Mediarchy by Citton Yves;

Author:Citton, Yves;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509533411
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2019-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

Geologies

What are the apparatuses that we use today, to record, transmit and process the signals that organize our social interactions, actually made of? They are made of North American patents, and of Asian and Mexican sweat, of course, but also of Chinese silicon and rare minerals from Africa. As Benjamin Bratton writes, as soon as they use a smartphone, ‘billions of Earthlings everywhere carry little bits of Africa around with them in their pockets’.4 And not just any LITTLE BITS OF AFRICA: reserves of rare elements such as coltan extracted from mines in drastic sociopolitical conditions, starting with the wars waged in the Democratic Republic of Congo for control of these resources. All this in order to build ‘intelligent’ apparatuses that unjustifiable commercial practices condemn to an obsolescence programmed in terms of months. A smartphone has an operating period of, on average, less than two years, and their recycling rate is not much better than 10 per cent; each American produces thirty or so kilos of electronic waste per year.5 From the geological perspective, the development and widespread dissemination of electronic media appear as a ‘vast immolation and involution of the Earth’s mineral cavities’, following circuitous paths that today lead to ‘minerals originally sourced from the Congo [making their way] to California via China, before being pulled by hand from a dead phone and burned or buried in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, or Lagos, Nigeria, two of the most active repositories, a short distance from their source’.6

The geology of the media places the absurd haste of this shallow consumption back in the context of the millions of years it took earlier natural processes to accumulate, in the strata of the earth’s crust, these precious reserves of rare elements that we squander in a few decades. But it also seeks to understand how the same circuit of unbridled consumption threatens us, now, with equally profound contaminations. The lead, cadmium, mercury, barium and arsenic stuffed into our electronic apparatuses accumulate uncontrollably in the bodies of workers on the periphery condemned to bury or treat the ELECTRONIC WASTE of our gadgets as soon as they are obsolete (Figure 9.1) – before gradually contaminating the land and water near the places where they accumulate.7 Rare minerals are extracted in times of war only to accumulate, almost immediately and sometimes almost in the same place, in the form of new geological layers threatening to poison hundreds of generations to come: electronic waste today can fill a continuous line of more than 20,000 kilometres of 40-tonne trucks full of phones, computers, screens and other electronic gadgets. All these accumulated layers of media zombies8 will inevitably haunt the centuries to come, either in the form of shortages of squandered rare elements (difficult to recycle due to the extreme miniaturization of our current gadgets) or in the form of contaminations that are much more ubiquitous than that caused by asbestos (and more difficult to locate for the same reasons of miniaturization).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.