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>> 1 1 Down in Big Blue’s Toxic Plume in Upstate New York Down in Big Blue’s Toxic Plume I say, thank God IBM is here to take care of this mess. —Former Mayor of Endicott Don’t mitigate me and tell me everything is ok. —Endicott resident In September 2008, I was doing fieldwork in Endicott, New York, the site of both IBM’s first manufacturing plant and a contentious U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Superfund1 site consisting of a 300-acre toxic plume of trichloroethylene (or TCE), which is a cancer-causing chlorine-based cleaning solvent heavily used by IBM to manufacture chipboards and other microelectronics. I was sitting down with Tonya, a resident of what is locally referred to as “the plume,” when I first sensed the need to take the concept of mitigation more seriously. Tonya was sitting on the edge of her couch and seemed excited to talk, explaining from the start of the interview that her two boys had moved out two years ago, and that it was nice to have a visitor. Before I asked my first question, she interrupted with, “You mentioned that you wanted to talk about the IBM spill, well just listen.” She pointed across the living room to the western wall of the house. “That’s it,” she says. “I can hear it going all the time. You forget about it, but you also always know it is there.” 2 > 3 computer in history—the IBM 650—less than half a mile from this spot. . . . When IBM began, the best market researcher predicted that fewer than 1,000 computers would be sold in the entire 20th century. Well, IBM’s first model sold almost twice that number in just 5 years, and now there are IBM plants in Endicott and around the world. And the computer revolution that so many of you helped to start promises to change life on Earth more profoundly than the Industrial Revolution of a century ago. . . . Already, computers have made possible dazzling medical breakthroughs that will enable us all to live longer, healthier, and fuller lives. Computers are helping to make our basic industries, like steel and autos, more efficient and better able to compete in the world market. And computers manufactured at IBM . . . guide our space shuttles on their historic missions. You are the people who are making America a rocket of hope, shooting to the stars. . . . Today, firms in this valley make not only computers but flight simulators, aircraft parts, and a host of other sophisticated products. (Reagan 1984) Eventually, the high-tech industry’s culture of obsolescence (Slade 2006) caught up with the IBM Endicott plant, resulting in “sophisticated ” downsizing and deindustrialization, a topic closely linked to neoliberal political and economic restructuring starting in the late 1970s (Harvey 2007, 2005; Zukin 1991). In 2002, 18 years after Reagan’s speech, IBM’s Endicott plant, which at its peak employed 12,000 workers , was for sale, and residents began to receive invitations in the mail to attend “Public Information Sessions” organized by IBM and state agencies to learn about IBM’s efforts to clean up a groundwater contamination plume (or pollution zone) it was leaving behind. Many of these early information sessions were held at the Union Presbyterian Church in west Endicott, just four blocks from where I lived at the time. I found myself amid this IBM contamination debate as both a resident and a budding anthropologist completing my undergraduate degree at Binghamton University, just six miles to the east. I was as much confused and concerned as a resident as I was interested and curious about the intersections of high-tech production, pollution, and environmental public health politics. All Endicott residents were invited to these “information sessions.” They were intended to showcase the collaborative effort of IBM and 4 > 5 to transformations in the political economy and ecology of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. As a “Rust Belt” community coping with the pains of industrial pollution, deindustrialization , and other rampant neoliberal consequences of an economy based on the ceaseless concentration of finance capital and protection of shareholder interests,3 Endicott has become a high-tech “bust town” (Bluestone and Harrison 1982) struggling with various concerns and uncertainties symbolic of our late industrial times (Fortun 2012). These include layoffs, environmental health risk, property devaluation, a dissipated tax base, stigma, corroding factories, toxic solvents, a general decline in the quality of social and economic life, and...

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