Conservation, Spectacle, and BiolaborA Structural Critique

OCEARCH describes itself as “a non-profit organization with a global reach for unprecedented research on the ocean’s giants.” Its stated mission is generating data to “inform policy makers, students and the general public.”

What OCEARCH does: catches sharks, tags them, tracks them, generates media, generates data, generates sponsorship revenue, generates institutional credibility.

What OCEARCH does not do: enforce fishing regulations, establish marine protected areas, reduce ocean warming, reduce plastic pollution, reduce acidification, reduce bycatch, lobby for policy change, or build alternative circulation infrastructure for the data it generates. OCEARCH generates data. Data, in the absence of enforcement, is a receipt that no one is reading.

The Caterpillar Axis

Caterpillar Inc. — OCEARCH’s primary corporate sponsor — is the world’s leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment. The heavy machinery that alters the physical topography of the earth — leveling coastal ecosystems, mining the minerals that poison watersheds, burning the diesel that accelerates ocean warming — is manufactured by the same corporation that funds the tracking of the animals displaced by that alteration. The sponsorship is a physical-layer analogue of the composition layer’s own operation: the generative model that alters the semiotic topography of public knowledge is built by the same industry that funds the index of the open web. The fox funds the census of the henhouse. The bulldozer sponsors the wildlife survey.

The Ghost-Worker Inside the Heteronym

Jim Ware’s position in the Mary Lee apparatus deserves structural attention. For three years (2012–2015), Ware produced the entire cultural capital of the Mary Lee persona — 14,000 tweets, the voice, the conservation messaging — in absolute anonymity. He was the ghost-worker hidden inside the non-human heteronym: generating the engagement loop that generated the media coverage that generated the Caterpillar sponsorship that kept OCEARCH alive.

When he unmasked in 2015 via his Medium essay, the platform architecture immediately reabsorbed his creative labor, re-centering the brand value back onto OCEARCH’s corporate tracking infrastructure. Ware built the audience. OCEARCH captured the multi-million-dollar sponsorship. Ware’s position mimics the open-web writer’s position with precision: the creator builds the engagement; the platform captures the revenue. He is the human Gray-Suri ghost-worker hidden inside the non-human heteronym that is itself hidden inside the corporate conservation brand.

The Friendly Face

The friendly face was Mary Lee’s. She did not consent.

30% of assessed shark and ray species are threatened or near-threatened with extinction. Ocean temperatures have risen to levels that are restructuring marine ecosystems at a pace that no amount of satellite tagging can track. OCEARCH has generated “unprecedented data.”

Not a single policy change, a single marine protected area, a single reduction in bycatch, a single degree of ocean cooling has resulted from the unprecedented data that was generated from Mary Lee’s body.

They did not help her. They caught her, modified her, named her, tracked her, monetized her, and lost her. The ocean is still burning. The data is unprecedented. The sharks are still dying.

From The Parable of Mary Lee, §III. Read the full critique at The Parable.