congolese mines, Chinese smelters.
The bit drags a geological and geopolitical genealogy behind it.
Data-soil symbiosis
—Servers as greenhouses of heat: vertical farms next to data centres recycle up to 30 % of the dissipated energy into lettuces under LEDs.
Silicon releases chlorophyll.
Agrarian firmware
—Drones that pollinate, sensors that irrigate, but also malware that sabotages harvests.
Code stops being neutral and learns to smell of mud.
Feral circuits
—Africane-waste : dead monitors turned back into totems, copper extracted with acid and faith.
The high-tech future scrabbles among sparks and toxic smoke.

III Lashes at dualism

Neomaterialism rises against two ghosts:

Plato 2.0 — believing the idea (app, token, AI) is pure form ordering passive matter.
Ethereal capital — believing digital surplus value is “clean” because it does not smoke in the open air.

The answer: no cables, no meme, no lithium, no metaverse, no data day-labourers, no GPT.
The system's flesh beats under every click.

IV Cartography of cases

AWS Frankfurt pumps water from the Main to cool its racks; the estuary's temperature rises 1.6 °C in summer.
Tesla-Potosí: a German-Chinese consortium plans a lithium hydroxide plant; Quechua farmers demand a water royalty.
Wreckage from a 737-MAX reprinted as the chassis of civilian drones in Kyiv — the recycled fuselage becomes a vector of war.

All of them are acts of “material re-inscription”: high tech bites and bites the Earth again.

V Pragmatic programme

Mineral footprint audit
Every startup must publish a “periodic table of provenance”: percentages of cobalt, tantalum, gold, virtual water.
Cloud-heat dividends
No more heat given away: the data centres sell BTUs to district networks or pay an enthalpic tax.
Mutualist firmware
Licences that compel the release of recycling patents once a device goes obsolete.
Agricultural-digital co-design
AI trained on public soil datasets; the agrarian feedback rewrites the model—an embodied cycle.

VI Frictions and paradoxes

Toxic efficiency: 2 nm chips cut consumption but double the ultrapure water footprint.
Inverted colonialism: southern countries ban lithium exports without local refining; the North cries “critical minerals nationalism”.
Literary rebound: the more we talk about materiality, the more digital content we produce—more hard drives in Arabia.

VII Coda: making silicon flesh

“The interface does not float; it sprouts like a spore on veins of rust and human sweat.”

Neomaterialism does not plead for a nostalgic return to the artisanal: it wants to embed geological consciousness in every line of code, to build gadgets with a thermodynamic pedigree and a poetics of provenance.
Accelerate, yes—but weighing every step in grams of copper, litres of blood, degrees Celsius.

Next time your feed loads instantly, picture the copper burning down the mine.
And ask yourself whether the thumb that swipes the screen also swipes away some chance of repair.