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7 The Import of Secondhand Computers and the Dilemma of Electronic Waste After the World Summit on the Information Society concluded in 2005, the attention of the national government and the business community in Ghana turned to a number of relevant concerns: the overtaxed electricity infrastructure, the influx of computers and other electronics as a burden on waste-handling systems, and the financial flows necessary for the business of enabling connectivity. Each of these issues illustrates a creeping awareness of the materiality of the Internet in Ghana countering a dominant rhetoric at WSIS that celebrated the transcendence of the material that would follow from joining the “information society.” At WSIS, the instantaneous connection of the new network technologies was defined as a triumph over constraints of space and time.1 The focus on information at the conference, as something formless and inexhaustible and to be made available to all of humankind, served as a savvy way to avoid all manner of intractable resource scarcity issues. This chapter works through some further issues of the political economy of the global Internet similar in scope to those raised in the previous chapter. However, by examining the hard infrastructural issues confronted in the actual build-out of Internet access in Ghana, this chapter serves as its counterpoint. The primary substantive focus of the following sections is the emergent, ad hoc trade in secondhand computers imported from the United States or Europe by Ghanaian transnational family businesses. What is not considered in this chapter are some of the matters of Internet policy and network infrastructure that more regularly appear in academic analysis of technology and political regimes in the Global South. In Ghana there were some undoubtedly critical changes in national telecom policy in the early 1990s that paved the way for Internet access in general and the Internet cafés in particular. The subsequent founding of local Internet 160 Chapter 7 service providers (ISPs), the physical network and its management, and the particular interactions between Internet café owners and the ISPs are additional topics in this space that potentially might have been considered in these pages. The omission of this history is not meant to indicate its irrelevance ; rather, these topics are especially well covered elsewhere (see Foster et al. 2004; Wilson 2006). By contrast, the computers that equip the Internet cafés in Accra and that are an essential conduit to the Internet have a perhaps unexpected story of arrival and circulation in Ghana that has not yet been told. Furthermore, examining the circulation of these machines helps to translate the material ambiguity of the Internet to the concreteness of material objects. Tracing their movement and the actors involved in their import, sale, and disposal touches on matters of national politics within Ghana, state-to-state relations, as well as global economic trends. In the Internet cafés, property tags remaining on many of the Internet café computers identified schools, businesses, and government offices in the United States and Europe as the source for this equipment. The property tags I encountered and documented included ones for the New York Public Library, Anne Arundel Community College (in Maryland), the United States Environmental Protection Agency, St. Mary’s College (in the United Kingdom), the University of Iowa, as well as tags written in Italian and Dutch. Such machines were likely considered obsolete and cleared out en masse as part of an effort to update IT facilities in these US and European institutions. The machines themselves were several development cycles older than the state of the art. It took seven years or more from the moment when a computer first appeared in the market to when it arrived at the Internet café.2 The discovery of these tags in the course of fieldwork inspired this effort to trace and explain the circulation of these machines. It ultimately proved to be an illuminating and novel way to explore the political economy of the Internet in Ghana while maintaining a direct and materially grounded tie to the cafés themselves. The import and resale of secondhand computers has played an underrecognized role in the success of Accra’s Internet cafés as a model of public access to the Internet. Affordable and reliable equipment is a basic necessity any Internet café requires in order to sustain itself financially. Such equipment must withstand the often heavy use cycles, in some cases running for twenty-four hours solid in the setting of the Internet caf...

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