Circuits/Reddy Kilowatt

I had the pleasure of giving a keynote at the Digital Temporalities Symposium at the University of Queensland in Brisbane recently. Since the event wasn’t recorded, I’ve turned the talk into a written piece so it can be read and shared beyond the room. Think of it as the next best thing to being there—just add your own cup of coffee and skip the humidity.

Before we begin, I want to acknowledge the owners of the land on which we meet today, the Turrbal and Yuggera people, and pay my respects to Elders past and present. I also recognise that sovereignty was never ceded, and that the infrastructures we live within—electrical, digital, political—stand on much older systems of knowledge, care, and custodianship.

That awareness is part of today’s talk. We’ll be thinking about what holds, what insulates, what carries current—and what happens when those systems fray.

Which brings me to our other companion in the room: Reddy Kilowatt—the ever-smiling mascot of midcentury electrification. He’ll be here as both guide and foil, a reminder of how infrastructure was once imagined, and how differently it hums in the present.

Reddy Kilowatt—ambassador of midcentury electrification, eternal optimist, and, in his own mind, keeper of the grid. Reddy will be joining us as we move through heatwaves, malfunctioning batteries, and the quiet drift of infrastructure under strain.

He’ll smile when things are fine, wince when they’re not, and occasionally get himself tangled in the wires. Think of him as both guide and counterpoint—a reminder of how we once imagined electricity would keep us safe, and how differently that story plays out now.

Let me set the scene.

And since we’re in Japan, let’s read the iconography from right to left.

Tokyo, July 20. It’s hot. Not just summer heat—record-breaking, body-breaking heat. The kind that sends people to hospital, buckles train tracks, withers crops. This isn’t background noise. It’s atmosphere. The heat makes everything feel brittle, volatile, reactive.

And then there’s the far-right swell. Sanseito. Still not mainstream—but no longer fringe. Surfacing from some deep sediment of national anxiety. A populist mood seeping into the cracks. In Tokyo, you feel it before it surfaces in policy. The city registers affective disturbance faster than the rest.

Something’s shifting. Pressure, volatility, a creeping affective realignment. Old orders are cracking. The fringe is stepping forward. The air feels too thick to breathe.

Even from Australia, it was palpable. As if Tokyo in July was mirroring a sensation we hadn’t yet put into words.

We were listening, attuned—waiting to catch the rupture.What breaks first? And what does it mean when it does?

Then, the incident.July 20, 2025. Around 4:10 p.m. Aboard a Yamanote Line train between Shin-Okubo and Shinjuku: a passenger’s mobile power bank, used to charge a smartphone, suddenly ignites. White smoke. Then flames.

The device is later confirmed: a cheero Flat 10000 mAh power bank—a model recalled in 2023 after being linked to at least 16 previous fire incidents.

Experts had warned: lithium-ion batteries—especially older, damaged, or counterfeit ones—can ignite under pressure. And in a packed, sweltering train car, that risk becomes very real.

I’ve been thinking about this fire.

Not because it’s rare—but because it’s ordinary.

A power bank catching fire on a train isn’t a grand spectacle.It’s not terrorism. It’s not sabotage. It’s not even front-page news.It’s just—an object doing what it wasn’t meant to do.

But something about it won’t let go.

The timing. The atmosphere.The way it flared and vanished in seconds—yet lingered.Like a minor rupture that marked something larger.

A malfunction, yes.But also maybe a signal.Of heat that exceeds containment.Of pressures building inside bodies, cities, devices.Of infrastructures not built to survive the intensity we’re now living in.

And so I keep returning to it.Not to overread it.But to sit with what it might be saying—about volatility, about thresholds, about the quiet violence of everyday breakdown.

When I think about this fire, I don’t just see an accident, I see a convergence.

Lithium-ion batteries aren’t supposed to ignite—but they do when conditions push them past design limits.And those conditions are never just “technical.”

There’s the heat wave, yes—but also the crowding of the train,the age of the device,the global circuits of manufacturing and recall,the informal economies where recalled models keep circulating.

A chain of pressures, each small enough to ignore—until they line up.

I think of it as an index event.A point where different systems—climate, infrastructure, market, social mood—touch the same live wire.

The fire isn’t just in the battery.It’s in the air, the city, the moment.

And if we treat it as an index,then it’s not a random glitch—it’s a reading.

 Let’s stay with the object.

A cheero Flat 10000 mAh power bank.Made in China. Slimline. Marketed for commuters, students, travellers.Sold on Amazon, Rakuten, Bic Camera.Recalled in 2023 after multiple overheating incidents—but still widely circulating.

Because in practice, a recall is not a disappearance.It’s a redistribution.

Recalled devices don’t vanish.They move—to resale platforms, secondhand markets, informal repair shops.They change hands, lose packaging, reappear in listings without model numbers.

In Japan, as elsewhere, these afterlives exist below the threshold of formal visibility.They’re not illegal—but they’re no longer fully accounted for either.They persist in limbo.

And when one of them ignites on a packed train—it tells us something about how risk circulates. About the kinds of devices that slip through systems of care and control.And about the quiet infrastructures that hold together everyday life—until they don’t.

Some of you might already be familiar with my work on phone farming in Southeast Asia.But here, I want to focus on the battery—or more precisely, on what happens when the battery becomes a liability.

Let’s start with the image many of us carry when we think of a phone farm.Rows and rows of phones, screen-side up, stacked in grids—automating tasks like inflating social media views or running crypto microtasks.

Visually, they’re striking.

A spectacle that hovers somewhere between dystopia and banality.Especially for Western audiences, these images register as “the dark side of the internet”—a vision of manipulation happening elsewhere. A spectacle of otherness.

But that’s already out of date.

By 2024, phone farming had shifted.This is what an operational phone farm looks like now: the box farm.

Here, back covers, screens, even batteries are removed.What remains are bare mainframes—stacked inside a custom box, centrally controlled via PC.

Why remove the battery?Because phones aren’t designed to run 24/7.The batteries overheat. They swell. They catch fire.And for automated tasks, a battery isn’t just a risk—it’s a trace.Platform detectors often look for abnormal power drain as a sign of bot activity.So removing the battery isn’t just practical—it’s strategic.

By late 2024, even the phone frame is gone.Just the motherboard remains—heat-managed, stripped to its functional core.

And those discarded parts? They don’t go to waste. In this part of the world, there’s a dense scrap culture.

Electronic remnants aren’t debris to dispose of—they’re material with afterlives. So when a battery catches fire on a Tokyo train, I don’t just see malfunction. I see a material that’s already been written out of the system somewhere else. A ghost component re-entering the frame.

So let’s widen the frame.

Because this isn’t just about one battery on one train in one city.It’s about a material logic that cuts across geographies—a logic of circulation, discard, repurposing, risk.

The cheero power bank that caught fire in Tokyo may have come from a recalled batch—but recall doesn’t mean removal. It means redirection. And that redirection moves through the same pathways I’ve been tracing in Southeast Asia.

This is what I mean by informal infrastructure.Not just improvised or marginal—but systematic, adaptive, quietly central.Phone farms strip batteries for safety and strategy.

Meanwhile, those same batteries circulate elsewhere—reinstalled, resold, repurposed.

Tokyo, Hanoi, Phnom Penh: different nodes in the same circuitry.Bound by shared conditions—Heat. Pressure. Precarity.

And a technical landscape where insulation is no longer guaranteed.Where the systems once designed to buffer risk—to act as insulators—now pass it along.

Optimization and volatility leak into each other.Containment becomes improvisation.

So when something breaks, it’s not always sabotage.Sometimes it’s just a chain of substitutions that held together longer than it should have.

A quiet workaround that hits its thermal, material, or social limit.

And that limit—when it shows up as fire—registers not just as failure,but as an atmospheric reading.A sign that the systems we think are stable are already running hot.

Let’s stay with that word: insulator.

Technically, it refers to a material that resists the flow of heat or electricity.A buffer. A barrier. Something that keeps volatility contained.

But systems have insulators too.Public infrastructure is an insulator.So are regulations, recall systems, labor protections, cooling mechanisms—all the things designed to absorb pressure before it reaches us.

But those insulators are thinning.

In the heat, literal insulation fails.In platform economies, responsibility is offloaded downstream.In precarious cities, governance doesn’t buffer—it disperses.

And affectively, we feel it.That sense that things are running too hot.That the atmosphere is dense, charged, unstable.That nothing is quite breaking, but nothing is quite holding either.

And so we improvise.We reroute heat through informal infrastructures.We strip the battery. We repurpose the frame.We become our own insulators—at a cost.

Until, eventually, something sparks.And what looks like failure is really a reading:of the heat that was always there,and the systems no longer built to hold it.

So what kind of energy are we talking about?What kind of voltage is running through these circuits of failure, improvisation, heat?

Let me offer you a lemon.

Literally—cut one open, stick a copper nail and a zinc nail in, and it generates electricity.Not much. But enough to light a small LED.

The lemon becomes a battery. A power source.Through acidity, not combustion.Through difference, not design.

That’s the kind of energy I’m interested in. Low-voltage. Improvised. Unstable, but real.

Chewing on a lemon is also a sensation. It shocks the mouth. Makes you wince.You don’t digest it so much as register it.It doesn’t nourish—it activates.

So what if we read the fire on the trainnot as disaster but as lemon energy?A kind of low-grade, affective charge running through failing systems, through informal infrastructures, through bodies asked to insulate more than they can.

Not enough to power the grid. But enough to light something.To signal that something is alive, reactive, charged.

This isn’t an answer. It’s a taste.

What the fire gives us—if we sit with it—is a reading of temporality, infrastructure, and technology under strain.

Not collapse, exactly. But friction.Not spectacle, but residue.

The fire isn’t just about a faulty battery. It’s about timing.It tells us something about how long something was held together—how long the system delayed heat, rerouted risk, improvised an insulation.And what it costs when that holding fails.

This is a temporality we rarely measure:not progress, not breakdown—but wear. Stretch. Drift.

Informal infrastructures stretch time.They keep things running past design limits.They extend the lifespan of technologies deemed obsolete—until something gives.

And when it gives, it’s rarely loud.More often it’s a flicker. A spark. A sour taste in the mouth.A moment that doesn’t announce itself—but insists on being read.

So maybe this is what our moment demands:Not more innovation.But a different attention.To where the heat accumulates.To how things hold, and when they stop.

Reddy has made it through—a little frayed at the edges, slightly scorched,but still carrying a faint, stubborn flicker.

He reminds us that even the most confident infrastructures age,that insulation wears thin, and that sometimes, the spark that remains is just enough—not to power the grid, but to light the way to a different attention.

So I’ll leave you here, with Reddy still watching over the wires, and the current—unsteady, imperfect—still flowing.

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The animations lose a little magic in still images, so I’ve included a video to bring them to life.