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Notes
Preface
Bruce Sterling, “The Dead Media Project: A Modest Proposal and a Public Appeal,” http://www.deadmedia.org/modest-proposal.html, accessed March 4, 2008. The “Dead Media” project is, at the time of this writing, now off-line. True to the topic of this book, Web sites and URLs are notoriously short-lived, and constitute yet another form of fleeting electronic media.
1. Opening the “black box” of technologies is a common practice and turn of phrase in science and technology studies to describe the making evident of technological processes that might otherwise go unnoticed. But this phrase also has a longer history of usage, and is a frequent figure within computing and information theory discourses. This study employs both senses of the term throughout. For more on this (double) use of the black box, see Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Scher (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), passim.
Introduction
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap, 1999), 390.
Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” in The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 116 n. 14.
1. The Superfund designation, which dates to 1980, was initiated by the U.S. federal government to clean up hazardous waste sites with particularly high levels of contamination. A description and map of Superfund sites designated for cleanup, known as the National Priorities List, can be found on the EPA's Web site, at http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/npl.
2. See the listings for Santa Clara County in the EPA's National Priorities List, http://yosemite.epa.gov/r9/sfund/r9sfdocw.nsf/WSOState!OpenView&Start=1&Count=1000&Expand=2.29#2.29.
3. Ecologies is a term that has circulated within media studies since at least McLuhan onward to describe a focus on media environments (at times in contrast to a focus on media content). This term has been recuperated and revised by multiple contemporary researchers, including Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). The term ecologies is used in this study to refer both to media environments and to those more natural-cultural ecologies that occur through soil and chemicals, water, and air.
4. Gopal Krishna, “E-Waste: Computers and Toxicity in India,” in Sarai 3: Shaping Technologies (Delhi: Sarai, 2003).
5. International Association of Electronics Recyclers, IAER Electronics Recycling Industry Report (Albany, NY, 2003; revised, 2004), 7. These quantities represent only consumer electronics. Commercial and industrial sectors are such large generators of electronic waste that they have until recently “driven” the electronics recycling industry, due to the electronics they discard in such appreciable volumes. Beginning in January 2009, the International Association of Electronics Recyclers was acquired by the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), which produces regular newsletters on electronics recycling issues. See http://www.isri.org.
6. This figure is cited as originating with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and is documented by the EPA. See Environmental Protection Agency, “Waste Wise Update: Electronics Reuse and Recycling,” EPA 530-N-00-007, October 2000, http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/partnerships/wastewise/pubs/wwupda14.pdf.
7. International Association of Electronics Recyclers, IAER Electronics Recycling Industry Report, 25.
8. The European designation for electronic waste is WEEE (waste from electrical and electronic equipment). The WEEE Directive, which lists an extensive number of products that constitute electrical or electronic waste upon expiration, is accompanied by the Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances Directive, or RoHS, which attempts to limit the inclusion of hazardous substances in electronics. For the original directives (which have been amended several times to accommodate exemptions), see “Directive 2002/96/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 January 2003 on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE),” Official Journal of the European Union, February 13, 2003, L37/24–L37/38; “Directive 2002/95/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 January 2003 on the Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment,” Official Journal of the European Union, February 13, 2003, L37/19–L37/23. The U.S.-based International Association of Electronics Recyclers includes a similar list of electronic waste in its reports but expands the range of electronics to commercial systems and financial systems, security systems and cameras, entertainment systems, office equipment, industrial electronics (including telecommunications equipment, control systems, manufacturing equipment, and commercial appliances), and consumer electronics (including audio, video, and communication devices). See International Association of Electronics Recyclers, IAER Electronics Recycling Industry Report, 2–3.
9. The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition maps out the “Electronics Lifecycle” on its Web site, where it notes that “electronics are a complicated assembly of more than 1,000 materials, many of which are highly toxic, such as chlorinated and brominated substances, toxic gases, toxic metals, photo-active and biologically active materials, acids, plastics, and plastic additives.” See http://www.svtc.org/site/PageServer?pagename=svtc_lifecycle_analysis.
10. See Jan Mazurek, Making Microchips: Policy, Globalization, and Economic Restructuring in the Semiconductor Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). For details about the effects of specific chemicals used in the electronics manufacturing process, see the EPA Toxic Release Inventory at http://www.epa.gov/TRI/.
11. For examples of these informative studies, see Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia (Seattle and San Jose, 2002), as well as BAN's newer study into electronic waste in Lagos, Nigeria, The Digital Dump: Exporting Re-use and Abuse to Africa (Seattle: Basel Action Network, 2005). For book-length studies on electronic waste, see Elizabeth Grossman, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health (Washington, DC: Island, 2006); Ted Smith, David A. Sonnenfeld, and David Naguib Pellow, eds., Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).
12. I use the term discourse as part of a material constellation and along the lines that Judith Butler describes when she argues, “To claim that discourse is formative is not to claim that it originates, causes, or exhaustively composes that which it concedes; rather, it is to claim that there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body.” In this sense, discourse is “performative” and part of the process whereby materials, bodies, and technologies unfold and circulate in the world. See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993), 10–11.
13. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1, Things (Autumn 2001): 10; Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 43.
14. For more information on the importance of considering how waste emerges not simply at the waste end of products but throughout the production and consumption cycle, see Kenneth Geiser, Materials Matter: Towards a Sustainable Materials Policy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
15. Such heterogeneity of relations also describes what sociologist Mike Michael refers to as the “range of possible trajectories for the uses and ‘mis-uses’ (or rather, misbehavior) of technological artifacts” (Reconnecting Culture, Technology, and Nature: From Society to Heterogeneity [London: Routledge, 2000], 10).
16. N. Katherine Hayles has convincingly argued this point, and this study is informed by her research. See N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
17. The term sediment draws on ideas from both Benjamin and Judith Butler (as discussed later in this introduction). For Benjamin, criticism was a project that should operate through the congealing of facts: “Criticism means the mortification of the works. By their very essence these works confirm this more readily than any others. Mortification of the works: not then—as the romantics have it—awakening of the consciousness in living works, but the settlement of knowledge in dead ones.” See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), 182. For Butler, sedimentation describes temporal and material practices that inform material effects (of power) as they concretize and transform. See Butler, Bodies That Matter, 250.
18. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 9–10.
19. Benjamin discusses his concepts of “natural history” and the outmoded in several key locations, including, of primary significance for the purposes of this study, The Arcades Project. See also Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and his “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Schocken Books, 1986), 177–92.
20. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 203.
21. Discussing Benjamin's “unorthodox” use of natural history, cultural and literary theorist Beatrice Hanssen writes, “By suggesting that history and nature were ‘commensurable’ in the moment of transience that befell both, Benjamin's study in fact contested the idealistic dichotomy between history and necessity, human freedom and nature, which it replaced with ‘natural history’” (Walter Benjamin's Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998], 9). A number of studies and literary texts take up and extend Benjamin's notion of natural history. Some of the more in-depth texts include Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (Routledge, 1993); and W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Vintage, 1998).
22. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; repr., London: Routledge, 1994).
23. Ibid.
24. As paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould argues, there have been multiple versions of natural history and as many ways of interpreting remains to build up a view of longer and larger earth processes. So while a Victorian view emphasizes natural history as a record of progress, with humans in the ascendancy, Gould, in his more contemporary rendering, takes issue with these conflations of natural history (and Darwinian evolution) with progress. If natural history has shown us anything, Gould argues, it is that life on earth proceeds through random, coincidental and contingent processes of survival. See Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1990; repr., London: Vintage, 2000); Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species (London: John Murray, 1859).
25. Failure is often discussed within studies of technologies and economies as a necessary aspect of further development. See, for example, Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). However, I suggest here and elsewhere that failure does more than simply propel further technological developments. See Jennifer Gabrys, “Machines Fall Apart: Failure in Art and Technology,” in Leonardo Electronic Almanac 13, no. 4 (April 2005), http://www.leoalmanac.org/journal/Vol_13/lea_v13_n04.txt.
26. Benjamin focused specifically on the outmoded, as it shattered, according to Buck-Morss, “the myth of automatic historical progress.” Such a move was important because “when newness became a fetish, history itself became a manifestation of the commodity form.” See Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 79–83, 93. To challenge this fetishized and always-new reversioning of history, Benjamin conceived of the “angel of history” based on a painting by Paul Klee entitled Angelus Novus. Benjamin's angel is driven by the “storm of progress” into the future, to which “his back is turned.” Instead of witnessing the future, the angel witnesses the “wreckage” that accumulates from this storm. See Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Schocken Books, 1969), 257–58.
27. There are other examples of digital or informational “natural histories,” which, in one way, discuss just how “natural” or evolutionary electronics may be (as progressive technologies) or, in a much different way, suggest relations between new media and corporeality, digital code and biology. For examples, see Paul Levinson, The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution (New York: Routledge, 1997); Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Media Aesthetics (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006). The present study works with a more unruly set of material effects to constitute its natural history method.
28. For more on second nature in relation to natural history, see Theodor W. Adorno, “Natural History,” in Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (1966; repr; London: Routledge, 1990), 354–58. The term second nature was initially deployed by Georg Lukács in The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974). In this process, nature becomes culture through manufacture, and the manufactured objects that surround us begin to seem as naturalized as nature itself: a second nature. Yet this rendering of “second nature” as a process of transformation, of culture acting on nature, does not rest so easily in this natural history, which resists a “first nature” on which culture might operate. Furthermore, once commodities have exited the spaces of cultural production and consumption, these fossils constitute another nature-cultural coupling again, bound by temporal forces.
29. Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium: FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™ (New York: Routledge, 1997), 142–43. In a related way, Madeline Akrich notes, “Machines and devices are obviously composite, heterogeneous, and physically localized. Although they point to an end, a use for which they have been conceived, they also form part of a long chain of people, products, tools, machines, money, and so forth.” These heterogeneous assemblages, as identified here, can even “generate and ‘naturalize’ new forms and orders of causality and, indeed, new forms of knowledge about the world.” See Madeline Akrich, “The De-Scription of Technical Objects,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 205–7.
30. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium, 142–43.
31. For Benjamin, the word scatter describes not just qualities of present experience but also a method for working through the past—as an iterative and resonant practice. He writes of the historian who works in this way, “Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the ‘matter itself’ is no more than the strata which yield their long-sought secrets only to the most meticulous investigation. That is to say, they yield those images that, severed from all earlier associations, reside as treasures in the sober rooms of our later insights” (Walter Benjamin, “Excavation and Memory,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2, 1931–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap, 1999], 576).
32. Theodor Adorno, “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 227–41.
33. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 392.
34. Butler writes, “For the concept of nature has a history, and the figuring of nature as the blank and lifeless page, as that which is, as it were, always already dead, is decidedly modern, linked perhaps to the emergence of the technological means of domination” (Bodies That Matter, 4).
35. Hanssen, Walter Benjamin's Other History, 16.
36. Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey, Global Nature, Global Culture (London: Sage, 2000), 59. In taking up this “set of debates about changing definitions of nature, culture and global” (ibid., 5), cultural theorists Franklin, Lury, and Stacey draw on Martin Rudwick's analysis to establish just how frequently interpretations of fossils have given rise to shifting definitions of nature, culture, history, and the global. See Martin Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
37. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 864.
38. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 10.
39. Ibid., 9–10.
40. Charles Acland, ed., Residual Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xxi.
41. Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 2–7. While this study draws on research in media archaeology, which shares many of the same interests in obsolete media and materiality, it opts instead to work through a natural history method in order to establish the ways in which things break down and do not cohere as singular media artifacts. In their breaking down, electronics generate further relations and political ecologies. This approach is less about media objects and mediation, and more about the transformative material ecologies of electronic media.
42. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam, 1967), 26.
43. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
44. Eva Horn, “There Are No Media,” Grey Room 29 (Winter 2008): 6–13.
45. Numerous studies have now employed an actor-network theory (ANT) approach to issues of science and technology. While this research is partially informed by literature in science and technology studies, particularly through the work of Donna Haraway, it intentionally does not adopt an ANT approach to electronic waste. Networks, I suggest in this study, can be one way to understand better how the distinct materialities of electronics are distributed and how they perform. Networks in this sense are not deployed as an organizing conceptual device for studying human and nonhuman relations, but rather as a term specifically situated within the material cultures of computing. This approach is further inspired by Michel Serres's use of “exchanges” and “quasi objects” to describe such transformative aspects of materiality. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2007); Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Kevin Hetherington and John Law, “After Networks,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18, no. 2 (2000): 127–32.
46. I use the term resonance here in the sense that Haraway discuses in relation to “situated knowledges,” which she suggests means “a way to get at the multiple modes of embedding that are about both place and space in the manner in which geographers draw that distinction. Another way of putting it is when I discuss feminist accountability within the context of scientific objectivity as requiring a knowledge tuned to resonance, not dichotomy” (Donna Haraway, How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve [New York: Routledge, 2000], 71). See also Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99; Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991).
47. I do not approach consumption and the “user” through everyday practice or mutual formation of users and technologies—areas that already have extensive and informative literatures. Rather, I understand “use” in several arguably undertheorized ways that focus on what comes after a more privileged idea of use as agency, often in the form of content manipulation. Following on a number of waste literatures discussed in more detail in chapter 3, I focus on use as using up—through disposal, through the labor of breaking up machines, and through the political and economic using up of geographies as global dumping grounds. For examples of “use” literature, see Bijker and Law, Shaping Technology/Building Society; Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch, eds., How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technologies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Susan Leigh Star, ed., The Cultures of Computing (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Lucy Suchmann, Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
48. See Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); John Law and Annemarie Mol, “Notes on Materiality and Sociality,” Sociological Review 43 (1995): 274–94; Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
49. While this is not a life-cycle analysis, this research does draw on studies that analyze electronics through their material inputs and environmental costs. For examples of this approach, see Ruediger Kuehr and Eric Williams, eds., Computers and the Environment: Understanding and Managing Their Impacts (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003).
50. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 60.
51. Hirokazu Miyazaki elaborates on the ways in which different theoretical practices identify an “object” and its “materiality” also count as material processes and constitute an important site for material analysis. See “The Materiality of Finance Theory,” in Miller, ed., Materiality, 165–81.
52. The use of the term rematerializing in this study refers to the registering of complex material processes that support otherwise apparently material-free electronics. Rematerializing in this sense is distinct from those more geographical debates concerned with whether rematerializing constitutes a return to physical matter (as opposed to cultural or conceptual concerns). See Ben Anderson and John Wylie, “On Geography and Materiality,” Environment and Planning A, 41, no. 2 (2009): 318–35.
53. Haraway, “Promises of Monsters,” 109.
54. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium, 43–45.
55. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 460.
56. Ibid., 459.
57. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 65.
58. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 871. This notion of the past sedimenting into space can also be found in Benjamin's earlier, related study of allegory and ruins, where he writes that “chronological movement is grasped and analyzed in a spatial image.” He also writes, “In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (Origin of German Tragic Drama, 177–78). The meeting of time and space in the ruin has influenced many scholars, including Kathleen Stewart, who develops a distinct method for writing about the cultural and poetic aspects of ruins. See Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 96.
59. While mining sites are clearly another waste zone related to electronics, this study does not elaborate on these sites, not only due to a lack of space, but also because the focus here is less on the sum of raw materials and resources that contribute to electronics. A discussion on mining in relation to electronic waste can be found in Grossman, High Tech Trash. Mention is also made of this issue in relation to coltan and mobile phones in Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy, eds., MediaSpace: Place, Scale, and Culture in a Media Age (London: Routledge, 2004), 2–3.
60. In my use of the term circulation, I am influenced by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth A. Povinelli, who write, “In a given culture of circulation, it is more important to track the proliferating copresence of varied textual/cultural forms in all their mobility and mutability than to attempt a delineation of their fragile autonomy and specificity. Or, it is more important if the purpose, as Michel Foucault long ago suggested, is to move between the seductive sparkle of the ‘thing’ and the quiet work of the generative matrix—the diagram, as Foucault's acolyte Gilles Deleuze would name this node in the production of life that provides us with the outline of the thing and its excess. This ethnography of forms, for want of a better term, can be carried out only within a set of circulatory fields populated by myriad forms” (“Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition,” Public Culture 15, no. 3 [2003]: 391).
61. United Nations Environment Programme, “Basel Conference Addresses Electronic Wastes Challenge,” November 27, 2006, http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=485&ArticleID=5431&l=en.
62. Greenpeace, “Greenpeace Pulls Plug on Dirty Electronics Companies,” May 23, 2005, http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/press/releases/greenpeace-pulls-plug-on-dirty.
63. Rachel Shabi, “The E-Waste Land,” Guardian, November 30, 2002.
64. Will Straw, “Exhausted Commodities: The Material Culture of Music,” Canadian Journal of Communication 25, no. 1 (2000), http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/1148/1067.
65. William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
66. Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
67. Walter Moser, “The Acculturation of Waste,” in Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory, ed. Brian Neville and Johanne Villeneuve (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 102. Several theorists discuss these generative and dynamic qualities of waste, which will be taken up throughout this study. See also Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); John Scanlan, On Garbage (London: Reaktion, 2005).
68. Victor Buchli writes (as influenced by Butler), “What is more important probably is not to study the materializations themselves but rather what was wasted towards these rapid and increasingly ephemeral materializations” (introduction to The Material Culture Reader, ed. Victor Buchli [Oxford: Berg, 2002], 17).
69. Serres, Parasite, 13.
Chapter 1
Donna Haraway, “Cyborgs, Coyotes, and Dogs: A Kinship of Feminist Figurations” and “There Are Always More Things Going on Than You Thought! Methodologies as Thinking Technologies: An Interview with Donna Haraway,” conducted in two parts by Nina Lykke, Randi Markussen, and Finn Olesen, in Haraway Reader, 338.
1. Jim Fisher, “Poison Valley: Is Workers’ Health the Price We Pay for High-Tech Progress?” Salon, July 30, 2001, http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/07/30/almaden1/. As Fisher writes, these “aspiring cities are founded on the reduction of a new precious metal—the computer chip—which in the end is just a metalized piece of sand, or silicon.”
2. Albert Borgmann, Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 144. This basic theory of information, which can be traced to Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, demonstrates how the “bit,” as a switching model, is closely tied to the actual operation of electrical currents. In this sense, material systems and informational systems are interdependent. See Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962); Hayles, How We Became Posthuman.
3. Christophe Lécuyer and David C. Brock undertake a material investigation into electronic innovation and suggest that not only are microelectronics “under materialized,” but that by focusing on materials entirely new questions about the material networks and ecologies of electronics emerge. See “The Materiality of Microelectronics,” History and Technology 22, no. 3 (September 2006): 301–25.
4. For a detailed analysis of microchip resources and inputs, see Ruediger Kuehr, German T. Velasquez, and Eric Williams, “Computers and the Environment: An Introduction to Understanding and Managing Their Impacts,” in Kuehr and Williams, Computers and the Environment, 1–16.
5. For reports on the historic development and dot-com to dot-bomb culture of technology in Silicon Valley, see Christophe Lecuyer, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930–1970 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Christine A. Finn, Artifacts: An Archaeologist's Year in Silicon Valley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
6. Fisher, “Poison Valley.” See also the listings for Santa Clara County in the EPA's National Priorities List, http://yosemite.epa.gov/r9/sfund/r9sfdocw.nsf/WSOState!OpenView&Start=1&Count=1000&Expand=2.29#2.29.
Information on Superfund sites in Silicon Valley in the form of legal documents and records of decision was initially made available through the EPA office in San Francisco. Much of this information is now available at http://www.epa.gov/region09/superfund/superfundsites.html. The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition also features a “Silicon Valley Toxic Tour” on its Web site, where an interactive map allows users to view the different Silicon Valley Superfund sites. See http://www.svtc.org/site/PageServer?pagename=svtc_silicon_valley_toxic_tour.
7. Cleanup is also not an absolute process, as chemicals potentially break down and migrate in unexpected ways to become newly toxic. See Matt Ritchel, “E.P.A. Takes Second Look at Many Superfund Sites,” New York Times, January 31, 2003.
8. Intel Corporation, “From Sand to Circuits,” 2005, ftp://download.intel.com/museum/sand_to_circuits.pdf.
9. Ibid.
10. Kuehr, Velasquez, and Williams, “Computers and the Environment,” 7. As these authors write, “Computer production is materials-intensive; the total fossil fuels used to manufacture one computer, for example, amount to nine times the weight of the actual computer.” As David Naguib Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park also outline, “In 1999, on average, the production of an eight-inch silicon wafer required the following resources: 4,267 cubic feet of bulk gases, 3,787 gallons of waste water, 27 pounds of chemicals, 29 cubic feet of hazardous gases, 9 pounds of hazardous waste, and 3,023 gallons of deionized water” (The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy [New York: New York University Press, 2002], 76–77).
11. Mazurek, Making Microchips, ix.
12. Not only is it ironic that a considerable amount of wasted material is required to manufacture dust-free microchips, but electronics also generate dust throughout their life cycles. More will be said about dust as waste in chapter 5, but the dust emitted from computers while in use has also been shown to contain brominated flame retardants (BFRs), substances that have a range of possible deleterious effects for people and environments. Elizabeth Grossman writes at length about BFRs in High Tech Trash; see also Alexandra McPherson, Beverley Thorpe, and Ann Blake, “Brominated Flame Retardants in Dust on Computers: The Case for Safer Chemicals and Better Computer Design,” June 2004, http://www.electronicstakeback.com.
13. A typical Intel fab is also equipped with automated pods on monorails, which monitor the chip “recipes” and transport heavy loads of wafer fabs. For a demonstration of this process, see the Intel Corporation's video “Invention, Innovation, Investment” at http://intelpr.feedroom.com/.
14. Many of the fab workers in the United States are immigrants and economically disadvantaged women of color. With offshoring of microchip fabrication to Southeast Asia and elsewhere, the profile of fab workers is similar. See Terry Harpold and Kavita Philip, “Of Bugs and Rats: Cyber-Cleanliness, Cyber-Squalor, and the Fantasy-Spaces of Informational Globalization,” Postmodern Culture 11, no. 1 (2000), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v011/11.1harpold.html. See also Pellow and Park, Silicon Valley of Dreams. There is very little comprehensive information about fab workers and rates of illness, but one early study is Damien M. McElvenny et al., Cancer among Current and Former Workers at National Semiconductor (UK) Ltd., Greenock (Norwich, UK: Health and Safety Executive Books, 2001).
15. Pellow and Park, Silicon Valley of Dreams, 76.
16. Ibid., 86–87.
17. Kenneth Geiser, “The Chips Are Falling: Health Hazards in the Microelectronics Industry,” Science for the People 17, no. 8 (1985), as cited in Pellow and Park, Silicon Valley of Dreams, 76–77. As Werner Rugemer further elaborates, “Building smaller and faster circuits…requires the use of more solvents and other chemicals to achieve the necessary requirements for ‘clean’ components. As the geometries of production decrease, more solvents are needed to wash away ever smaller ‘killer particles’ that could jam a circuit. Smaller and faster may also mean using even more chemicals” (“The Social, Human, and Structural Costs of High Technology: The Case of Silicon Valley,” Nature, Society, and Thought 1 [1987]: 149–60).
18. In this way, Esther Leslie asks whether it is “possible to tell history from the standpoint of matter—coal, diamonds, gold, metals, glass, dyes, cellophane” (Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art, and the Chemical Industry [London: Reaktion, 2005], 24).
19. Ibid.
20. See the Semiconductor Industry Association's Web site at http://www.sia-online.org/cs/industry_resources/industry_fact_sheet. The SIA estimates that “In 2005, the semiconductor industry made over 90 million transistors for every man, woman and child on Earth, and by 2010, this number should be 1 billion transistors.” See also Grossman, High Tech Trash, 4; Pellow and Park, Silicon Valley of Dreams, 86.
21. Daniel Bell is one of the most well-known historic commentators on the perceived shift to postindustrial economies. See Daniel Bell, The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
22. Pellow and Park, Silicon Valley of Dreams, 86.
23. I will not discuss offshoring at length here; for more information on this topic, see Smith, Sonnenfeld, and Pellow, Challenging the Chip.
24. Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor filed separate patents for versions of the integrated circuit in 1959 (having each developed versions in 1958). They have both since been recognized as founding “inventors” of the integrated circuit.
25. The terms microprocessor and integrated circuit are both referred to as chips or “microchips” in this study; in technical terms, microprocessor refers to a more sophisticated assemblage of transistors, the “computer on a chip.”
26. Leslie Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 137.
27. Ibid., 138.
28. Gordon Moore cited in ibid., 138.
29. Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics 38, no. 8 (April 19, 1965): 114–17. While Moore's Law may have been an inviolable principle up to this point, a number of inquiries make continual speculations about the point at which maximum growth will be reached and when an entirely new structure of growth and development will be required (such as nano-technology). Gordon Moore offers his own speculation on this point in the essay “No Exponential Is Forever…but We Can Delay Forever,” Solid State Circuits Conference Proceedings 1 (2003): 20–23.
30. Drawing a correlation between technological advance and waste, where ongoing growth in processing power renders old models obsolete, Gordon Moore further notes, “If the auto industry advanced as rapidly as the semiconductor industry, a Rolls Royce would get half a million miles per gallon and it would be cheaper to throw it away than to park it” (cited in “4004: Intel's First Microprocessor,” available at http://intelpr.feedroom.com/).
31. Intel produces around 75 percent of microchips worldwide, with the nearest competitor, Advanced Micro Devices, accounting for 23 percent of microchip production. Intel's dominance has recently been challenged by a run of antitrust cases. See “Intel's Antitrust Ruling: A Billion-Euro Question,” Economist, May 14, 2009.
32. Timothy Mitchell, “Rethinking Economy,” Geoforum 39, no. 3 (2008): 1116–21. See also Timothy Mitchell, “The Character of Calculability,” in Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 80–122.
33. Patrick Haggerty, “Integrated Electronics: A Perspective,” in Management Philosophies and Practices of Texas Instruments (Dallas: Texas Instruments, 1965), as reprinted in Frederick Seitz and Norman G. Einspruch, Electronic Genie: The Tangled History of Silicon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 221.
34. Ibid., 252.
35. Claude E. Shannon, “The Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in Shannon and Weaver, Mathematical Theory of Communication, 31–35.
36. John Durham Peters suggests just how seductive a universal approach to information became, as meaning was detached and reattached in altered form: “‘Communication theory’ was explicitly a theory of ‘signals’ and not of ‘significance.’ But as the terms diffused through intellectual life—and they did so at violent speed—these provisos were little heeded. ‘Information’ became a substantive and communication theory became an account of meaning as well as of channel capacity. Indeed, the theory may have seemed so exciting because it made something already quite familiar in war, bureaucracy, and everyday life into a concept of science and technology. Information was no longer raw data, military logistics, or phone numbers; it was the principle of the universe's intelligibility” (Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999], 23). Hayles points out that with developments in information theory, emphasis was placed on the manipulation of informational patterns at the expense of embodiment. She notes, “Aiding this process was a definition of information, formalized by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, that conceptualized information as an entity distinct from the substrates carrying it. From this formulation, it was a small step to think of information as a kind of bodiless fluid that could flow between different substrates without loss of meaning or form” (How We Became Posthuman, xi). In the same study, Hayles writes about the dematerializing drive toward total informatization and about how, “in the face of such a powerful dream, it can be a shock to remember that for information to exist, it must always be instantiated in a medium” (13).
37. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 139.
38. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 25–26. In this study of information technologies, Beniger addresses the possibility for complete assimilation through digitalization, which he suggests “begins to blur earlier distinctions between the communication of information and its processing…as well as between people and machines.” “Also blurred,” he writes, “are the distinctions among information types: numbers, words, pictures, and sounds, and eventually tastes, odors, and possibly even sensations, all might one day be stored, processed, and communicated in the same digital form. In this way digitalization promises to transform currently diverse forms of information into a generalized medium for processing and exchange by the social system, much as, centuries ago, the institution of common currencies and exchange rates began to transform local markets into a single world economy.”
39. Ibid., 23. By locating the “crisis” of production and control in the nineteenth century, Beniger suggests that information overload has a longer history than recent postwar computing devices. Printing, punch cards, and preelectric forms of automation all contributed to a form of overload. Computing, then, emerges as yet another technology that attempted to control the deluge.
40. Ibid., 17–18.
41. Punch cards are the classic example of the ways in which attempts to manage information (e.g., Census data) contributed to the development of new technologies (punch cards) to manage that information. See Jennifer Gabrys, “Paper Mountains, Disposable Cities,” in Surface Tension Supplement 1, ed. Brandon Labelle and Ken Ehrlich (Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2006), 130–39. For another example of these integrated economies of excess, see Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
42. Engineer and information scientist John Robinson Pierce notes that “an increase in possibilities increases entropy” (“The Origins of Information Theory,” in An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals, and Noise [New York: Dover, 1980], 23). Warren Weaver similarly considers how the tendency toward overproduction of new information leads to entropy, or to what information theorists refer to as “noise.” Weaver discusses how a channel may be saturated with information to overload the delivery process completely. In this way, “if one tries to overcrowd the capacity of the audience, it is probably true, by direct analogy, that you do not, so to speak, fill the audience up and then waste only the remainder by spilling. More likely, and again by direct analogy, if you overcrowd the capacity of the audience you force a general and inescapable error and confusion.” In fact, Weaver correlates the noise, or entropy, of a signal with both the “character of the source” and the “capabilities of the channel” through which it passes. His extended explanation makes clear, however, that the entropy is actually related to the material restraints the medium sets on the message. See Warren Weaver, “Some Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in Shannon and Weaver, Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1–28.
43. Beniger, Control Revolution, 47–48.
44. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 4. This report was originally commissioned by the Conseil des Universités of the government of Quebec. Arguably, widespread use of electronic information technologies and postmodernism emerge at the same moment for a reason: the perceived excess (of information and speed) that generates from and through these devices gives rise to discourses of proliferation.
45. See Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (New York: Henry Holt, 2003).
46. Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian, “How Much Information,” 2003, http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/index.htm. Information about the ongoing 2008 “How Much Information” study can be found on the Web site of the Global Information Industry Center at the University of California, San Diego, http://hmi.ucsd.edu/howmuchinfo.php.
47. Lyman and Varian, “How Much Information.”
48. Ibid.
49. Another private study, sponsored by EMC Corporation, suggests that these numbers are much higher, with as many as 3,892,179,868,480,350,000,000 bits added to the “Digital Universe” in 2008, which would be equivalent to an increase of 487 exabytes (almost 30 times more bytes than estimated by the “How Much Information” study in 2003). See IDC, The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth through 2011 (Framingham, MA: IDC, 2008).
50. Many computing texts—historic and contemporary—emphasize the basic calculating function of computers. For example, see Gordon Pask and Susan Curran, Micro Man: Living and Growing with Computers (London: Century, 1982). Media theorists have also discussed at length the relation between calculation and computation. For example, Darin Barney elaborates on the notion of the calculative episteme of computing technologies in Prometheus Wired (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2000), 61.
51. Georg Simmel discusses the ways in which quantities can give rise to new qualities in The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (1907; repr; London: Routledge, 1990), 278–80. In this respect, as Don Slater and Andrew Barry emphasize through the ongoing developments in metrology, calculation does not just count or reflect “reality”; instead, it creates “calculable objects” that can give rise to “new realities.” See Slater and Barry's introduction to The Technological Economy, ed. Don Slater and Andrew Barry (London: Routledge, 2005), 11; Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
52. Lyman and Varian, “How Much Information.” To give another sense of just how big five exabytes is, the authors elaborate, “If digitized, the nineteen million books and other print collections in the Library of Congress would contain about ten terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections.”
53. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, 101–8, available at http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0001.101 Similar economies of scale and compression are still at work today, most notably with the ongoing Google Books project. See http://books.google.com/googlebooks/history.html.
54. Bush, “As We May Think.”
55. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 111.
56. Dave Patterson, “A Conversation with Jim Gray,” ACM Queue 1, no. 4 (June 2003): 8–17. http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=864078.
57. I will discuss these qualities of calculation further in chapter 2. See also Michel Callon and John Law, “On Qualculation, Agency and Otherness,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23, no. 5 (2005): 717–33.
58. As discussed throughout this study, I am here extending N. Katherine Hayles's discussion of the imagining of immaterial information to consider how dematerialization operates beyond the “medium” and extends to infrastructures or media environments. See Hayles, How We Became Posthuman.
59. Simmel described this sensation in 1903, at a time when urban stimuli challenged all strategies of adaptation and response. The intensity, speed, and rapid change of impressions found in the modern metropolis, Simmel argued, gave rise to new strategies of sensorial navigation. See Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (1903; repr., London: Sage, 1997), 174–86.
60. A number of writers have worked through the notion of virtual geography. For example, see William J. Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
61. For a description of this Superfund redevelopment, see Environmental Protection Agency, “Fairchild Semiconductor Case Study,” http://epa.gov/superfund/programs/recycle/live/casestudy_fairchild.html.
62. While one finds the most Superfund sites in the United States within the amorphous boundaries of Silicon Valley, there is another register of abundance in this same location: Silicon Valley is also the site of one of the largest concentrations of millionaires in the world (see Pellow and Park, Silicon Valley of Dreams, 1). Many of these millionaires, however, refer to themselves as “working-class millionaires,” given the relative poverty they feel they experience in comparison to highly paid executives. See Gary Rivlin, “In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don't Feel Rich,” New York Times, August 5, 2007.
63. In a Marxian analysis, David Harvey discusses the role of spaces of accumulation and suggests that the growth of economies requires “the necessary creation of a geographical landscape to facilitate accumulation through production and circulation” (Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography [London: Routledge, 2001], 266).
64. Ibid., 237.
65. The need to renew the tools of production constantly, as Marx has stated, contributes to the inevitable production of waste. This is clearly demonstrated in Silicon Valley (and beyond) by the fact that Intel amortizes over 1 billion dollars in infrastructural costs annually in order to remain at the cutting edge of microchip production. See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (1976; repr., London: Penguin, 1990); Gordon Moore, interview, March 3, 1995, Silicon Genesis: An Oral History of Semiconductor Technology, Stanford and the Silicon Valley Project, http://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/complete_listing.html. Moore's Law, as it turns out, may level off not due to physical constraints but because of the economic constraints imposed by the costs of fabs. Smaller circuitry will become increasingly expensive to manufacture, with some technologists estimating that by 2014, when circuitry dimensions are expected to be as small as 18 nanometers, fab costs will outstrip profits recovered. See Jack Schofield, “When the Chips Are Down,” Guardian, July 29, 2009.
66. Pellow and Park, Silicon Valley of Dreams, 16–18.
67. Jean Baudrillard, “The Remainder,” in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 145.
Chapter 2
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 153.
Serres, Parasite, 52.
1. For documentation of this project, see Dennis Oppenheim, interview, March 29, 1969, in Recording Conceptual Art, ed. Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 21–30.
2. According to the NASDAQ Newsroom “Performance Report,” “NASDAQ is the largest U.S. electronic stock market. With approximately 3,200 companies, it lists more companies and, on average, trades more shares per day than any other U.S. market. It is home to companies that are leaders across all areas of business, including technology, retail, communications, financial services, transportation, media and biotechnology” (http://www.nasdaq.com/newsroom/stats/Performance_Reports.stm, accessed March 4, 2008).
3. NASDAQ, “Built for Business: Annual Report,” 2004. The “2007 Annual Report” indicates that “in 2007, NASDAQ became the largest U.S. equities exchange by volume with an average in NASDAQ securities of 2.17 billion shares per day” trading on the NASDAQ platform. See NASDAQ, “2007 Annual Report,” 7, http://ir.nasdaq.com/annuals.cfm.
4. The term new economy is much debated and discussed. For more information on the term and phenomenon, see Doug Henwood, After the New Economy: The Binge and the Hangover That Won't Go Away (New York: New Press, 2005); Jean Gadrey, New Economy, New Myth (2001; London: Routledge, 2003); Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Lisa Adkins discusses the particular ways in which the “new economy” can be seen to give rise to altered relations between people and property and to definitions of personhood and labor, in “The New Economy, Property, and Personhood,” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 2 (2005): 111–30.
5. Melissa Fisher and Greg Downey elaborate on this point: “The New Economy looked like an old story: speculator hype driving a stock market bubble…. There was no New Economy, if that term meant the dawn of an age without business contractions, where the cyclical laws of the economy had been repeated” (“Introduction: The Anthropology of Capital and the Frontiers of Ethnography,” in Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, ed. Melissa Fisher and Greg Downey [Durham: Duke University Press, 2006], 2).
6. Thompson argues this point throughout Rubbish Theory, although he discusses the migration of value across categories of value, devaluation, and revaluation primarily in relation to houses and antiques.
7. To this extent, as Harvey writes when elaborating on the relation between crisis and saturated markets so often discussed by Marx, “Periodic crises must in general have the effect of expanding the productive capacity and renewing the conditions of further accumulation. We can conceive of each crisis as shifting the accumulation process onto a new and higher plane” (Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 241).
8. For a more extensive discussion on the stock ticker as a “generator” of temporalities, see Alex Preda, “Socio-Technical Agency in Financial Markets: The Case of the Stock Ticker,” Social Studies of Science 36, no. 5 (October 2006): 753–82.
9. My use of the performative here draws on literature that discusses the more affective and material aspects of markets, as well as analyses of the ways in which markets perform and so constitute economic conditions. See, for instance, Nigel Thrift, “Performing Cultures in the New Economy,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, no. 4 (2000): 674–92; Michael Pryke and John Allen, “Monetized Time-Space: Derivatives—Money's ‘New Imaginary?’” Economy and Society 29, no. 2 (May 2000): 264–84; Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu, eds., Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
10. Donald MacKenzie, “Is Economics Performative? Option Theory and the Construction of Derivative Markets,” and Michel Callon, “What Does It Mean to Say That Economics Is Performative?” in MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu, Do Economists Make Markets? 54–86, 311–57.
11. Benjamin sought to describe this more phenomenal aspect of “economy and culture” through his readings (in some ways, against the grain) of Marx. As Benjamin suggests, he was less interested in the “causal” or originary aspects of economies and more attentive to their “expressive” aspects. This expressive element could even influence the shape of theories that describe those economies. So Benjamin asserts, in his Convolute on the stock exchange, that his study of the arcades “will demonstrate how the milieu in which Marx's doctrine arose affected that doctrine through its expressive character (which is to say, not only through causal connections); but, second, it will also show in what respects Marxism, too, shares the expressive character of the material products contemporary with it.” See Benjamin, Arcades Project, 460. The present study on electronic waste similarly seeks to draw out such shared elements of economy and culture, particularly (but not exclusively) through readings of postmodern and media theory as corresponding in expression with information economies.
12. Rita Raley, “eEmpires,” Cultural Critique 57 (Spring 2004): 121–22. In fact, electronic communication networks now constitute a considerable portion of online trading, and these private mechanisms often enable 24-hour trading. But the full scope of electronic markets and technologies cannot even be circumscribed with these networks. As discussed by Pryke and Allen in “Monetized Time-Space,” financial deregulation has, of course, played a significant role in the alteration of markets.
13. Raley, “eEmpires,” 111.
14. To this end, media theorist Nick Dyer-Witheford notes that the growth of digital technology is “inseparable” from the growth of these markets. See Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 139.
15. See Bette K. Fishbein et al., Extended Producer Responsibility: A Materials Policy for the 21st Century (New York: Inform, 2000); Bette K. Fishbein, Waste in a Wireless World: The Challenge of Cell Phones (New York: Inform, 2002). When assessing trends toward dematerialization, some researchers have argued that material flows should be evaluated not just in terms of mass or weight but also in terms of the impact—or “environmental weights”—of materials. Some materials may have a relatively small bulk, but their environmental weight may be considerably larger. This is particularly true for metals. See Ester van der Voet, Lauran van Oers, and Igor Nikolic, “Dematerialization: Not Just a Matter of Weight,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 8, no. 4 (2005): 121–37.
16. N. Currimbhoy, “New NASDAQ MarketSite Design Inspired by Computer Chip (New-York-City Headquarters Resembles the Inside of a Computer,” Architectural Record 186, no. 5 (May 1998): 262. C & J Partners of Pasadena, California, was the primary design firm responsible for MarketSite, while Illuminating Concepts completed the lighting design.
17. Ibid.
18. NASDAQ, “MarketSite Fact Sheet,” http://www.nasdaq.com/reference/marketsite_facts.stm.
19. Anthony Dunne, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 26–27.
20. For extended studies on the virtual, see N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
21. See James G. Carrier and Daniel Miller, Virtualism: A New Political Economy (Oxford: Berg, 1998).
22. Indeed, Bernard Stiegler suggests that “the so-called ‘financial bubble’ is becoming autonomous to such an extent that it is often cut off from productive realities, and functions according to a logic of belief (or of credit) massively determined by the performance of telecommunication and computer-based systems in the management of financial data. Capital exchanges have become a problem of informational management effected ‘in a nanosecond.’ These exchanges are data that are exchanged and processed, and no longer monetary masses. Decisions made ‘in a nanosecond’ are calculations performed on series of indicators dealing primarily with the stock markets themselves and with macroeconomic decisions interfering with them, and not evaluations of the macroeconomic situations of particular enterprises.” In this sense, Stiegler writes, “This is the context in which the limited company and the stock-market system developed, with the aim of assuring the mobility of capital” (Technics and Time, vol. 1, The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998], 38). Rather than argue that bubbles are “cut off” from reality, however, the present study suggests that the performance of electronic technologies contributes to and mobilizes reality effects, in both the rise and fall of values.
23. Intensity of market practices is one register through which market performativity is now increasingly described. See Scott Lash and Celia Lury, Global Culture Industry (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Karin Knorr-Cetina and Urs Bruegger, “Global Microstrucures: The Virtual Societies of Financial Markets,” American Journal of Sociology 107, no. 4 (2002): 905–50.
24. Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism (London: Sage, 2005), 126.
25. Thrift goes so far as to state that such expenditure, which came to define the new economy, in fact constituted “a kind of forced technological march” (ibid., 127).
26. Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 21. Elsewhere, Michael Callon suggests, “To predict economic agents’ behaviors an economic theory does not have to be true; it simply needs to be believed by everyone” (“What Does It Mean to Say That Economics Is Performative?” 322).
27. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 29. Caitlin Zaloom also discusses this overlay of financial news and trading in Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006).
28. NASDAQ, “MarketSite Fact Sheet.”
29. Gordon L. Clark and Nigel Thrift, “Performing Finance: The Industry, the Media, and Its Image,” Review of International Political Economy 11, no. 2 (May 2004): 290.
30. Thrift, Knowing Capitalism, 124. See also Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma. “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 191–213.
31. Clark and Thrift, “Performing Finance,” 298.
32. NASDAQ, “2007 Annual Report,” 7.
33. Ibid.
34. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 39–40. As Shiller elaborates in his discussion of “irrational exuberance,” the rate of turnover for NASDAQ stocks rose “from 88% in 1990 to 221% in 1999.”
35. Pryke and Allen, “Monetized Time-Space,” 270. Benjamin has also made this observation in relation to nineteenth-century economies (drawing on Marx's discussion of the spinning jenny): “More than a hundred years before it was fully manifest, the colossal acceleration of the tempo of living was heralded in the tempo of production. And, indeed, in the form of the machine…. The tempo of machine operation effects changes in the economic tempo” (Arcades Project, 394).
36. Caitlin Zaloom, “Ambiguous Numbers: Technology and Trading in Global Financial Markets,” American Ethnologist 30, no. 2 (2003): 259.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 261. Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger emphasize the ways in which screens even qualify the dominant model of markets as networks. They argue instead for a “scopic” understanding of screen-based markets, because “networks are sparse social structures, and it is difficult to see how they can incorporate the patterns of intense and dynamic conversational interaction, the knowledge flows, and the temporal structuration” of market activity. As this study on electronic waste suggests, however, networks are more than organizing conceptual structures and can be understood as part of the processes of electronic materialization, with which screens are continuous and constitutive. See Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger, “Global Microstructures,” 910.
39. Donna Haraway, “Cyborgs to Companion Species: Reconfiguring Kinship in Technoscience,” in Haraway Reader, 303.
40. In this way, media theorist Ludwig Pfeiffer undertakes a study into the elusive “materiality of communication” and maintains that “the fall of matter and materialism does not lead to the immaterial pure and simple; rather, it branches into the immaterial and its material ‘sites’ or ‘supports.’ Instead of substantial objects and their meanings, we get information overload and a new hardness of ‘supporting’ materials, and new ‘performativity’ of things and bodies” (“The Materiality of Communication,” in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, trans. William Whobrey [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994], 2).
41. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 28. As Hayles writes, “Information in fact derives its efficacy from the material infrastructures it appears to obscure. This illusion of erasure should be the subject of inquiry, not a presupposition that inquiry takes for granted.” Hayles contests the supposed separation between materiality and information and further argues, “The point of highlighting such moments is to make clear how much had to be erased to arrive at such abstractions in all theorizing, for no theory can account for the infinite multiplicity of our interactions with the real.” Here she reveals how the abstract model works to erase multiplicity and stands in for the real such that noise appears as an intrusion rather than an actual condition that challenges any pretense toward complete abstraction.
42. Don Slater, “Markets, Materiality, and the ‘New Economy,’” in Market Relations and the Competitive Process, ed. Stan Metcalfe and Alan Warde (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 95–113. See also Slater and Barry, Technological Economy.
43. Slater, “Markets, Materiality, and the ‘New Economy.’”
44. For a more detailed history of the first computers used to control stock, inventory, and even pastries, see Mike Hally, Electronic Brains (London: Granta, 2005).
45. Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 186.
46. Ibid., 189.
47. Ibid.
48. The massive server farms that power NASDAQ are alone evidence of this considerable resource base, in addition to the other examples cited up to this point. Servers—for everything from NASDAQ to Google to the Internet in general—are a major source of energy consumption (and carbon dioxide emissions). See Bobbie Johnson, “Web Providers Must Limit Internet's Carbon Footprint, Say Experts,” Guardian, May 3, 2009.
49. Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 16.
50. Ibid., 15.
51. Ibid., 16–17. As Schiller writes, “Inclusive of computing and telecommunications, information technology was proclaimed (by the American Electronics Association) the United States’ largest industry.”
52. Ibid., 17. Barney also writes on the effectiveness of networks as engines of economic growth: “Computer networks did not create the globalized, privatized economy; they do, however, make it possible to exploit this economy. Flexible production and mass customization are based on speedy, but controlled, processing of systems information, a requirement that the movement of bits over networked computers is particularly suited to meet…. Networks are the essential technology for those ‘agile’ and ‘virtual’ enterprises that are ‘thriving on change and uncertainty’ in the era of perfecting capitalism” (Prometheus Wired, 130).
53. Raley writes that this “Electronic Empire” “is a loose assemblage of relations characterized by another set of terms: flexibility, functionality, mobility, programmability, and automation. The paradigm for such an assemblage is the network, which involves new geopolitical orderings, a reconfigured sense of center and periphery and an attendant complication of the world-system idea” ( “eEmpires,” 132).
54. Kelly, Out of Control, 193.
55. Schiller, Digital Capitalism, xv. Algorithmic trading, or “exchange automation” is also one key way in which the particular functionalities and speeds of market exchanges are performed. See Fabian Muniesa, “Assemblage of a Market Mechanism,” Journal of the Center for Information Studies 5, no. 3 (2004): 11–19.
56. Kelly writes, “In network economics the major expense of new product development stems from designing the manufacturing process and not designing the product” (Out of Control, 196).
57. Nigel Thrift and Shaun French, “The Automatic Production of Space,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27, no. 3 (2002): 310.
58. Friedrich Kittler, “There Is No Software,” CTHEORY, October 18, 1995, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74.
59. Ibid. Kittler also writes, “Only in Turing's paper On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem there existed a machine with unbounded resources in space and time, with infinite supply of raw paper and no constraints on computation speed. All physically feasible machines, in contrast, are limited by these parameters in their very code. The inability of Microsoft DOS to tell more than the first eight letters of a file name such as WordPerfect gives just a trivial or obsolete illustration of a problem that has provoked not only the ever-growing incompatibilities between the different generations of eight-bit, sixteen-bit and thirty-two-bit microprocessors, but also a near impossibility of digitizing the body of real numbers formerly known as nature.”
60. John Diebold, “Factories without Men: New Industrial Revolution,” Nation, September 19, 1953, 227–28, 250–51, 271–72. See also Paul Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 32.
61. John Diebold, Automation: The Advent of the Automatic Factory (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1952), 46.
62. Ibid., 46–47.
63. Ibid., 47.
64. Ibid., 30. In many ways, this optimization and improved efficiency in the production process simply shifted the problem of waste to appear to be a problem related to consumption. More will be said about this in the following chapters, which address disposal and obsolescence.
65. Ibid., 32.
66. Marshall McLuhan, “Automation: Learning a Living,” in Understanding Media, 347.
67. Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 56.
68. Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 61.
69. Serres further writes, “At least by the change of directions, at least by the division of flows, by bifurcation, at least by semiconduction, one-way streets and no entries, at least by orientation. Hermes is the god of the crossroads, and is the god of whom Maxwell made a demon. Thus the message, passing through his hands in the location of the exchanger, is changer. It arrives neither pure nor unvarying nor stable” (Parasite, 42–43).
70. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 4. Appadurai suggests that we explore “the conditions under which economic objects circulate in different regimes of value in space and time.”
71. Ibid., 9.
72. Thrift, Knowing Capitalism, 7.
73. For more on such “refashioning” of the commodity, see Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium, 142.
74. Fritz Machlup, Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribution, and Economic Significance, vol. 1, Knowledge and Knowledge Production (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 162. Such “flows of knowledge” took actual form in a 1949 analog computer designed by Bill Phillips, which modeled varying economic conditions through flows of differently colored water. Phillips designed this computer while at the London School of Economics, and the machine is now held by the Science Museum of London.
75. Ibid., 162.
76. Ibid., 171. As Machlup notes, “The production and distribution of knowledge in the United States is, in essence, the annual flow of knowledge disseminated at a cost (defrayed or borne by some members of our society).”
77. Kelly, Out of Control, 209–10.
78. Spam has reached such a volume that “pump and dump” strategies for promoting and then selling shares can at times have a significant effect on markets. See “Spammers Manipulate Stock Markets,” BBC News, August 25, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/5284618.stm.
79. The proportion of e-mail traffic that consists of spam reportedly ranges from 50 to 80 percent of all Internet traffic. Similarly, the proportion of U.S. mail that constitutes “junk” or bulk mailings is as much as 50 percent. See Andrew Odlyzko, “The History of Communications and Its Implications for the Internet,” 2000, http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/history.communications0.pdf.
80. Paul Reyes details the remainders of these recently failed economies in “Bleak Houses: Digging through the Ruins of the Mortgage Crisis,” Harper's, October 2008, 31–45.
81. Michael Shanks, David Platt, and William L. Rathje, “The Perfume of Garbage: Modernity and the Archaeological,” Modernism/Modernity 11, no. 1 (2004): 72.
82. John Frow, “Invidious Distinction: Waste, Difference, and Classy Stuff,” in Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, ed. Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 35.
83. Ibid., 36.
84. Design theorist Anne-Marie Willis addresses some of the contradictory notions of dematerialization: “While initially, information technology seemed to offer obvious opportunities for impact reduction (e.g., less need to travel, less need for paper) it in fact has provided endless possibilities for driving new forms of material throughput.” “De/re/materialization (contra-futures),” Design Philosophy Papers 2 (2005), http://www.desphilosophy.com.
85. The World Resources Institute report on material flows documents the relatively constant quantities of resources in use within manufacturing, even with the trend toward fewer resource inputs per unit manufactured. See Allen Hammond et al., Resource Flows: The Material Basis of Industrial Economies (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute, 1997).
86. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “Myths of the Informational Society,” in The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Madison, WI: Coda, 1980), 6. Dupuy writes, “Whether they talk of ‘new growth’ or a ‘new international economic order,’ the underlying strategy is the same: let's send our heavy industries abroad where they can pollute the countries of the Third World, spoiling their landscapes, deadening their workers, and disrupting their time and space, and let's keep for ourselves the growth of immaterial productions which do not poison the atmosphere, are suited to decentralized locations, and enable us to solve to a large extent the problem of unemployment.”
87. Lisa Parks, “Kinetic Screens: Epistemologies of Movement at the Interface,” in MediaSpace: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age, ed. Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy (London: Routledge, 2004), 52.
88. Cathode-ray tubes, commonly found in monitors for computers and televisions, contain lead oxide and cadmium, substances that are toxic to humans (and the environment). When recycled, the copper tubes at the end of the CRT yokes are broken off and sold for metal recovery. CRTs in monitors are now increasingly replaced by liquid crystal displays. There is some speculation that due to new flat-panel screens and the introduction of digital television, television and computer screen disposal may increase considerably. See Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Exporting Harm, 5.
89. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 153.
Chapter 3
J. David Bolter, Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 121.
1. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 91. Calvino writes, “The bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher, become stratified, extend over a wider perimeter. Besides, the more Leonia's talent for making new materials excels, the more the rubbish improves in quality, resists time, the elements, fermentations, combustions.”
2. Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (New York: David McKay, 1960), 4–5.
3. International Association of Electronics Recyclers, IAER Electronics Recycling Industry Report, 7.
4. Basel Action Network, Digital Dump, 12.
5. Appadurai, “Introduction,” 5.
6. Robin Murray, Zero Waste (London: Greenpeace Environmental Trust, 2002). Murray cites the 1997 World Resources Institute study already cited in chapter 2: “The World Resources Institute led an international team that traced the flows of 55 materials in 500 use streams (covering 95% of the weight of materials in the economy) for four leading OECD economies (the USA, Japan, the Netherlands and Germany). They found that the total materials requirement in these countries was 45 to 85 metric tonnes per person and that of this between 55% and 75% takes the form of waste materials that are discarded in the course of production (such as mining overburden, agricultural waste or material removed for infrastructural works).” See also Hammond, Resource Flows.
7. Rathje and Murphy, Rubbish! 188–89.
8. Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, “Introduction: Matter Unbound,” Journal of Material Culture 8, no. 3 (2003): 246.
9. While early studies on electronic waste focused on PCs and mobile phones, the full delineation has now been extended to include this range of electrical and electronic devices. For a discussion on the early estimates of electronic waste volumes, see H. Scott Matthews and Deanna Matthews, “Information Technology Products and the Environment,” in Kuehr and Williams, Computers and the Environment, 17–40.
10. Intel is “inside” just about every device imaginable. With “Intel Inside,” and with chips that continually ramp up every 18 months, not just computers but also every manner of electronic appliance and gadget become subject to this temporal trajectory for innovation. On the far-reaching effects of “Intel Inside,” Harvey Molotch writes, “In some cases, the same source provides identical or near-identical elements for many purveyors. ‘Intel's Inside’ a lot of different products that compete with one another but which get their chip from the same producer—Intel” (Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers, and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are [New York: Routledge, 2003], 205–6).
11. Vernon L. Fladager, The Selling Power of Packaging (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), 94.
12. Katie Dean, “Disposable DVDs at Crossroads,” Wired News, February 7, 2005, http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2005/02/66513.
13. Amanda Onion, “Buy, Use, Dispose: A Spike in Disposable Products Has Environmentalists Worried,” ABC News, December 4, 2002.
14. Packard, Waste Makers, 54.
15. This logic is taken up by a number of (postmodern) theorists, including Baudrillard: “What is produced today is not produced for its use-value or its possible durability, but rather with an eye to its death, and the increase in the speed with which that death comes about is equaled only by the speed of price rises…. Now, we know that the order or production only survives by paying the price of this extermination, this perpetual calculated ‘suicide’ of the mass of objects, and that this operation is based on technological ‘sabotage’ or organized obsolescence under cover of fashion” (The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, trans. Chris Turner [London: Sage, 1998], 46).
16. Gay Hawkins, “Plastic Bags: Living with Rubbish,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (2001): 9. As Benjamin writes, “The dialectic of commodity production in advanced capitalism: the novelty of products—as a stimulus to demand—is accorded an unprecedented importance. At the same time, the ‘eternal return of the same’ is manifest in mass production” (Arcades Project, 331).
17. To this extent, geographer Kevin Hetherington calls for the study of consumption and disposal as related practices. He writes, “Studying consumption makes no sense unless we consider the role of disposing as an integral part of the totality of what consumer activity is all about.” See Kevin Hetherington, “Second-handedness: Consumption, Disposal, and Absent Presence,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 1 (2004): 158.
18. Diebold's writings (“The Diebold Group, Inc., Client Reports, 1957–1990,” held at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota) provide an extensive record of how material goods have been transformed—and have also proliferated—through “computerized” automation. Diebold consulted to companies ranging from General Electric to Time Incorporated and K-mart. In the process, he established a clear logic about how computerized automation would contribute to the growth of economies.
19. Hawkins, “Plastic Bags,” 9.
20. With new levels of convergence and pervasive computing with wireless technologies, electronic waste may increase even further. For an extended discussion of this dilemma, see Andreas Köhler and Lorenz Erdmann, “Expected Environmental Impacts of Pervasive Computing,” Human and Ecological Risk Assessment 10, no. 5 (October 2004): 831–52.
21. Ezio Manzini, The Material of Invention (London: Design Council, 1986), 29. Manzini further writes, “The only way to describe the material is to consider it as a system capable of performance: thus we shall speak of a ‘material,’ not by defining ‘what it is,’ but describing ‘what it does.’”
22. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers, A History of Chemistry, trans. Deborah van Dam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 205–6.
23. “Molded Plastic Containers,” Modern Packaging Journal 31 (1957): 120.
24. According to Rathje and Murphy, however, packaging accounts for a comparatively moderate proportion of municipal solid waste in the United States, and they suggest that packaging has actually helped to reduce some types of waste, including food waste. See Rathje and Murphy, Rubbish! 216–20.
25. “Molded Plastic Containers,” 120.
26. Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination (Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1992), 65–66.
27. Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society, 1750–1980 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 190–93. In this sense, Forty suggests that electricity—particularly as packaged in the form of electrical appliances—depended on “ideas and potential rather than present realities in its appeal to domestic consumers.”
28. Roland Barthes, “Plastic,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 97.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 299.
32. Ibid.
33. Manzini, Material of Invention, 31.
34. Ibid., 32.
35. Ibid., 39.
36. Even though they increasingly appear to be disposable, electronics are not typically designed for disassembly. Electronics recyclers often point out the difficulty of salvaging machines that are not designed with standardized disassembly in mind, which means that most machines must be stripped by hand. Electronic waste then constitutes a formidable waste problem, not least because there is no established or systematic infrastructure to handle this type and volume of waste.
37. The “Electronic Waste Guide” (http://www.ewaste.ch/) suggests that the hazards of electronic waste can be contained if properly handled: “The formation or discharge of hazardous emissions during the recycling of electrical and electronic equipment depends highly on the handling of electronic waste. Hence hazardous substances contained in computers and televisions don't lead automatically to a risk for the environment and the human health.”
38. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), 55.
39. As John Scanlan writes on Zygmunt Bauman's notion of “fluid modernity,” mobile technologies such as these enable a particular kind of “flushing,” a sense of fluidity that enables transience and disposability. Such flushing makes way for future movement, and in this respect, “the liquidity of the present describes the dematerialization of the object world, not to mention the practical ease with which we can apply the technological flush.” Flushing and the fluidity of movement are continuous with the dissipation of materials. See Scanlan, On Garbage, 127; Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 2–14.
40. For a general discussion of dirt and systems, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; repr., London: Routledge, 1995).
41. Hetherington, “Secondhandedness,” 160.
42. Shanks, Platt, and Rathje, “Perfume of Garbage,” 80.
43. Discussing these processes of delay and postponement, cultural historian Susan Strasser writes, following on Mary Douglas, “Sorting and classification have a spatial dimension: this goes here, that goes there. Nontrash belongs in the house; trash goes outside. Marginal categories get stored in marginal places (attics, basements, and outbuildings), eventually to be used, sold, or given away” (Strasser, Waste and Want [New York: Henry Holt, Metropolitan, 1999], 6).
44. Hetherington, “Secondhandedness,” 162.
45. Ibid., 160.
46. Environmental Protection Agency, “Waste Wise Update: Electronics Reuse and Recycling.”
47. Giles Slade documents just how limited existing waste infrastructures would be in their capacity to remove the masses of e-waste in storage. He writes, “But more practically, the e-waste problem will soon reach such gigantic proportions that it will overwhelm our shipping capacity. The world simply cannot produce enough containers for America to continue at its current level as an exporter of both electronic goods and electronic waste” (Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006], 3).
48. Hetherington, “Secondhandedness,” 169.
49. The process of destroying data on hard drives is notoriously difficult, and many electronics recyclers first set up business to deal not with the reuse of machines but, rather, with the destruction of sensitive data on computers. Typically, recyclers will offer a certification that ensures the elimination of data from hard drives. Many computers, however, are “recycled” without this guarantee, and as a result, hard drives have been scoured for personal data. The Basel Action Network documents leftover sensitive data on hard drives sent from the United States to Africa in their report The Digital Dump and in media related to this project on their Web site, http://www.ban.org.
50. This recycling experiment was conducted at a time when relatively few channels existed for the recycling of consumer electronics. These programs have since become better established, although they are not without their difficulties. More will be said about electronics recycling in chapter 5 and the conclusion.
51. Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Exporting Harm, 6.
52. The WEEE Directive is the first of such systematic attempts to prevent the flow of electronics to landfills. Initiated by the European Union, the WEEE Directive has recently required that manufacturers and producers take responsibility (extended producer responsibility, or EPR) for electronics at end of life by providing options for take-back and recycling of their machines. The program has had difficulties with enforcement, however. As a result, some commentators suggest the WEEE and RoHS regulations have become prime examples of “greenwash.” See Fred Pearce, “Greenwash: WEEE Directive Is a Dreadful Missed Opportunity to Clean up E-waste,” Guardian, June 25, 2009.
53. See Fishbein et al., Extended Producer Responsibility.
54. Up to 80 percent of electronics shipped to Asia for recycling have their point of origin with raw material brokers in the United States. See Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Exporting Harm, 1–2. See also Jennifer Clapp, Toxic Exports (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), for an in-depth analysis of the geopolitical implications of the movements of hazardous waste.
55. “Greenpeace Deploys GPS to Track Illegal Electronic Waste,” Environment Blog, Guardian, February 18, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/feb/18/greenpeace-electronic-waste-nigeria-tv-gps; “Undercover Operation Exposes Illegal Dumping of E-waste in Nigeria,” Greenpeace News, February 18, 2009, http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/e-waste-nigeria180209.
56. See Basel Action Network, Digital Dump; Fishbein, Waste in a Wireless World.
57. Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 252–53.
58. Dan Glaister, “US Recycling: ‘I Don't Even Think We Have an Industry,’” Guardian, January 9, 2009.
59. Tania Branigan, “From East to West, a Chain Collapses,” Guardian, January 9, 2009; Christine Oliver, “Recycling in the Credit Crunch,” Guardian, January 9, 2009; Leo Hickman, “The Truth about Recycling,” Guardian, February 26, 2009.
60. “UN Programme Aims at Environmentally Sound Disposal of Electronic Waste,” UN News Centre, November 25, 2005, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=16690&Cr=electronic&Cr1=.
61. Heather Rogers, Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (New York: New Press, 2005), 201. Increasingly, the production of electronics has been offshored to India, China, and Taiwan—the same places where electronic waste returns after it has been shipped and consumed in the United States and Europe.
62. Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995), 12. See also Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
63. Sekula, Fish Story, 49.
64. Ibid., 50. Not only is shipping a more protracted space of material movement, but it also requires extensive material resources while contributing significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. See National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “Maritime Shipping Makes Hefty Contribution to Harmful Air Pollution,” February 26, 2009, http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090226_shipping.html.
65. While North America is currently the largest consumer of electronics, China and India are now experiencing the greatest growth in electronics consumption. In this case, the countries that have traditionally been the recipients of electronic waste from other parts of the world must now deal with their own internal electronic waste problem. See the “Electronic Waste Guide,” which notes, “China had the highest growth in number of computer users per capita in the period 1993–2000. It grew a massive 1052%, compared to a world average of 181%” (http://www.ewasteguide.info/economical_facts_and_figures).
66. Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Exporting Harm, 5.
67. Ibid., 18.
68. Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 60. Bauman notes that electronics are so easily outdated that not even charities will accept them as donations. To process the waste, instead, there emerges “human-waste producing plants. In Guiyu, there are 100,000 of them—men, women and children working for the equivalent of 94p a day.”
69. Gavin Lucas, “Disposability and Dispossession in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Material Culture 7, no. 1 (2002): 15.
70. Moser addresses this dynamic within recycling: “As potential resource, waste therefore reacquires value and becomes a commodity. It then can be treated as any other product, even traded on the stock exchange, on the condition, however, that it undergo a process of transformation, which sees it from a heterogeneous and degraded object back to the status of basic material” (“Acculturation of Waste,” 96).
71. Martin O'Brien, “Rubbish-Power: Towards a Sociology of the Rubbish Society,” in Consuming Cultures, ed. Jeff Hearn and Sasha Roseneil (Houndsmill, UK: Macmillan, 1999), 270. While the disruption that waste effects within traditional political economies of production and consumption is of greater interest here, O'Brien does expand his study of waste from rubbish economies to histories, literatures, and more in A Crisis of Waste? Understanding the Rubbish Society (London: Routledge, 2007).
72. As Hetherington similarly explains, “‘Dirt’ has to do with the making and unmaking of that process rather than with a thing in itself” (“Secondhandedness,” 163). Hetherington draws on discussions of dirt by Lyotard and Serres: see Jean-François Lyotard, Driftworks (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984); Michel Serres, Rome (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
73. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Pelican, 1973), 91.
74. Ibid., 93.
75. Ibid.
76. Lucas, “Disposability and Dispossession,” 17.
77. Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, “Consuming Andean Televisions,” Journal of Material Culture 8, no. 3 (2003): 275, 283.
78. Lucas, “Disposability and Dispossession,” 19.
Chapter 4
Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Redmond, WA: Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, 1987), 4–5.
Stiegler, Technics and Time, 27.
1. While a basic distinction is often made between the museum as a space of exhibition and the archive as a space of storage, I will discuss the museum and archive together in this chapter, as electronic technologies tend to collapse the distance between these two previously distinct entities. For more on the convergence of museum and archive (and library), see Wolfgang Ernst, “Archi(ve)textures of Museology,” in Museums and Memory, ed. Susan A. Crane (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 17–34.
2. Straw, “Exhausted Commodities.”
3. “In regard to such a perception, one could speak of the increasing concentration (integration) of reality, such that everything past (in its time) can acquire a higher grade of actuality than it had in the moment of its existing. How it marks itself as higher actuality is determined by the image as which and in which it is comprehended. And this dialectical penetration and actualization of former contexts puts the truth of all present action to the test. Or rather, it serves to ignite the explosive materials that are latent in what has been (the authentic figure of which is fashion)” (Benjamin, Arcades Project, 392).
4. As further explained by Rosalind Krauss, “Benjamin believed that at the birth of a given social form or technological process the utopian dimension was present and, furthermore, that it is precisely at the moment of the obsolescence of that technology that it once more releases this dimension, like the last gleam of a dying star. For obsolescence, the very law of commodity production both frees the outmoded object from the grip of utility and reveals the hollow promise of that law” (A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition [London: Thames and Hudson, 1999], 41).
5. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 182. See also Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 160.
6. See Benjamin, Arcades Project, 462; Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 178.
7. Hetherington, “Secondhandedness,” 166. Hetherington writes, “There are few things that institutions like museums and libraries agonize over more than disposal in the sense of deaccessioning.” Indeed, in various computing history archives, one finds such an uneasy relation to the fact that the sheer number of preservable electronics well exceeds the holding capacity of the museum. So the inevitable deaccessioning takes place, where objects are given nearly ritualistic burials at the local landfill. This is not a topic most curators are prepared to discuss, but the fact remains that not every object in the history of electronics can possibly be retained for “future posterity.”
8. This chapter maintains the standard differentiation between mass or permanent storage, typically on magnetic media, and memory, which refers to the temporary working storage of random-access memory (RAM). In common usage, however, these terms are often used interchangeably.
9. Seitz and Einspruch, Electronic Genie, 213–15.
10. The manipulation of time in fact counts as the measure of progress for electronics in multiple ways. As Bolter writes, “The operating time is often the single most important measure of work done by the computer. When a new machine is brought on the market, the first question asked is: how fast are the basic instructions to fetch data from memory, operate upon it, and return the result? A new computer installation, a collection of several processors and storage devices, measures its productivity in terms of throughput, that is, how many programs can be run in a fixed period of time. Conversely, the programmer grades the success of his solution to a problem by the speed of execution of his program” (Turing's Man, 109–10).
11. Jean François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 64.
12. Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (London: Indigo, 1999), 198.
13. Ibid.
14. Hansen's discussion of voluntary and involuntary memory as read through Benjamin may be a helpful addition to this statement: “For Benjamin, therefore, the disjunction demarcates two antithetical types of experience: one centered around a reflective, psychic subject whose powers have been markedly diminished with the advent of modernity (Erfahrung); another around a corporeal agency sensitive to the inhuman rhythms of the mechanosphere (Erlebnis). Since voluntary memory takes its standard directly from the rhythm of external duration, of the commodity world itself, its predominance in the modern world yields a fundamental deterritorialization of the traditional humanist, cognitive subject” (Hansen, Embodying Technesis, 243).
15. Bush, “As We May Think,” 101–8.
16. Jim Gemmell, Gordon Bell, and Roger Lueder, “MyLifeBits: A Personal Database for Everything,” Microsoft Research Technical Report, MSR-TR-2006-23 (San Francisco: Microsoft Bay Area Research Center, 2006), http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=64157.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid. See also Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (New York: Dutton, 2009).
19. As Friedrich Kittler argues, “For the very first time in media history, data that are stored or transferred are already computable for that very reason” (“Museums on the Digital Frontier,” in The End(s) of the Museum, ed. Alexander Garcia Düttmann et al. [Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1996], 71).
20. Alan Turing, “Intelligent Machinery,” in Mechanical Intelligence, ed. D. C. Ince (1948; repr., London: North Holland, 1992), 107–28.
21. Kittler, “Museums on the Digital Frontier,” 75.
22. Corzo asks, “Is it possible that the clay tablets of Tell Brak will last longer than our current high-powered, ultra-sophisticated technology?” (Miguel Angel Corzo, ed., Mortality/Immortality? The Legacy of 20th-Century Art [Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 1999], xvii).
23. Gemmell, Bell, and Lueder, “MyLifeBits.”
24. Indeed, MyLifeBits assumes such an underlying condition of transience, which presents cause for one's personal database to grow. This is due to the fact that “external” data, such as Web sites, are so transient that it is necessary to store this desired data on one's own system in order to ensure continuing access.
25. In Chris Marker's film Sans Soleil (1982), the narrator predicts, “The New Bible will be of Magnetic Memory, and will have to rerecord itself constantly just to remember itself.” This is a situation of “total recall” and “total amnesia,” of a memory that is as extended as it is volatile.
26. Friedrich Kittler writes, “Emulation would seem to be the answer to the oft-repeated paradox that the computer as a medium can archive all other media except itself. In his essay Trancemedia: from Simulation to Emulation, Arjen Mulder suggests that emulation is the only means at the computer's disposal to secure and access its own history. Emulation of all earlier hardware plus software is the only way in which computer history can be written using a computer” (“The Exhibition as Emulator,” trans. James Boekbinder, text commissioned for the 2000 InfoArcadia exhibition, http://www.mediamatic.net/article-8740-en.html).
27. Molotch, Where Stuff Comes From, 2–3.
28. Bruce Sterling, “Built on Digital Sand: A Media Archaeologist Digs the Lonely Shores of Binary Obsolescence,” in “Ghost: Archive, Evolution, Entropy,” Horizon Zero 18 (2004), http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/ghost.php?is=18&file=4&tlang=0.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Geert Lovink, “Archive Rumblings: Interview with German Media Archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst,” Nettime, February 25, 2003, http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0302/msg00132.html.
32. Ibid.
33. This concept is expressed in varying ways by authors as far-ranging as Stiegler, Hansen, Lyotard, and Sterling. For a more extended discussion, see especially Stiegler's Technics and Time. In this work, Stiegler writes, “There is a historicity to the technical object that makes its descriptions as a mere hump of inert matter impossible. This inorganic matter organizes itself. In organizing itself, it becomes indivisible and conquers a quasi-ipseity from which its dynamic proceeds absolutely: the history of this becoming-organic is not that of the humans who ‘made’ the object” (71).
34. Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 58.
35. Franz Alt, Evaluation of Automatic Computing Machines (Washington, DC: National Bureau of Standards, 1951).
36. Ceruzzi, History of Modern Computing, ix.
37. Ibid.
38. A number of scholars write on the multiple implications of this term. See, for example, Jonathan Sterne, “Out with the Trash: On the Future of New Media,” in Residual Media, ed. Charles Acland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 16–31; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, eds., New Media, Old Media (New York: Routledge, 2006); Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). Writing in what seems to be a Benjaminian register, Paul Rabinow suggests the “contemporary” emerges not through the elimination of the new, but through the shaping of distinctive relations between “older and newer elements.” See Marking Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
39. Packard identifies three modes of obsolescence that range from function to fashion, including “obsolescence of function,” “obsolescence of quality,” and “obsolescence of desirability” (Waste Makers, 55).
40. Toffler, Future Shock, 62–63.
41. Ibid., 62.
42. Industrial designer Brooke Stevens is often credited with popularizing the term obsolescence. Slade suggests that Stevens was actually preceded by other promoters, who also championed obsolescence as a stimulant to economic activity. Most notably, Bernard London proposed death dating for objects, which would have predetermined life spans and would have to be returned to manufacturers upon expiration. See Slade, Made to Break, 73–75.
43. The Long Now Foundation suggests that “by constantly accelerating its own capabilities (making faster, cheaper, sharper, tools that make even faster, cheaper, sharper tools), the technology is just as constantly self-obsolescing. The great creator becomes the great eraser.” Yet this erasure is never complete, because “behind every hot new working computer is a trail of bodies of extinct computers, extinct storage media, extinct applications, extinct files.” See The Long Now Foundation, http://www.longnow.org; Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
44. See also Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us,” Wired News 8, no. 4 (April 2000). The history of human obsolescence could constitute a book in itself: both nineteenth- and twentieth-century versions of automation have given rise to distinct forms of human obsolescence. I would title this book The Post-Luddite Chronicles, as a way to engage with this knotted intersection and humanist dilemma where the human passes out of relevance only to return as an imagined site of resistance in relation to technologies.
45. Even going beyond the typical analysis of actor-network theory, which places humans and nonhumans on a relatively flattened field of influence, the obsolescence of the human suggests a condition more similar to that identified by Serres, where we become subjected to our objects, with the result that the very possibility of sharply delineated causal relations between subjects and objects crumbles. See Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
46. Sterling, Shaping Things, 59.
47. Evan Watkins, Throwaways: Work Culture and Consumer Education (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 26.
48. Ibid., 32. Straw similarly writes, in “Exhausted Commodities,” that obsolete objects do not “simply disappear”; rather, they “persist and circulate through the commercial markets of contemporary life.”
49. Watkins, Throwaways, 19.
50. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.”
51. Ceruzzi, History of Modern Computing, 7.
52. On this note, Ceruzzi asks, “Yet who would deny that computing technology has been anything short of revolutionary? A simple measure of the computing abilities of modern machines reveals a rate of advance not matched by other technologies, ancient or modern” (ibid., 3).
53. According to Ceruzzi, the pervasiveness of computers also attests to the far-reaching impacts of this revolution. In this respect, he suggests that computers are among the most significant technological devices, more revolutionary than the washing machine (ibid., 3). But the washing machine is also now a computer. As an appliance, it, too, has become a device for the distribution of microchips.
54. Donald MacKenzie, Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 8.
55. Ibid.
56. Gordon Moore, interview, Silicon Genesis. http://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/complete_listing.html.
57. MacKenzie, Knowing Machines, 56.
58. MacKenzie writes, “The prophecy of a specific rate of increase has thus been self-fulfilling. It has clearly served as an incentive to technological ambition; it has also, albeit less obviously, served to limit such ambition” (ibid.). As Michel Callon underscores, self-fulfilling prophecies are never simple scripts that are directly implemented without consequence. Indeed, the failure—as much as the success—of these implementations reveals the complex material and textual worlds in which these prophecies unfold. See Michel Callon, “What Does It Mean to Say That Economics Is Performative?” 323–24.
59. MacKenzie, Knowing Machines, 56.
60. Toffler, Future Shock, 53.
61. It may be helpful here to remember Appadurai's discussion of turnover, where he writes, “From the point of view of demand, the critical difference between modern, capitalist societies and those based on simpler forms of technology and labor is not that we have a thoroughly commoditized economy whereas theirs is one in which subsistence is dominant and commodity exchange has made only limited inroads, but rather that the consumption demands of persons in our own society are regulated by high-turnover criteria of ‘appropriateness’ (fashion), in contrast to the less frequent shifts in more directly regulated sumptuary or customary systems. In both cases, however, demand is a socially regulated and generated impulse, not an artifact of individual whims or needs.” As he suggests, it is exactly this rate of turnover, not consumption or commodification per se, that distinguishes economies. See Appadurai, “Introduction,” 32.
62. Toffler further writes in the same section, “Sophisticates in the fad business prepare in advance for shorter and shorter product life cycles. Thus, there is in San Gabriel, California, a company entitled, with a kind of cornball relish, Wham-O Manufacturing Company. Wham-O specializes in fad products, having introduced the hula hoop in the fifties and the so-called Super-Ball more recently…. Wham-O and other companies like it, however, are not disconcerted when sudden death overtakes their product; they anticipate it. They are specialists in the design and manufacture of ‘temporary’ products” (Future Shock, 66).
63. Mike Featherstone, “Archiving Cultures,” British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 1 (January/March 2000): 170.
64. Ernst also suggests, “The electronic archive no longer emphatically differentiates between memory and waste. There is no technical distinction between sense and nonsense” (Wolfgang Ernst, “Agencies of Cultural Feedback: The Infrastructure of Memory,” in Neville and Villeneuve, Waste-Site Stories, 113).
65. Ibid., 115.
66. Ibid., 116.
67. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 16.
68. Ibid., 9.
69. Both the “imperative to remember,” as Ernst writes, and the need for “intentional forgetting,” as the MyLifeBits researchers indicate, need to be programmed into electronic memory technologies. In both respects, electronic circuits are directed to emulate our own memory operations but inevitably perform in much different ways.
70. See David Grattan and R. Scott Williams, “From ‘91’ to ‘42’: Questions of Conservation for Modern Materials,” in Corzo, Mortality/Immortality? 67–74.
71. Buchli, Material Culture Reader, 14.
72. Ibid., 12. As Buchli explains, “material culture studies as part of a sacrificial economy has historically occurred within a framework of social purpose, which required the constitution of such super-material objects—material culture—to facilitate these goals whether industrial progress, social revolution or critical consciousness.”
73. As design historian Adrian Forty writes, “The Western tradition of memory since the Renaissance has been founded upon an assumption that material objects, whether natural or artificial, can act as the analogues of human memory. It has been generally taken for granted that memories, formed in the mind, can be transferred to solid material objects, which can come to stand for memories and, by virtue of their durability, either prolong or preserve them indefinitely beyond their purely mental existence.” However, “it is clear that the relationship between objects and memory is less straightforward than Western thinking has been in the habit of assuming. We cannot take it for granted that artifacts act as the agents of collective memory, nor can they be relied upon to prolong it.” See Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler, eds., The Art of Forgetting (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 2, 7.
74. Ernst, “Archi(ve)textures of Museology,” 25–28. As Ernst suggests in this respect, “Maybe the task of the museum today is to reflect on the contemporary loss of substance in objects; a contributor to this dematerialization, however, is the museum itself.”
75. See the Museum of E-Failure, http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/.
76. See the Internet Archive, http://www.archive.org. Elsewhere, Ernst suggests, “The Internet has turned the notion of the archive into a metaphor for data retrieval” (“Agencies of Cultural Feedback,” 117).
77. Featherstone, “Archiving Cultures,” 179.
78. Jens Schröter, “Archive—Post/photographic,” Media Art Net, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/photo_byte/archive_post_photographic/.
79. Schröter further writes (in a futuristic, if progressive, tone), “In this, the issue is not a nostalgic return to the safe refuge of the museum—which is impossible as it is—rather, the point is to keep the discussion on the archive of the future in motion, that is, of working on alternative models to the archive” (ibid.).
80. See Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 89–104. One striking project that engages with emulation through correspondences is the Variable Media Network, a collaboration between the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology. This project preserves the ephemeral media and the obsolescence of electronic technology in artists’ projects by migrating projects across media. See http://www.variablemedia.net.
81. Kittler, “Exhibition as Emulator.”
82. In fact, such a description might align with Benjamin's description of a preferred mode of storytelling, which consists of the “slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers which constitutes the most appropriate picture of the way in which the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of retellings.” See Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, 93.
83. Kittler, “Museums on the Digital Frontier,” 78.
84. Ernst, “Agencies of Cultural Feedback,” 116.
85. Moser, “Acculturation of Waste,” 102.
86. Ernst draws out the possibilities of what happens at the intersection of memory and waste: “The digital archive may merely aim at storing information; the energetic texture of memory, though, is based on counter- and dis-information, which amounts to a memory of waste” (“Agencies of Cultural Feedback,” 118).
Chapter 5
Philip K. Dick, In Milton Lumky Territory (1985; repr., London: Paladin, 1987), 61.
1. Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Exporting Harm.
2. Rathje and Murphy, Rubbish! 117
3. In this respect, Neville and Villeneuve write, “We observe, moreover, that waste is defined by its own resistant materiality, by what we are tempted to call its ‘material memory’” (“Introduction,” Waste-Site Stories, 7).
4. Ilya Kabakov, “The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away,” in The Archive, ed. Charles Merewether (London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 37.
5. Michael Shanks, Experiencing the Past: On the Character of Archaeology (London: Routledge, 1992), 75.
6. Brown, “Thing Theory,” 4–8. Brown writes more extensively on the concept of breakdown, noting, “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily.”
7. Benjamin draws on the urban poetry of Charles Baudelaire to describe this particular form of salvage, or ragpicking. Citing Baudelaire, he writes, “‘Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day's refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously: he collects like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry.’ This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse.” See Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap, 2002), 48; Ursula Marx et al., eds., “Ragpicking: The Arcades Project,” in Walter Benjamin's Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, trans. Esther Leslie (London: Verso, 2007), 251–65.
8. For an urban narrative approach to salvaging and the possible imaginaries to which this gives rise, see Jeff Ferrell, Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
9. Joost van Loon and Ida Sabelis, “Recycling Time: The Temporal Complexity of Waste Management,” Time & Society 6, no. 2 (June 1997): 293. As Van Loon and Sabelis write, “The temporal paradoxes of waste are hidden in an idealistic, technocratic and future-oriented ethos that fails to take into account the continuity of its own implications in the present, that is, the time-scales of waste itself.”
10. Thompson, Rubbish Theory, 9.
11. Kevin Lynch, Wasting Away (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), 69.
12. International Association of Electronics Recyclers, IAER Electronics Recycling Industry Report, 7. For a more extended discussion of the cultural possibilities of repair (from a relatively Heideggerian perspective), see Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance,” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (2007): 1–25.
13. National Safety Council, Electronic Product Recovery and Recycling Baseline Report: Recycling of Selected Electronic Products in the United States (Washington, DC, 1999), 36.
14. International Association of Electronics Recyclers, IAER Electronics Recycling Industry Report, 32.
15. Lynch, Wasting Away, 61.
16. Peter J. M. Nas and Rivke Jaffe, “Informal Waste Management: Shifting the Focus from Problem to Potential,” Environment, Development, and Sustainability 6 (2004): 339.
17. Ravi Agarwal and Kishore Wankhade, “Hi-Tech Heaps, Forsaken Lives: E-waste in Delhi,” in Smith, Sonnenfeld, and Pellow, Challenging the Chip, 237. Several organizations covering the topic of electronic waste workers document the working conditions and practices involved with the salvaging of electronics. The Basel Action Network and Toxics Link are two such organizations that have documented processes of electronic waste sifting in developing countries. See also Greenpeace, “Recycling of Electronic Wastes in China & India: Workplace & Environmental Contamination,” August 2005, http://www.greenpeace.to/publications/electronic_waste_recycling_appendix.pdf.
18. Ibid., 237.
19. Ibid., 239.
20. Nas and Jaffe, “Informal Waste Management,” 343.
21. See Karen Tranberg Hansen, Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), for a detailed account of the salvage practices in relation to clothing donated to charity and shipped to places such as Africa. These salvage practices extend to more than simply receiving items, as Hansen documents, also involving transforming them in entirely creative ways.
22. John Frow, “A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole,” Critical Inquiry, 28, no. 1, Things (Autumn 2001): 284.
23. Colloredo-Mansfeld, “Introduction,” 250.
24. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 232. Here Taussig is drawing on the atmosphere released from outmoded objects as discussed by Benjamin in his essay “Surrealism.”
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Agarwal and Wankhade, “Hi-Tech Heaps, Forsaken Lives,” 234–46.
28. Hawkins writes on the “cultural economy” of recycling and explores the extent to which, from the 1960s onward, recycling has emerged out of a sense of “nature in crisis,” as it was transferred to households and consumers as the site of management. See Hawkins, Ethics of Waste, 99–104. Within the context of this focus on consumers and recycling, it is interesting to note just how little of the waste stream is composed of end-consumer waste. Even accounting for how much general waste industry produces (and potentially recycles) in comparison to consumers is a difficult task, moreover. Molotch writes, “What consumers have been less able to affect is the recycling of producers’ waste, a major problem given that, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), only about 2 percent of all waste comes from households, offices, institutions, and retail in the first place—‘Municipal Solid Waste,’ in the official terminology. Given that hazardous waste makes up about 6 percent of the total, much of it indeed controlled in various ways across the jurisdictions, 92 percent of U.S. waste is unaccounted for; there are almost no data on what makes it up. Most is apparently disposed of on site, beyond prying eyes” (Where Stuff Comes From, 235). Matthew Gandy similarly writes, “Municipal waste accounts for only a relatively small fraction of total global waste production, the main sources being from agriculture, industry and mining” (Recycling and the Politics of Urban Waste [New York: St. Martin's, 1994], 4).
29. Loon and Sabelis, “Recycling Time,” 294. As already mentioned, these viable future markets have recently been put into question with the temporary lapse during the 2007 financial crisis with China accepting recyclables, volatility in material prices, and realignments of material markets.
30. Ibid., 295.
31. Ibid., 302.
32. See, for instance, Shred Tech's approach to electronic waste handling, described at http://www.shred-tech.com/electronic.html.
33. Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Exporting Harm, 17.
34. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 163.
35. Ibid., 164.
36. Ibid.
37. Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Exporting Harm, 6.
38. Ibid., 6. As these authors argue, “The assumption too, is that recycling is always better than landfilling. This is not the case when the recycling results in toxic worker exposures, and the open dumping or burning of toxic residues and wastes that we have witnessed in Asia. While the recycling of hazardous materials anywhere creates a serious pollution challenge, it can be a disastrous one in an area of the world where the knowledge of, and infrastructure to deal with hazards and waste is almost non-existent. With the cautionary note above, it is nevertheless estimated that in 1998, 11% of computers were being recycled (including those sent for export).”
39. Ibid., 7. On the quantity of electronic waste that issues for the dump, these authors write, “According to the EPA, in 1997 more than 3.2 million tons of E-waste ended up in U.S. landfills. It is thought that most households and small businesses that dispose rather than store their obsolete electronic components send their material to landfills or incinerators rather than take them to recyclers.”
40. Ibid., 21–22.
41. Lynch, Wasting Away, 54.
42. Ibid., 191.
43. Mira Engler, Designing America's Waste Landscapes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 112–13. See also Noel van Dooren, “Never Again Will the Heap Lie in Peace,” in Tales of the Tip, ed. Chris Driessen and Hiedi van Mierlo (Amsterdam: Fundament Foundation, 1999), 100–105.
44. O'Brien, “Rubbish-Power,” 268. This is the “contrariness of waste,” as O'Brien writes, “its capacity to be its own opposite, to have no apparent value and yet potentially to be valuable.”
45. Loon and Sabelis, “Recycling Time,” 299.
46. Basel Action Network and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Exporting Harm, 7.
47. Ibid., 27. As Jim Puckett writes, “Indeed, hazardous waste recycling is a dangerous practice anywhere on earth, even in rich, developed countries. To this day, BAN's onsite visits to electronic waste processors in the United States reveal a very serious lack of concern and knowledge about the impacts of such hazards as brominated flame retardants and beryllium in fumes and dusts, as well as toxic cadmium and rare-earth, metal-laced phosphors released by broken cathode ray tubes (CRTs). And smelters, the final and weakest environmental link in any metals recycling operation, have been historically notorious in Europe and North America as major point-source polluters” (“High-Tech's Dirty Little Secret: The Economics and Ethics of the Electronic Waste Trade,” in Smith, Sonnenfeld, and Pellow, Challenging the Chip, 229).
48. For additional information on substances classified as harmful or hazardous, see CERCLA, “Priority List of Hazardous Substances,” http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/cercla/index.asp.
49. Marilyn Strathern, Property, Substance, and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things (London: Athlone, 1999), 61.
50. Loon and Sabelis, “Recycling Time,” 297. As these authors write, “There is little doubt that time concepts are of eminent importance when discussing environmental matters. If recycling based on a cyclical-linear time is our ideal, we might falsely believe that damage can be undone.”
51. Buchli, Material Culture Reader, 17.
52. Scanlan suggests that such decay opens up orders of time that we too often prefer to ignore. “Deteriorating matter,” he writes, “embodies a time that exists beyond our rational time: in this shadow world, time is always running matter down, breaking things into pieces, or removing the sheen of a glossy surface and, therefore, the principal methods of dealing with material waste throughout most of human history—dumping, burning, recycling, reducing the use of virgin materials—are simply ways of ensuring that this fact does not intrude too far into everyday experience. In contemporary society the increase in the volume of consumer products may force a strict reorganization of time, in so far as the situation can be met by adherence to a regime that ensures the removal of these objects before they decay” (On Garbage, 34).
53. Rem Koolhaas, “Wasteland—Dump Space: Freedom from Order,” Wired 11, no. 6 (June 2003).
54. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 198.
55. Ibid., 196.
56. On Benjamin's interest in undoing the insistence on progress, Peter Osborne writes, “The avant-garde is not that which is most historically advanced because it has the most history behind it (the angel), but that which, in the flash of the dialectical image, disrupts the continuity of ‘progress,’ and is thus able (like the child) to ‘discover the new anew.’ Benjamin's philosophy of history is a struggle to wrestle the idea of the ‘new,’ essential to any concept of the avant-garde, away from the ideology of ‘progress’” (“Small-Scale Victories, Large-Scale Defeats: Walter Benjamin's Politics of Time,” in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne [Manchester: Clinamen, 2000], 88).
Conclusion
Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 91.
Serres, Parasite, 68.
1. Lynch, Wasting Away, 6.
2. Ibid., 6–8.
3. Ibid., 10.
4. For example, see Murray, Zero Waste.
5. “Waste management,” as Loon and Sabelis write, not only entails “the commodification of excess productivity into renewable resources,” it also “becomes a euphemism for the displacement and misplacement of the unwanted and unmanageable consequences of modernization” (“Recycling Time,” 292).
6. Ibid., 296. Loon and Sabelis further write, there emerges “a new, higher moral union,” where “the environment enters the capitalist system through commodification, while in return capitalism is further mythified as ‘natural.’” There are numerous texts and projects that have been developed within the natural-capital nexus. For one example relevant to design, see William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (New York: North Point Press, 2002).
7. Moser similarly writes, “Waste is permanent and unavoidable, for there is no system—whether biological, technical, social, or historical—that does not produce remnants, remains, scraps, leftovers, that does not leave certain parts to decay, that does not secrete or reject. Anything in a system can become waste” (“Acculturation of Waste,” 102).
8. Serres, Parasite, 12–13. I discuss the notions of “systems” and “harmony” at greater length in Jennifer Gabrys, “Sink: The Dirt of Systems,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, no. 4 (2009): 666–81.
9. Hawkins, Ethics of Waste, 122.
10. For an example of this sort of return of waste to productive mechanisms, consider the proposal Judd H. Alexander makes in his book In Defense of Garbage, where he suggests that garbage is a good thing because it offers a way to fill up all the holes that result from mining and other forms of resource extraction. He calculates that in the United States, more than twenty-three times the amount of land is removed through resource extraction than is filled. Clearly, the solution is to fill all the holes with garbage. In Alexander's strange mathematics, the distinction between raw material, commodity, and waste collapses. Materials seem only to have wanted to leave the ground to return as trash. But the transformation that these materials undergo and the remainders and irreversible effects they generate comprise a critical distinction and an overlooked area of investigation. See Judd H. Alexander, In Defense of Garbage (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993).
11. Loon and Sabelis, “Recycling Time,” 296. Addressing the mythic solution engineered by waste management, these authors write, “Progress is simply conceived of in terms of a differential discount on the future. This means that while progress is accounted for in the present, it entails a reduction of the complexity of futures that springs from the indeterminacy of the difference between the actual and the possible.”
12. Ibid., 297. These authors make the statement, “Markets cannot resolve ecological issues because they are not geared toward providing infrastructures for dealing with negative utility (excess). The win-win economics of ecological marketing (‘it is possible to capitalize on waste’) will not pay off if the hidden costs are taken into account” (302).
13. The difficulty of even agreeing on what constitutes waste and what the severity of certain types of waste consists of has meant that hazardous waste may not be acknowledged as such and will be improperly handled. This is certainly true with electronics, where the apparent inertness of these devices conceals the hazards that lie within the machines. Electronic waste and other forms of waste often waver in such spaces of indeterminable status. As The Guardian reports, “One of the great challenges of our time is to collectively agree on what is waste and what are secondhand products—this question extends to end-of-life ships as much as to electronic goods” (Hilary Osborne, “Rich Nations Accused of Dumping E-Waste on Africa,” Guardian, November 27, 2006).
14. Hawkins, Ethics of Waste, 122.
15. Ibid.
16. Loon and Sabelis, “Recycling Time,” 295, 298.
17. Ibid., 303.
18. Hawkins, Ethics of Waste, 81.
19. See Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool, http://www.epeat.net; Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, “Green Chemistry,” http://www.svtc.org/site/PageServer?pagename=svtc_green_chemistry; Green Electronics Council with the National Center for Electronics Recycling and Resource Recycling, “Closing the Loop: Electronics Design to Enhance Reuse/Recycling Value,” January 2009, http://www.greenelectronicscouncil.org/documents/0000/0007/Design_for_End_
of_Life_Final_Report_090208.pdf; E-Stewards Initiative, http://www.e-stewards.org/; Solving the E-waste Problem (StEP), “Annual Report, 2009,” http://www.step-initiative.org/pdf/annual-report/Annual_Report_2009.pdf; Sibylle D. Frey, David J. Harrison, and Eric H. Billett, “Ecological Footprint Analysis Applied to Mobile Phones,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 10, nos. 1–2 (2006): 199–216; C. Kieren Mayers, Chris M. France, and Sarah J. Cowell, “Extended Producer Responsibility for Waste Electronics,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 9, no. 3 (2005): 169–89.
20. Molotch, Where Stuff Comes From, 245–46.
21. Greenpeace, “Guide to Greener Electronics,” December 2008, http://www.greenpeace.org/rankingguide. Together with improving electronic design through the use of fewer toxic materials, this report proposes extended producer responsibility, or EPR, as an important strategy in the take-back and recycling of electronics.
22. These initiatives have also emerged in response to the RoHS and WEEE directives in Europe, which have begun to inform the manufacture and disposal of electronics (as previously discussed in this study). For a review of this program, see United Nations University, “Review of Directive 2002/96 on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE)” (Tokyo: UNU, 2008). See also “Dell's 2008 Corporate Responsibility Summary Report” (2009), http://www.dell.com/sustainability report, for an example of a current approach to electronics that focuses on product life cycle, hazardous substances, and product take-back. U.S. responses have often occurred at the level of state legislation, but for a more comprehensive, if voluntary, approach developed by the EPA, see “Responsible Recycling (‘R2’) Practices for Use in Accredited Certification Programs for Electronics Recyclers,” October 30, 2008, http://www.epa.gov/waste/conserve/materials/ecycling/r2practices.htm; see also Basel Action Network, “Detailed Critique of Problems with R2 Standard,” November 2008, http://e-stewards.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Detailed_R2_Analysis.pdf.
23. When I first made the proposal for a “green machines” handbook in 2006, there were relatively few examples of green computing in circulation. As this study is completed, an increasing number of projects are developing in this area, including the recent Bill Tomlinson, Greening through IT: Information Technology for Environmental Sustainability (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
24. “Compostable Keyboard,” as documented in Alastair Fuad-Luke, The Eco-Design Handbook (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005); Joseph Chiodo, “Active Disassembly,” http://www.activedisassembly.com/index2.html.
25. On these few (among many) examples of reworking the material form of electronics, see “Cool Light Leads to Greener Chips,” BBC News, June 30, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5128762.stm; “Cardboard PC Case by Lupo,” October 21, 2005, http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2005/10/cardboard_pc_ca.html.
26. Alternative materials and reduced energy consumption are two areas of considerable attention within design projects. For example, see Core 77, “Greener Gadgets Design Competition,” http://www.core77.com/competitions/Greener Gadgets. Given concerns over energy use and climate change, increasing attention is now being drawn to the amount of energy that electronic technologies require—not just to power the devices themselves, but also to power the extensive servers, networks, and interlocking systems that allow these devices to communicate. See Bobbie Johnson, “Google's Power-Hungry Data Centres,” Guardian, May 3, 2009; Richard Wray, “Spam ‘Uses as Much Power as 2.1M Homes,’” Guardian, April 15, 2009.
27. The project “How Stuff Is Made,” conducted by design students and academics, documents the resources, manufacturing processes, and labor and environmental impact of contemporary goods (see http://www.howstuffismade.org). The United Nations Environment Programme has also recently produced a document that focuses on the social aspects to life-cycle analyses. See United Nations Environment Programme, “Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment of Products,” DTI/1164/PA (2009), http://www.unep.org./pdf/DTIE_PDFS/DTIx1164xPA_guidelines_sLCA.pdf.
28. Ed van Hinte, Eternally Yours: Visions on Product Endurance (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1997), 27. Sterling similarly projects a relatively friction-free future for technologies. He imagines one speculative version of technology that will “eventually rot and go away by itself.” This completely biodegradable and “auto-recycling” technology will, when it breaks down, give rise to new “complicated forests, grasslands and coral reefs.” But this technology will not require “natural materials”; rather, it will sprout up in a “room-temperature industrial assembly without toxins.” See Sterling, Shaping Things, 143.
29. For examples of “trash-tracking” projects, see Eric Paulos and Tom Jenkins, “Urban Probes: Encountering Our Emerging Urban Atmospheres,” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2–7, 2005. (Portland, Oregon); Trash Track, http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/; Valerie Thomas, “Radio-Frequency Identification: Environmental Applications” (white paper, Foresight in Governance Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, 2008).
30. Examples of these projects include Natalie Jeremijenko and Proboscis's feral robotic dogs, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/feralrobots/. In a related way, Dunne explores how electronics constitute “post-optimal objects,” and he seeks to capture the “para-functionality” of electronics in order to consider how these objects may become critical devices and “provide new types of aesthetic experience.” See Dunne, Hertzian Tales, 12–14.
31. See Jonah Brucker-Cohen, “Scrapyard Challenge Workshops,” http://infamia1.infamia.com/coin-operated.com/; Benjamin Gaulon, “Recyclism,” http://www.recyclism.com/.
32. See the call for CHI 2010, Jina Huh et al., “Workshop on Examining Appropriation, Re-use, and Maintenance for Sustainability,” http://jinah.people.si.umich.edu//chi2010/reuse.html.
33. “Sustainable HCI” approaches range from the informational to the artistic and from the interventionist to the persuasive. See Carl DiSalvo, Kirsten Boehner, Nicholas A. Knouf, and Phoebe Sengers, “Nourishing the Ground for Sustainable HCI: Considerations from Ecologically Engaged Art,” Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 4–9, 2009 (Boston), 385–94; Marcus Froth, Eric Paulos, Christine Satchell, and Paul Dourish, “Pervasive Computing and Environmental Sustainability: Two Conference Workshops,” IEEE CS 8, no. 1 (January–March 2009): 78–81.
34. Frow, “A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole,” 273–74.
35. Felix Guattari's discussion of “three ecologies,” spanning from the individual to the sociocultural and environmental, is a relevant reference for addressing the multiple versions of ecologies that inform environmental issues. See Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone, 2000).
36. Zehle's proposal is based on James Boyle's article “A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?” 1997, http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/Intprop.htm. Where Boyle proposes environmentalism as an analogy for how to negotiate the digital commons of the Internet, Zehle suggests we take this environmentalism more literally into the realm of digital material effects. See Soenke Zehle, “Environmentalism for the Net 2.0,” Mute: Culture and Politics after the Net, September 21, 2006, http://www.metamute.org/en/Environmentalism-for-Net-2.0. Together with Geert Lovink, Soenke Zehle set up the Web site incommunicado.net as a space to discuss and critique the global arrangements of the “information society.” As part of this project, regular discussions of electronic waste and technology workers have appeared. See Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle, eds., Incommunicado Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2005); Matthias Feilhauer and Soenke Zehle, eds., “Ethics of Waste in the Information Society,” special issue, International Review of Information Ethics (IRIE) 11 (October 2009).
37. Zehle, “Environmentalism for the Net 2.0.”
38. There are an increasing number of projects that are operating within this area of digitally relevant environmentalism, which consider ways to address issues of environmental justice and green machines. For examples, see Shuzo Katsumoto, “Information and Communications Technology and the Environment: An Asian Perspective,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 6, no. 2 (2003): 4–6; Jonathan Fildes, “Wireless Power System Shown Off,” BBC News, July 23, 2009; Jonathan Fildes, “The Winds of Change for Africa,” BBC News, July 23, 2009.
39. See Furtherfield, “Zero Dollar Laptop,” http://www.furtherfield.org/zerodollarlaptop/; Access Space, http://www.access-space.org; Graham Harwood and Yokokoji Yoha, “Coal Fired Computers,” Discovery Museum (Newcastle, United Kingdom: AV Festival, March 12–14, 2010).
40. Buchli, Material Culture Reader, 15. Jane Bennett similarly draws out the possibilities for thinking through new natures and new subjects that emerge through materializations. See Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter,” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (June 2004): 347–72.
41. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 99.
42. Shanks, Platt, and Rathje, “Perfume of Garbage,” 64.
43. Lynch, Wasting Away, 32.
44. Ibid., 41.
45. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 261–62.