Difference between revisions of "Dirty Media"

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==The Aesthetics of Waste==
 
==The Aesthetics of Waste==
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=The (Political) Economy of the Dump=
 
=The (Political) Economy of the Dump=

Revision as of 16:49, 13 December 2010

"Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return." –Genesis 3:19

"The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." –Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire

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The broken tool

Your iPhone is sleek and beautiful. It was designed in California and made in China. It contains within its form—the form of the commodity—the blood of the subaltern exploited for its production. It will soon be obsolete, ready to be burned in order to harvest the precious metals inside. It will soon turn into toxic dust. This is a dossier about this blood and this dust.

Mineral Extraction

How we became posthuman

E-trash Distribution

"digital wizardry relies on a complex array of materials: metals, elements, plastics, and chemical compounds. Each tidy piece of equipment has a story that begins in mines, refineries, factories, rivers, and aquifers and ends on pallets, in dumpsters, and in landfills all around the world."-Grossman, High Tech Trash

As consumer electronics become an important, if not, predominant form of commodity being consumed in many countries around the world, the concern regarding such technologies obsolesces and subsequent disposal has become an increasingly germane issue facing the contemporary world. What’s now know as “e-waste” or “electronic waste” has increasingly become one of the worlds most problematic forms of disposable product.

Because these electronics often contain hazardous chemicals or other toxic materials (such as Copper, antimony, beryllium, barium, zinc, chromium, silver, nickel, and chlorinated and phosphorus-based compounds, as well as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), nonyphenols, and phthalates) (Grossman 2006), their safe disposal require specialized forms of waste management or handling. Unfortunately, such concerns are all to often disregarded by the economy of “fast and cheep” disposal that dominate much e-waste’s eventual destinations, mostly in different parts of Asia and continental Africa, which first world companies and citizens alike are more than willing to turn a blind eye to. In this section, we will be entering a world of waste and circulation, the veritable dark underbelly to Marx’s ‘abode of production’, where the only thing more exploitative than the conditions under which many of the worlds consumer electronics are produced is the manner in which they are disposed of.

The Emergence of E-Waste

“Over the past two decades or more, rapid technological advances have doubled the computing capacity of semiconductor chips almost every eighteen months, bringing us faster computers, smaller cell phones, more efficient machinery and appliances, and an increasing demand for new products. Yet this rushing stream of amazing electronics leaves in its wake environmental degradation and a large volume of hazardous waste— waste created in the collection of the raw materials that go into these products, by the manufacturing process, and by the disposal of these products at the end of their remarkably short lives.” -Grossman, High Tech Trash

From the emergence of the digital age, industrial nations engaged in the never ending proliferation of electronics and other informational devices have been engaged in a relentless cycle of technological growth where preexisting (and often functional) electronic and communications infrastructure is continuously replaced by newer updated versions. As a result of this continuous drive to replace older (and not so old) electronics with new ones, many advanced nations around the world have increasingly found themselves with a growing surplus of obsolete electronics ranging from cell phones, home computers, and an assortment of other industrial and consumer electronics. While in the 1970s and 80s the problem of accounting for (i.e. developing a systematic program for dealing with the safe disposal and/or recycling of such products) discarded electronics seemed like an issue to be dealt with in the distant future, by the 1990s the massive proliferation of personal electronics and their ever accelerating rate of obsolescence expanded to a proportion that threatened to literally bury many advanced nations under a mountain of electronic waste (Grossman, 2006).

E-Waste: A Global Problem

Environmental Impact of E-Waste

The Aesthetics of Waste

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The (Political) Economy of the Dump

"The most efficient means to recover value from e-waste is to destroy any computational ability it has, returning it to a raw state." —Samantha MacBride, The Immorality of Waste: Depression-Era Perspectives in the Digital Age


References