Toxic Town: IBM, Pollution, and Industrial Risks

Preface

>> xi Preface One simple way to assess the impact of any organization is to answer the question: how is the world different because it existed? —Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM Chairman On June 16, 2011, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) celebrated its one-hundredth birthday and commemorated this event with a year-long series of seminars and conferences around the world. The centennial celebration was an opportunity for IBM to reach out to many of its constituents in industry, government, and academia and engage with them in a variety of celebratory events. IBM Chairman Sam Palmisano even invited these “members” of the IBM family to pledge at least eight hours of community service during 2011 to commemorate IBM at 100. IBM has much to celebrate. After a hundred years of business and technological innovation, the company has a dazzling resume, making investments and impacts in almost every sector of industry, government , and science. They have developed a supercomputer system named WATSON, named after IBM’s founder, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., that is able to approximate human speech and respond to questions with a precise, factual answer by running complex analytics. On a Jeopardy ! match televised in February 2011, WATSON beat two champions of the game. IBM even has its own Institute for Electronic Government and is at the forefront of developing electronic voting services and technologies to advance the worldwide growth of “electronic” or “digital” democracy.1 IBM’s Computational Biology Center has partnered with National Geographic to arrange the largest human genetic xii > xiii and on. The company has also received a number of awards for its environmental leadership in the business world. In 2010, it received several “environmental” awards. IBM ranked number one in the Newsweek “Green Ranking” of the biggest publicly traded companies in developed and emerging world markets for its business attention to environmental impact, green policies, and reputation. The company ranked number one in the latest Supercomputing Green500 List announced by Green500.org, an organization that ranks the top 500 supercomputers in the world by energy efficiency. The list the organization generates shows that 13 of the top 25 most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world today are built on IBM high-performance computing technology. Finally, IBM ranked number ranked number one in all-around performance and was in the top three in all five categories in Gartner/World Wildlife Fund’s recent “Low-Carbon & Environmental Leadership Findings Report,” a report that evaluated 28 information and computer technology companies on their all-around performance, including, but not limited to, the company’s “internal environmental performance.”2 Amid these things to celebrate, these products and moments of high-tech prowess and progress, certain consequences of such IBM productions do exist. Lenny Siegel and John Markoff, in their book, The High Cost of High Tech: The Dark Side of the Chip, exposed the “toxic time bomb” of the so-called green high-tech industry, writing confidently that “[h]igh-tech pollution is a fact of life wherever the industry has operated for any length of time, from Malaysia to Massachusetts” (Siegel and Markoff 1985:163). The following book extends this effort of exposure by focusing on a case study concerning the material environmental impacts of IBM technology which call into question IBM’s new technoscientific ideology based on a corporate desire and mammoth effort to “Build a Smarter Planet” in a decade (2010–2020), which IBM calls the “Decade of Smart.” “By a smarter planet,” according to IBM’s corporate website, “we mean that intelligence is being infused into the systems and processes that enable services to be delivered; physical goods to be developed, manufactured, bought and sold; everything from people and money to oil, water and electrons to move; and billions of people to work and live.”3 A Smarter Planet, as it appears here, is a cosmospheric innovation whereby “everything” can become better with more infusion of “intelligence”—that always slippery term—and xiv > xv processing power and computer analytics? The lived experiences and discourses of Endicott residents explored in this book do not fully answer this question. The book does, on the other hand, argue for a much needed pathway of understanding rooted in ethnographic research and description to show how and why this message of hightech progress, dynamism, and “smartness” is contradictory and might be contested and thwarted for good reasons. In the spirit of one Endicott resident and former IBMer who has struggled to live a comfortable life in IBM’s contaminated birthplace...