Dr. Jussi Parikka's The Anthrobscene

Dr. Jussi Parikka is a Danish-born academic and writer. He is a professor of Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University and a visiting professor at Winchester College of Art (University of Southampton). Parikka’s writing covers a wide range of themes around network culture, aesthetics, and media archaeology (Parikka, n.d.).

Media Archaeologist's work includes the study of new media trends, relating them to detailed, critical research of historic communication techniques (Huhtamo and Galili, 2020). The word Anthrobscene, coined by Parikka in the title of his short eBook, alludes to the term Anthropocene, the proposed name for the current global era. Anthropo- or “pertaining to mankind” from ancient Greek indicates a new stage of world development commencing at the point of substantial impact from human intervention (Lewis and Maslin, 2015).

The Anthrobscene is a short book of 77 pages and four chapters. My review looks at the first chapter, Chapter 1. And the Earth Screamed, Alive (Parikka, 2014).

In Chapter 1. Parikka uses the Arthur Conan Doyle short story, When The World Screamed as a metaphor for the intensive mining of the earth’s surface for the precious minerals needed to support our growing computing needs. In Doyle’s story the protagonist, Dr. Challenger drills into the earth’s core and in doing so wounds a mysterious monster who lived there. Challenger’s self-imposed mission was to prove his theory that the center of our planet was alive.

Relating Challenger’s approach to the mining of Petroleum, or natural gas through fracking, and the mining of precious metals and minerals. Materials such as cobalt, tin, palladium, silver, gold, and copper are used to build the equipment upon which our computing infrastructure resides. Parikka states

“We have shifted from being a society that until mid-twentieth century was based upon a very restricted list of materials… to one in which a computer chip is composed of 60 different elements” (Parikka, 2014).

The primary purpose of Parikka’s text is to encourage critical discussion of global resource depletion, which continues to accelerate with every technological advancement.

HUHTAMO, E., GALILI, D., 2020. The pasts and prospects of media archaeology. Early Popular Visual Culture, 18:4, 333-339,

LEWIS, S., M. MASLIN, 2015. Defining the Anthropocene. Nature, 519, 171–180

PARIKKA, J., n.d. Bio [viewed 04/11/2024]. Available from: https://jussiparikka.net/about/

PARIKKA, J., 2014. The Anthrobscene [viewed 04/11/2024]. Available from: https://jussiparikka.net/?s=the+anthrobscene