Part 1: Making the Mass Image

The final challenge in proving the relevance of anecdotal method for contemporary purposes lies in the need to confront the now-dominant mode of accessing moving and still image media. Vast databases of social and streaming media now contain, store, process, and deliver video, audio, and visual content. It is always possible to encounter one or two images at a time; but millions are now stored and constantly updated form a single mass image of the world, structured and restructured through metadata including human behaviours of searches, likes, and shares, in an evolving topology only partially designed for human users. For anecdotal method to have a claim, it must answer the question: Is it possible to encounter a database? Arguing that the mass image database is the logical outcome of a history of mechanical imaging, the chapter argues that humans are now reduced to behaviours, that time is no longer consolidated experientially but undergoing a chronoclasm, bringing the central position of the human to an end. It goes on to argue that this creates a new opportunity for ecocritical aesthetic politics by excluding the human, thus placing humanity on the side of both nature and technology. This opens a discussion of the nature of the ancestral dead labour, skills, and knowledge enshrined in technologies, and the obligation to the victims of ecocide and genocide, and to the proposal of an encyclopedic commons as the medium for ecocritical politics.