Devices, gadgets and everyday things might be the most obvious tangible entities of Mundania. Present technology. Perceivable and touchable. But what does it mean that something is tangible, and for whom and when is it tangible or graspable? How can different aspects of technologies be controlled in Mundania, and by whom? What do different people have to know about the technologies they live with? What can they know? The aim of this chapter is to approach these questions by closely engaging with some of the devices, materials and details of Mundania, and to start thinking about how they often seem to vanish.

Hands-on

To grasp something is to gain control, to have it at hand. To notice, comprehend and get in touch with it. To engage with processes, relations and devices (Dahlgren and Hill 2022). There are power dynamics at play here. Who can grasp what, who or what is under influence, and what do different people come to grips with? What does it mean that something is hands-on in a society permeated by complex technologies?

Many societies of the early 2020s are built on vast interconnected technological and organizational systems. Large-scale systems are furthermore built of miniscule components that are impossible to notice or adjust without advanced instruments. Top-secret facilities like data centres and connection points, housing a plethora of interconnected infinitesimal components.

The technologies of Mundania are ungraspable due to scale. Too large or too small. They are also ungraspable due to spatial or conceptual perimeter control. Many sites and whereabouts are secret, shielded and fenced off. The assemblages of technologies are huge and microscopic, distant but also close. When close and at hand, often also boxed in, sheltered and shielded. ‘Warranty void if seal is broken.’

Even though much of the world of advanced digital technologies is out of grasp, the word ‘digital’ pertains to something utterly concrete and human, namely fingers. Digital comes from digitus, the Latin word for finger. Throughout history, the fingers of a human have often been used for counting, and early calculating devices like abacuses are used with fingers. Devices for calculation operated by fingers are early and graspable forebears of today's systems of computation.

vbLarge-scale distributed technological systems extend beyond, and they are in the atmosphere, like a fog or like mist. This is all built on multiple layers and arrangements of infrastructure. Technologies of various age, installed for various reasons and with various purposes, are combined. Older constructions and systems influence the way newer systems are built and organized. Infrastructures are hidden beneath streets and floors, inside walls and away from sight. The word ‘infra’ in ‘infrastructures’ is Latin and means below, under or beneath. Spatially, infrastructures are, of course, not always below, but they are often persistently staying under the threshold of attention. Under, infra, sub. Subliminal.

Infrastructures

Sometimes infrastructures are visible. Intentionally showcased. Large factories, constructions and facilities built to function, but also built to impress (Nye 1996; Willim 2005b). Think again about the TV towers in the middle of cities, broadcasting buildings, huge power plants or enormous data centres (Ericson and Riegert 2010). Some of these are prominently visible. Anchor points. Parts of corporations and organizations, as well as parts of infrastructures. Even if these structures may be colossal, they are merely small parts of the systems. Like beacons along wide-ranging routes and networks. Water towers looking like mushrooms, visible fruiting bodies revealing that beneath there are enormously vast mycelium-like, rhizomatic systems of pipes, tubes and ducts. Our societies are full of similar fruiting bodies. Beneath, larger structures are hidden.

Despite these exposed buildings, infrastructures are often not considered. Mostly they are below the threshold of attention for most people. Sometimes they appear as cables and connectors that surface from below (Starosielski 2015). Sometimes they appear as enigmatic constructions, sometimes as points to engage with. Microphones, screens, buttons or maybe small, symmetrically organized holes in walls and sockets, tempting people to insert equipment, to connect and to charge. These are minute yet important points of engagement. Noticeable. Something people might look for. Once again like fruiting bodies, only smaller ones, that capture the attention of mushroom pickers. But the workings, the rhizomatic arrangements past these points are often overlooked and out of reach.

What role does order play in Mundania? When is this property challenged? Everyday life is where technologies withdraw. Infrastructures and the concealment of complexity are enmeshed in the dynamics of the commonplace, in the interplay between order and disorder. Also uncanny circumstances are veiled below ordered structures and grids, and through often numbing procedures. Sometimes order is challenged.

Standard procedures

Everyday life is rule-bound. It is orderly. Everyday life is however also based on improvisation, the nonsensical and the happenstance. Everyday life is this strange mix of routine and irregularity, where even recurrent disruptions seem to seep into the fabric of acceptance and normality. Uncertainties become enmeshed with monotony. It is paradoxical, ‘both ordinary and extraordinary, self-evident and opaque, known and unknown, obvious and enigmatic’, as cultural studies scholar Ben Highmore put it (2001: 16). Sometimes things just seem to happen, or they happen while we are busy doing something else. The ‘everyday is marked by both repetition and change, and by disciplinary assemblages that not only produce order but also disorder’ (Michael 2016: 650).

There is no standard version of the everyday. Yet, standards are enmeshed with the ways life unfolds. A standard is a unifying power in the upholding of technological systems. Technologies and infrastructures are sustained by ongoing processes and arrangements, by agreements and by formalized common understandings. Organization, classification and standards, together with maintenance, induce what seems like a permanent state, makes it possible to experience the variable and even irregular as a solid unified structure. It makes certain things withdraw while others pop up and provoke attention.

Standards, classifications and categorizations can be visible, and they can be manifested physically, like in the row of numbered architectural box-like houses along a street. Processes of classification are also part of the infrastructural, through withdrawn systematicity. The numbers on the houses, the addresses are indications of a drawn-out expanse of bureaucratical organization, classification and ongoing procedures. Population registration and utility services, statistics and connectivity.

What if everyday life was approached as a life in Mundania? A realm where more and more complex and incomprehensible technologies become part of the atmosphere. Layer after layer of these technologies is added. This realm shifts shape depending on context and the variabilities of everyday lives. Mundania emerges through the adoption of and adaptation to technologies that are gradually experienced as ordinary. It emerges through seductive offers and deals, built on the operations of a number of influential businesses. Mundania is then strengthened through recurring practices, rituals and routines through which technologies become intimately integrated in life. These circumstances make Mundania simultaneously banal and uncanny. Mundane and weird. At hand and ungraspable.

This book is a suggestion to imagine differently about so-called emerging technologies, about everyday life with foremost digitally engendered processes of computation bound together by vast technological and organizational networks and systems. It is also about continuously questioning what is experienced as and considered to be ordinary. What, when and for whom?

The book is based on a method I call ‘probing’. It is part research, part artistic practice and a way to serendipitously move between and remix different cultural analytic concepts and perspectives (Willim 2017b; 2023). In this, I will juxtapose and mix thoughts about the most miniscule and overlooked phenomena with discussions on broader issues. I will weave these together with theoretical arguments and elaborations.

I will concentrate foremost on how technologies, in the form of concrete material and corporate operations and often clandestine arrangements, can come together in everyday life, among those using, or rather living through, the technologies. I suggest that the realm of Mundania is based on a process called ‘mundanization’. I also suggest that Mundania is variable due to time, place and social circumstances. I will propose some variations of this realm and show how Mundania is based on processes of mundanization, and less so on domestication.

When technologies are introduced in Mundania, it is not about something wild becoming tamed and domesticated or converted step by step into controlled parts of everyday life.

Mundania started to take shape for me some years into the new Millennium. Google was quite new, and so were so-called social media. There were no iPhones. Advanced AI-generated content was considered as science-fiction. Pervasive, sensor-laden, networked and computational systems were talked about, but they were far from being part of people's everyday lives. I was working with mixes of art and cultural analysis, and one part of this work was associated with site-specific art and something that at the time was called locative art. We used digital equipment such as GPS-receivers, to make artworks that questioned ideas about geography, tourism and experiences of places.

Some years later, all the disparate equipment that we had been using was bundled into small rectangular slates of glass and metal: smartphones. These devices were continuously connected to socio-techno-economic systems that became increasingly hard to outline or pinpoint. Devices and systems were used daily, but were never really domesticated, tamed or under control. Instead, technologies were mundanized: they became part of everyday lives but were impossible to grasp. Pervasive digitalization and so-called digital transformation have never been about the taming of technologies. Not domestication. Instead mundanization.

What if this expanding mundanization is part of the gradual emergence of the realm Mundania? A shape-shifting entity. Mundania is something that gradually arises, like an all-encompassing haze that gradually sets as layer after layer of ever more complex technologies and offerings are presented. I have not been able to get rid of that imaginary. What if most of us live in Mundania, or rather in various guises of Mundania? The realm where new technologies repeatedly become ordinary. Where the very ordinary gradually mutate. The atmosphere thickens, new layers crop up.

While dealing with Mundania, while writing this book, I have been working as a researcher and as an artist. I have been based at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences at Lund University, an interdisciplinary environment at the Faculties of Humanities and Theology.

At a closer look, Mundania is constantly re-created. Order is, as we have seen, merely temporarily and situationally fixed. Mundania is like an image on a computer screen that seems to be static, but beneath and beyond the glass surface of the screen there is a constant flow of energy, processes and invisible work upholding what is experienced as a motionless image. Mundania keeps on emerging as people experience it.

What is experienced as ordinary and what is experienced as inertia or transformation is contextual. The different experiences of change, interferences and suspensions are furthermore unevenly distributed. There is variability and mutability in Mundania. Conditions might change and differ between time and context. Shifting tempi, temporalities and horizons of possibility for different people. This variability is related to social processes and stratifications and to the ways imaginaries unfold. What is possible, how does variability emerge and how is it maintained? The here and now of Mundania is influenced by projections into different times and possibilities, by expectations of what could come and what is remembered.

Elsewayness

How to capture the fleeting now, the emergent contemporary, and all the complex processes that continue, emerge and enmesh throughout time? How to capture all the varied rhythms and processes that uphold Mundania? How is the very local connected to distant places and to larger and stronger ongoing changes? Futures to pasts? All the incalculable potential entanglements. Uploading of files to a cloud service and climate change. Configuration of a webcam and the fluctuations of stock values of tech corporations on Nasdaq, the cosy hue from the light of a smart lamp and the death and suffering radiating from conflicts over rare earth metals? What is linked to what, and what is relevant to consider?

How the future of Mundania is manifested is not predetermined. It is important not to fall into the trap of technological determinism, to think that the specificities of the technologies that we are enmeshed with will inevitably steer us into one specific future (Rahm and Kaun 2022: 24). The future is inherently uncertain, unknowable and enigmatic, and attempts to steer or predict what will happen often fail. This is why it is relevant to think about futures in plural (Pink 2022: 14-15).

We have reached an endpoint. This last chapter is a kind of terminus, but not a boundary. It opens rather than closes the book. It resonates with the truism that every end is a beginning. Therefore, several contrasting considerations will be presented and juxtaposed in an exposition of short stories; some quite concerning, others slightly banal. These can be understood as openings. Here be peculiarities, failures and frictions of practices, operations, and circumstances. A cabinet of curiosities of the commonplace, the odd and sometimes the erroneous. A confession to strangeness, sometimes banal, sometimes intense.

This cabinet is a starting kit, a proposal for the reader to continue to think about and to collect similar examples. Which everyday weirdness is evoked by life with complex technologies and ungraspable techno-economic systems? How is your Mundania manifested? The curious, weird and incongruous is often hidden in the mundane. In that faint background hum. This is a suggestion to further unveil and capture the variations of Mundania. Because it might be in these openings, in the curiosities, that the potential lies. Instead of vanishing points, they can be vantage points to imagine differently, but to also question and scrutinize that which is unfair or outright wrong. The small stories of this cabinet might link to some of the discussions that have already been presented in the book. But here the stories are mostly intended to evoke openings in the shape of further question marks.

The chapter, or this small cabinet, will raise questions and instil more variation. How far can we stretch the Mundania-imaginary? The contrasting examples will point at the ambiguous nature of the variations of Mundania. Or are these examples fractures in the construct? Are these openings? To what? When is Mundania challenged by disruption, and when is mundanization still going on despite malfunctions, frictions, and discontent? What opens and what closes? For whom, how and when? There are variations in how Mundania can be experienced by different people. Uneven and often unfair circumstances. Mundanization is based on a tense interlink between enablement and submission.

When media and technologies withdraw, they can seem to vanish into thin air. They become ambient, part of the atmosphere. Ethereal. A kind of technology-induced effortless presence of services and appliances becomes part of everyday life, offering pleasures and conveniences. Oftentimes it is all ignored, just like the elements we live in and with. What are the prerequisites for the technologically influenced ambiences of Mundania, and how do these ambiences merge with the practices of everyday life?

Ambient media

In 1996 Bill Gates, founder and at that time chief executive officer (CEO) of Microsoft, wrote an essay on the Microsoft website. He argued that ‘Content is King’, which basically meant that the stuff that was produced and conveyed through internet would make a huge difference. Texts and images, websites, even software. This was before social media like Facebook, or Twitter. Before Google. Before the algorithmically engineered feeds of video clips of TikTok, or the flow of images and videos of Instagram. Before the flood of AI-generated stuff, meandering tech-induced conversations, and the bleed of digital inceptions into ever more dimensions of everyday life. In the decades that followed an enormous amount of content emerged through computation and connectivity. Chats, posts, tweets, snaps and ads. Sounds and video. Images and texts. Informal outbursts and calculated campaigns. Informed tuitions and emotive rants. Automated content production. Affective and informational excess.

Over thirty years before Bill Gates’ essay about the weight of content, Marshall McLuhan wrote instead that ‘the medium is the message’ (1964/1994). This means that the particular qualities of different media are embedded and in symbiosis with any message (or content). For McLuhan: ‘the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’ (McLuhan 1964/1994: 18). Since McLuhan, much research has shown that content is hard to separate from media, technologies and social circumstances, but to approach the in-betweenness of media and technologies as part of Mundania, McLuhan's thoughts can be helpful.

There can be different orientations of Mundania, such as in-between, beyond and beneath. There can also be different properties. One such property pertains to practices and consequences of concealment. Complex systems, organizations and technologies are hard to oversee and to fully see through. Powerful stakeholders, governments, corporations or other conglomerates can hide their businesses for various reasons. Sometimes justly and fairly, sometimes not. There are also intrinsic trade-offs and distributions between simplicity and complexity, as we saw in the previous chapter, ‘Beneath’. Tradeoffs between ignorance and knowledge. Between transparency and opacity.

Black boxes

A widely used concept to capture the distribution of knowledge and control when it comes to technologies is the Black Box. It has been used as a metaphor or analogy to describe how complexity is hidden in a process, technological artefact, or system. The black box is about concealment of complexity. What does a person need to know to use a device or system, to be part of something, to handle or deal with something? What is possible to know about complex processes and circumstances, and how is this knowledge distributed among different partakers?

The black box, as a concept related to technologies and knowledge, was first used in the development of military technology during World War II (Petrick 2020: 577). The black box as a metaphor was furthermore adopted and transformed within the emerging field of cybernetics in the 1950s and 1960s. Cybernetics grew as a wide scientific field that studied regulatory and complex systems among animals and machines. How could the processes in steam engines, thermostats, electronic circuits, the nervous system or social behaviour be understood through common models involving inputs, outputs and feedback loops? In this sense and context, the black box was a means to analyse systems that were too large or too complex to fully grasp (Petrick 2020: 576).

Since the uses of the black box within military technologies and cybernetics in the middle of the 20th century, it has been brought up in several other contexts. Among these different contexts and associated practices there is also a multitude of understandings of what the metaphor might mean. Maybe this was the case from the very beginning?

In Mundania, much of what we are connected to is somewhere else. Beyond. Elsewhereness has become a normal condition of everyday life with network technologies (Willim 2013b). Occurrences elsewhere have concrete repercussions in our immediate surroundings, and they also influence how we think about such phenomena as places, location and addresses. Systems and devices spread out across the planet influence at a distance and can also be influenced from a distance. Instantly. The assemblages of Mundania stretch out geographically and through imagination.

A manufactured firmament

August 2022. It is beyond midnight and I sit outside. Just outside my home. Looking up to the sky. Waiting for something to happen. This is the time when the comet Swift-Tuttle and the Earth come close to each other. It happens once a year. Like distant acquaintances briefly passing in the night. The comet is followed by a stream of debris. Small particles stretching out in a cloud behind it. The Perseids. That is the name of the cloud. Some of the particles reach the atmosphere of the Earth, creating a shower of meteorites. Dust and stones incinerated as they fall, creating a celestial spectacle. Several shooting stars appear across the night sky every hour during these mid-August nights.

During that night a stronger light appears. At least that was what I heard had happened. I could not see it myself. According to the stories, the light glows brighter than any of the meteorites. Newspapers and television channels start to receive reports from people wondering about the light. Is this really normal? Is it something extra-terrestrial? It looked like a ball, hovering in a cloud, as one person reported to the newspaper Sydsvenskan (13 August 2022).

After some hours, an astronomy researcher offered an explanation. It was the light from a SpaceX rocket, launched from California (Karlsson 2022). What looked like a bright cloud, was burnt rocket fuel. SpaceX, the company headed by eccentric and controversial magnate Elon Musk, had launched a Falcon 9 rocket to bring another cluster of satellites of their Starlink programme into orbit. The glowing cloud in the sky, with the ball in the middle, was related to the way the layers of Mundania grow.