Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics

Preface

What we need is a somber, thoughtful, thorough, hype-free, even lugubrious book that honors the dead and resuscitates the spiritual ancestors of today's mediated frenzy. A book to give its readership a deeper, paleontological perspective right in the dizzy midst of the digital revolution. We need a book about the failures of media, the collapses of media, the supercessions of media, the strangulations of media, a book detailing all the freakish and hideous media mistakes that we should know enough now not to repeat, a book about media that have died on the barbed wire of technological advance, media that didn't make it, martyred media, dead media. The Handbook of Dead Media. A naturalist's field guide for the communication paleontologist.

—BRUCE STERLING, “The Dead Media Project: A Modest Proposal and a Public Appeal”

This project did not begin with Sterling's modest proposal, but it is in no small way interested in the challenge of charting the dead and dying qualities of media technologies, particularly our contemporary electronic technologies. The “paleontological” record of dead electronics is surprisingly extensive and diverse. From obsolete software, to the chemical pollution and material waste that issues from microchips, to the sprawling landscapes of technology parks, discards recurrently surface in the electronic realm. Indeed, this project emerged from the discovery that digital technologies, so apparently immaterial, also have their substantial remainders. An often-cited anecdote in the history of computing describes how it was assumed, in the early days of postwar computing, that the demand for digital computers would not exceed even a dozen devices worldwide. With these few bulky and costly mainframes, experts declared, the computing needs of the world would be met. Years later, electronic devices of all shapes and sizes proliferate and pile up at end of life. Scan any city street, and you may find discarded monitors and mobile phones, printers and central processing units, scattered on curbsides and stacked in the dark spaces between buildings.

These remainders accumulate into a sort of sedimentary record, from which we can potentially piece together the evolution and extinction of past technologies. These fossils are then partial evidence of the materiality of electronics—a materiality that is often only apparent once electronics become waste. In fact, electronics involve an elaborate process of waste making, from the mining of metals and minerals, to the production of microchips through toxic solvents, to the eventual recycling or disposal of equipment. These processes of pollution, remainder, and decay reveal other orders of materiality that have yet to enter the sense of the digital. Here are spaces and processes that exceed the limited transfer of information through hardware and software. Yet these spaces and processes are often lost somewhere between the apparent “virtuality” of information, the increasingly miniature scale of electronics, and the remoteness of electronic manufacture and disposal. It is possible to begin to describe these overlooked infrastructures, however, by developing a study of electronics that proceeds not from the perspective of all that is new but, rather, from the perspective of all that is discarded.

Where does all the electronic detritus go once it has expired? The theory of waste developed in this book describes processes by which electronics end up in the dump, as well as what happens to electronic remainders in their complex circuits prior to the dump. Just as there are material, social, and economic infrastructures that support the growth and circulation of electronics, so, too, are there elaborate infrastructures for removing electronic waste. Underground, global, and peripheral residue turns up in spaces throughout the life and death of electronics. This study considers how electronics migrate and mutate across a number of sites, not only from manufacture to disposal, but also across cultural sites spanning from novelty to decay. My intention is to crack open the black box of electronics¹ and to examine more closely what sediments accumulate in the making and breaking of electronics. Yet, by focusing on waste, this book is less interested in material comprehensiveness, or all that goes into electronics, and is instead more attentive to the proliferations—material, cultural, economic, and otherwise—that characterize electronics. There is much more to electronics than raw materials transformed into neat gadgets that swiftly become obsolete. Electronics are bound up with elaborate mechanisms of fascination, with driving economic forces beyond the control of any single person, and with redoubling rates of innovation and decay.

In a time when media occupy our attention most unmistakably when they are present as new media, a study of dead media would, presumably, begin to describe the invisible resources expended and accumulated in these interlocked ecologies. In his “dead media” proposal, Sterling calls for a paleontological perspective, an approach that would account for the extinctions and sedimentations of lost media technologies, perhaps even with the object of preventing past media mistakes. To pursue this project, I have opted to develop a more particular natural history, which examines outmoded electronics as “fossils” that bear the traces of material, cultural, and economic events. Rather than amass a collection of outdated artifacts, then, this natural history suggests it is necessary not to focus solely on abandoned electronic gadgets but also to consider the extended sites through which electronics and electronic waste circulate, as well as the resources that assemble to facilitate these circulations. This natural history works not, however, from the assumption of never-ending technological evolution and progress but, rather, from the perspective of transience. What do continual cycles of novelty and obsolescence tell us about our material cultures, economies, and imaginaries? What other stories might emerge from the fossils of these obsolete commodities? In the end, this is not the handbook that Sterling describes. It is not an encyclopedic item that features so many odd but strangely attractive dead media. Instead, with any luck, it is the sort of study that, through another natural history method, traces the fossils of digital media within more heterogeneous material, political, and imaginary registers, while also providing insights into the complex ways that electronics fall apart.

The topic of electronic waste is situated at the intersection of a number of disciplines and locations. While this project dates to doctoral research begun in 2002, it also has a longer span of interest from the time I spent practicing landscape architecture and conducting fieldwork, design, and research in waste sites in North America. During the course of researching, writing, and revising this text, numerous people, from electronics recyclers to archivists of computing history, have extended support to the project. While not an exhaustive list, I would like to thank faculty and graduate students (past and present) in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, including Will Straw, Sheryl Hamilton, Darin Barney, Cornelius Borck, Jonathan Sterne, Christine Ross, and Jasmine Rault. Faculty members at Concordia University in Montreal have also provided valuable help along the way, including Johanne Sloan, Kim Sawchuk, Michael Longford, and Lorraine Oades.

This project has been made possible and greatly enhanced by funding received from several sources, including the McGill Majors Dissertation Fellowship; the Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship through the Institute of Historical Research in the School of Advanced Study at the University of London; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Grant for dissertation fieldwork and research through the Research Grants Office at McGill University; the Researcher in Residence program at the Daniel Langlois Foundation, Centre for Research and Documentation (CR+D) in Montreal; a dissertation fellowship from the Center for Research on Intermediality in Montreal; and the Design Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, which provided research and publication assistance. While a researcher in residence at the Langlois Foundation, I developed a wider view of electronic culture and art through reviewing the holdings at the CR+D. I would like to extend my appreciation to everyone at the center, including Vincent Bonin, Alain Depocas, and Jean Gagnon.

With funding from the CR+D, I was further able to visit numerous recyclers of electronic waste in the United States and Canada. I would like to thank individuals from Envirocycle, Back Thru the Future, Waste Management and Recycling Products, Retroworks, and Per Scholas for providing me with tours of their facilities and for explaining more about the complexities of electronics recycling. The recycling practices described in this study are informed by, but do not necessarily directly describe, the operations of these individual businesses. Other individuals who have helped in the research and fieldwork for this project include Megan Shaw Prelinger at the Prelinger Archives in San Francisco, Penny McDaniel at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in San Francisco, Bette Fishbein at INFORM in New York City, and Francis Yusoff in Singapore. Thanks are also due to everyone involved with the “Zero Dollar Laptop” project in London, including Ruth Catlow of Furtherfield, Jake Harries of Access Space, and participants from St. Mungo's charity for the homeless, for having me as a guest during their project press launch.

The funding received in support of this research allowed me to visit archives of computing history and to conduct fieldwork on electronics and electronic waste. I would like to thank archivists for their assistance in accessing holdings in computing history at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC; the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California; the London Science Museum Computing Archives; the British Film Institute in London; the National Archive for the History of Computing in Manchester; and the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Tilly Blyth was especially helpful in facilitating my access to the holdings in computing history at the London Science Museum, and Stephanie Crowe made available a wealth of materials at the Charles Babbage Institute. Simon Lavington also provided a useful framework for understanding the history of computing while I was working in archives in the United Kingdom. While I was conducting archival research in London, Scott Lash at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, graciously served as my mentor. Thanks are also due to faculty and graduate students at the Centre for Cultural Studies for the seminars and events that provided me with a collegial environment while researching in London.

I have received many helpful suggestions from colleagues at conferences and seminars where I have presented parts of this material, including the “Making Use of Culture” conference at the Cultural Theory Institute, University of Manchester; the “Ethics and Politics of Virtuality and Indexicality” conference at the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory, and History at the University of Leeds; the “Modernity and Waste” conference at the University of St. Andrews; and the “Design and Social Science” seminar series at the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Portions of the introduction were published previously by MIT Press and Alphabet City Magazine as “Media in the Dump,” Trash 11 (2006): 156–65; portions of chapter 1 by the MIT Department of Architecture as “The Quick and the Dirty: Ephemeral Systems in Silicon Valley,” Ephemera 31 (2006): 26–31; portions of chapter 3 as “Appliance Theory,” Cabinet 21 (2006): 82–86. Thank you to these presses and publications for permission to republish this material.

Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous referees for providing useful suggestions for revisions and the staff at the University of Michigan Press, including Tom Dwyer, Alexa Ducsay, and Christina Milton, for their guidance in all aspects of bringing this project to publication. I would also like to thank David Gabrys and Kathryn Yusoff, who have gracefully endured more than a few extended conversations and readings in relation to this text.