Digital Rubbish: a Natural History of Electronics

DIGITAL RUBBISH DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS, an imprint of the University of Michigan Press, is dedi- cated to publishing work in new media studies and the emerging field of digital humanities. DIGITAL RUBBISH a natural history of electronics Jennifer Gabrys The University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor First paperback edition 2013 Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2011 Some rights reserved This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America A Printed on acid-free paper 2016 2015 2014 2013 5 4 3 2 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gabrys, Jennifer. Digital rubbish : a natural history of electronics / Jennifer Gabrys. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-472-11761-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Electronic waste. 2. Electronic apparatus and appliances— History. I. Title. TD799.85.G33 2011 363.72988—dc22 2010033747 isbn 978-0-472-03537-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-472-02940-2 (e-book) 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 discov- ery 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 vi Preface 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 pro- duction 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 trans- fer 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 resi- due 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 Preface vii 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-end- ing 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 commodi- ties? 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 research- ing, 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, Chris- tine Ross, and Jasmine Rault. Faculty members at Concordia University viii Preface 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 fund- ing received from several sources, including the McGill Majors Disserta- tion 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

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