A Geopolitical History of Hard Drive Technology, 1978-2016

By Zane Cooper

1 Table of Contents

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Section O: A Material Contract ...... 4

SECTION 1: Out Of Africa ...... 14

SECTION 2: Computer Language ...... 34

SECTION 3: Magnets, Magnets Everywhere ...... 55

SECTION 4: Raw / Data ...... 79

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Primary Sources ...... 85

Secondary Sources ...... 94

2

Thanks =

1. Drs. Jeffrey Charles, Zhiwei Xiao, and Katherine Hijar for first helping to mold me into a historian in the Fall of 2013, and then for advising the progress of my thesis into a product of which I can be proud. 2. Dr. Xiao, for encouraging me to foster the presentation of my research, a skill that will prove indispensable at the University of Pennsylvania. 3. Dr. Charles, for constantly challenging me and improving my research skills. 4. Dr. Ibrahim Al Marashi, for instilling in me the confidence to be great and live up to my potential. 5. Dr. Hijar, for teaching me how to write like a historian. 6. Dr. Kimber Quinney, for leading by example and showing me how to be a better educator. 7. Kristine Diekman, for allowing me the opportunity to cut my teeth as a member of the Visual Arts Faculty. 8. Mayela Caro, for paving the way and offering endless support and laughter, even in the most trying and difficult times. 9. Lastly, to Kate Gressitt-Diaz, my great love, beside me like a rock this past year. Without your love and support, I could not have achieved this, nor would I have such magnificent faith in my future. I love you. 3

At both the academic and popular levels, scholars of the history of computing have studied the development and proliferation of specific technologies such as the microprocessor, the great people that made these technologies possible, as well as the history of the entrepreneurial and business culture that first gave birth to the modern Silicon Valley. However, in studying the history of computing, most scholars have neglected the history of data, and the rapid construction of the infrastructure needed to support the ever-growing swaths of data we create and consume.

This infrastructure is large and complicated, so in order to begin to address its history, this thesis will focus specifically on the mass production of a small but essential component of the personal computer hard drive: The NdFeB (Neodymium-Iron=-Boron) magnet. The invention and universal standardization of this magnetic material has roots in Cold War policies, civil unrest in

Africa, and is closely tied to China’s rise to economic power in the 1990s. By investigating the history of the production, implementation, and continued acquisition of this magnetic material, this study will show that the personal computer revolution, the miniaturization of hard drives, and eventually the proliferation of cloud computing are chained inextricably to a dense geopolitical history of violence, military strategies, and industrial infrastructures. It will reveal the beginnings and continuing struggles of the resource war constantly waging underneath innovations in digital storage, a war in which the neodymium magnet is currently at the center.

4

Section O: A Material Contract

“The world is a business, Mr. Beale.”

- Arthur Jensen, Network (1976)

The cloud appears free but it is everywhere in chains. We associate the cloud with liberty because of the language we use to describe and personify it. Images surrounding the cloud and cloud computing are all rooted in ideas of freedom – freedom from space and place, from weight and distance, and from materiality in general. “Cloud” evokes a green, environmental lightness, and the word “the” implies a single, monolithic, and benevolent space in which the world’s data congregates. Allegedly, in the cloud, we can access all information from everywhere; we can connect with everyone from anywhere; and the social barrier to entry into this cloud is lower than with any other form of mass communication in history.1 However, the cloud is neither benign, inert, nor is it a singular, definable entity. In reality,0 it is no more than a distributed network of massive data centers of concrete, wires, and steel that house millions upon millions of interconnected hard disk drives. These data centers are enormous, and yet they hide in plain sight, in depopulated rural areas, or in the shells of former office buildings in city centers. The growing popularity of cloud computing has caused this infrastructure to massively expand even just within the last two years. Companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, as well as lesser known data processing companies like Equinix and Switch have erected and continue to construct tremendous, “ultra-scale” data centers, each as large as 1.2 million square feet.2 The feasibility of the cloud and the facilitation of this emerging digital life depend entirely on this

1 Allison Carruth, “The Digital Cloud and the Micropolitics of Energy,” Public Culture, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2014). 2 Rich Miller, “Server Farms Get Super-Sized for Cloud Growth,” Data Center Knowledge (April 21, 2014), www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/04/21/server-farms-get-super-sized-cloud-growth/, accessed 12/1/14. 5 very physical infrastructure. The cloud, then, is actually a very heavy, energy-hungry, grounded entity that exists in multiple physical spaces all over the world– not a benign, ethereal, environmental body of data that exists both everywhere and nowhere.

In order to understand the dynamics of cloud infrastructure, this study will investigate hard drives not as technology, but as commodities – commodities whose raw materials respond to, create, and sustain international tensions. This paper will focus specifically on one small but essential component of the computer hard drive: The Neodymium-Iron-Boron magnet – its history, acquisition, production, and implementation within the context of this industry in the

1980s and 1990s. Neodymium belongs to a series of elements called the lanthanide metals, and it, along with other metals in this series, is responsible for numerous technological innovations, including the miniaturization of electronics, green energy technology, electric vehicles, and digital screens. The NdFeB magnet has a complex history. This thesis will explore its beginnings as a research initiative to free the U.S. from volatile African mineral markets, trace its movement into the personal computer industry in the 1980s, and will then illustrate how the expansion of digital networks in the 1990s (and cloud computing in the 2000s) both responded to and helped catalyze the total transfer of NdFeB manufacturing to China. This narrative will show how the personal computer revolution, the miniaturization of hard drives, the invention of laptops, and the proliferation of cloud computing are chained inextricably to a dense geopolitical history of violence, military strategies, and industrial infrastructures. There is a resource war constantly waging underneath innovations in digital storage, a war in which neodymium is currently at the center.

This thesis intersects numerous fields of historical inquiry. It is principally grounded in the history of computing, but also draws on the history of mining and natural resources, political 6 history, business history, and also the history of magnetic recording.3 Since this work looks primarily at the social and political origins of the digital data storage infrastructure, the scholarship of Thomas P. Hughes (the father of the social history of technology) has proven essential to framing my research. Hughes’s 1983 monograph Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society 1880-1930 introduces the idea of Technological Momentum, a feedback loop of societal and technological forces that work together to build grand systems around emerging technologies.4 Furthermore, his 2004 book Human Built World: How to Think About

Technology and Culture applies this theory across multiple industries, including the digital information economy. Hughes connects current notions of technological enthusiasm to previous eras of rapid technological advancement, highlighting the importance of language in crafting the climate in which technology is incubated.

Hughes’s work helped launch an entire sub-discipline of history that argues against notions of technological determinism (the idea that changes in technology principally drive changes in society). Langdon Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an

Age of High Technology is a great entry into this argument.5 Furthermore, Lisa Gitleman’s

Always Already New provides context on cyclical patterns of media discourse, and MIT’s Merritt

Roe Smith and Leo Marx compiled a series of essays on technological determinism in the early

1990s entitled Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism that I have consulted alongside Giles Deleuze’s and James Beringer’s theories of control

3 Notable books detailing the history of resource scarcity in Africa are: Abiodun Alao, Natural Resources and Conflict in Africa: The Tragedy of Endowment (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007), and Geoff Hiscock, Earth Wars: The Battle For Global Resources (Singapore: John Wiley & Sons, 2012). 4 Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society 1880-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) p. 140. 5 While many of Winner’s philosophical arguments provide sound foundations for this study, some of his more specific arguments have been met with merited criticism – notably in Bernward Joerges’s Do Politics Have Artefacts, a biting response to Winner’s often cited article, Do Artefacts Have Politics. 7 societies (in A Thousand Plateaus and The Control Revolution respectively). Out of this tradition comes Christophe Lecuyer’s revolutionary history of the Bay Area tech industry,

Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech 1930-1970, the first monograph on Silicon Valley to consider the social and economic factors that led to the formation of the current nucleus of the information economy.6 Lecuyer focuses on changes in business practices and relationships between entrepreneurs, manufacturers, universities, and the military in the growth of this industry. While my study will zero in on a single resource and the social and cultural effects of its implementation in computer hard drives, Lecuyer’s study nevertheless provides an anchor for my research. I seek to add another layer of understanding to the complex and contingent social, economic and political interactions that shape digital technology and our response to it.

The history of computer peripherals (and hard disk drives in particular) has only been explored tangentially, through the study of computing in general. However, some recent scholarship has begun to focus more specifically on cloud computing infrastructure. Allison

Carruth’s “The Digital Cloud and the Micropolitics of Energy” (which appeared in Public

Culture in 2014) investigates the language surrounding cloud computing. As a professor of

English as well as an advocate for environmental sustainability, Carruth concerns herself predominantly with the green image of the cloud, and the pervasive idea that cloud computing is inert and environmentally friendly. She traces the bodiless language of the cloud back to

William Gibson’s Neuromancer, a book that most technology scholars would agree framed future visions of the Internet. However, Hughes traces this evolution much further back in time,

6 Paul E. Ceruzzi’s work has also provided a thorough background on the history of computing, principally his A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). In Internet Alley: High Technology in Tyson’s Corner, 1945-2005 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), Ceruzzi analyzes the infrastructure that developed in this area to support emerging network technologies. 8 and Lisa Gitelman echoes these arguments in Always Already New. These works show that the information revolution conforms to earlier patterns of development of popular discourse that obscured industrial and geopolitical necessities involved in technological innovation.

Most secondary studies tell a rather teleological story of computer evolution, driven principally by the idea of benevolent progress and innovation, and spearheaded by brilliant entrepreneurs. Many of these histories limit their focuses to the direct contributions of the men and women involved in these innovations. A focus on entrepreneurial innovation alone, however, ignores the crucial component of production, which drives the industry. Hughes shows this beautifully in Networks of Power. Edison could invent a lightbulb by himself, but lighting the world required a vast network of systems and infrastructure. Thus far, with a few exceptions, the history of Silicon Valley has been riddled with great man histories; they champion the innovation, but gloss over the path to the mass market. One can find patterns of great man or rather great company histories in Basset Ross Knox’s To the Digital Age: Research Labs, Start-

Up Companies, and the Rise of MOS Technology, Nathan Ensmenger’s The Computer Boys Take

Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise, and Johnny Ryan’s A

History of the Internet and the Digital Future. Ensmenger’s book tries to focus more on lower- level software and IT workers, but still does not provide a close study of the workers that actually built the machines. Even Lecuyér’s Making Silicon Valley (revolutionary in the way it traces the history of the area back to earlier growth cycles in the electronics industry) does not give proper space to the history of the supply chain.

In an article entitled The Digital Construction of Technology: Rethinking the History of

Computers in Society, Nathan Ensmenger does concern himself with the nature and origin of the computer itself, but only insomuch as it affects the end-function – in other words, the software. 9

“Historians of technology are only just beginning to come to terms with the history of software, a subject of even larger scope and complexity than the history of the hardware that runs it.”7 This thesis does not dismiss the importance of software, but rather tries to place the history of the hardware and its construction in its proper, socio-political place. Ryan’s book on the origins of the Internet traces its well-known beginnings as a military project, but in the end focuses primarily on those that wrote the language of the internet – Vint Cerf (developer of TCP/IP),

Tim Berners-Lee (developer of the World Wide Web), and others that helped facilitate communication between machines. Ryan’s book does not delve too deeply into physical or infrastructural concerns. He does provide an insightful history of the collusion of military and commercial strategies in shaping the future of computers and networks, but he, like so many other scholars, neglects the complex space between the innovation of a product and its mass production, a gap in the scholarship that this thesis hopes to fill.

A new field of study is rapidly emerging to investigate the history, present, and future of the long-neglected digital media infrastructure. The field of Media Infrastructure Studies is attracting scholars from widely varied disciplines like History, Information Science, Political

Science, English, Communications, and Film and Media Studies, to achieve what Matthew Jones of Columbia University calls “total data awareness.” There has been a flood of recent scholarship in the last year that represents a new breed of scholars that who use epistemological frameworks established by the likes of Thomas P. Hughes and Langdon Winner to peer through the haze of digital utopianism. In The Undersea Network (2015), Nicole Starosielski has written a groundbreaking social, political, cultural, and ethnographic history of undersea cables; Signal

Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (2015), edited by Starosielski and her former

7 Nathan Ensmenger, “The Digital Construction of Technology: Rethinking the History of Computers in Society,” in Technology and Culture, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Oct. 2012), p. 757. 10 advisor Lisa Parks, is the first volume of collected works in this field; Tung-Hui Hu’s A

Prehistory of the Cloud (2015) offers both a physical and political history of the cloud as both an idea and a thing. These scholars and others are taking great strides to understand the material nature of the digital world, but there is very little scholarship discussing society’s changing relationship to the raw materials essential to the devices with which we organize and execute our daily lives.

Scholars spanning multiple disciplines have written on the need to investigate the expansion of the digital world by means of raw materials. Media Archaeologist Jussi Parikka states in A Geology of Media (2015) that the study of “mineral durations” is essential to properly understanding the place of media technologies and media infrastructures in our lives.8 Like

Shannon Mattern, author of “Deep Time of Media Infrastructures,” Parikka places media infrastructures in the context of “deep time,” meaning that their work studies media technology from a geologic perspective, therein linking media infrastructures to long, sometimes inhuman mineral processes.9 This methodology is critical for understanding how the literal dirt of the

Earth manifests itself in media technologies, but tends to subvert the crucial elements of human agency involved in the extraction of these materials.

This theme of human subversion within media infrastructures has grown considerably since the 1980s, when German media theorist Frederich Kittler first published his revolutionary

Discourse Networks: 1800/1900 (1985), and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986). In

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter Kittler writes, “Media determine our situation.”10 This statement represents an evolution in thought and scholarship from earlier thinkers like Marshall McLuhan,

8 Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 4. 9 See Shannon Mattern, “Deep Time of Media Infrastructures,” in Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015). 10 Frederich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. xxxix. 11 who famously proclaimed, “The medium is the message.”11 McLuhan was in his early twenties during the birth of television in the early 1930s, and his work is deeply concerned with media in transition – primarily the movement oral and print messages into the signal-based mediums of radio and television. In other words, his work tends to study content from the perspective of the medium. Kittler takes this a step further, studying human history from the point of view of media, and subsequently gives agency to large technological systems.

Like McLuhan, Kittler’s scholarship was also influenced by transforming technology.

The 1980s saw the rise of the personal computer and digital networks, and Kittler’s work reflects these changes.

“Technologies that not only subvert writing, but engulf it and carry it off along with so- called Man, render their own description impossible. Increasingly, data flows once confined to books and later to records and films are disappearing into black holes and boxes that, as artificial intelligences, are bidding us farewell on their way to nameless high commands.”12

Kittler speaks here of computers, networks, chips, digital storage and transmission, and how old notions of textuality and a human’s ability to process ideas become obscured once transformed into digital signals. His use of the term “so-called Man” relieves human society of some of its agency in this endeavor, and his reference to the “nameless high command” bequeaths that stolen agency to an autonomous digital system. Similar to Kittler, Matthew Kirschenbaum (a professor of English at the University of Maryland), in his book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic

Imagination (2008), illustrates the evolving nature of textuality in a digital environment. An essential update to works like Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Kirschenbaum’s work is indeed forensic and breaks down the hard disk drive into its component parts in order to investigate exactly where and how digital language is written. Yet even though Mechanisms seeks to

11 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media 12 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, p. xxxix. 12 deconstruct the physical hard drive, it does not give due attention to the political and economic underpinnings of its mineral makeup.

Unlike Kirschenbaum or Kittler, this thesis gives little agency to technology itself, instead focusing on the political and economic relationships that were built to create and sustain the digital infrastructure. It borrows more from of the methodologies of Thomas P. Hughes and

Langdon Winner, both proponents of what Hughes calls “Technological Momentum.”13

Technological momentum refers to the cyclical nature of technological innovation. Hughes’s histories chart the development of large, technological systems, and identify how culture and society impacted the building of these systems, and therein how these growing systems impacted society. Moreover, Langdon Winner identifies a symptom of this momentum that he calls

“Technological Somnambulism,” which refers to the manner in which society responds to great technological change. This thesis will explore this idea more in Chapter 2, when discussing the discourse surrounding the rise of personal computing. Both of these methodologies serve to support the idea of human agency in the acquiring and processing of the raw materials that built and maintain the digital infrastructure, an idea not yet sufficiently explored in the field of media infrastructure studies.

Still, since issues surrounding big data and data surveillance have made concerns over data security ubiquitous, scholars from multiple disciplines have begun to think critically about the creation, existence, and sustainability of data. While this thesis (like Kirschenbaum, Kittler, and Parikka) is concerned about the material nature of media, it will predominantly focus on how humans have exploited the raw materials of media for political, social, and economic reasons.

Using the history of the neodymium-iron-boron magnet as a case study, this thesis will illustrate

13 See Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 and Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. 13 how the digital world is inseparable from the material, and how digital infrastructure moved and grew in tandem with the geopolitical forces that dictated the extraction, processing, importation, and exportation of rare earth magnetic materials.

14

SECTION 1: Out Of Africa

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”14 - John Perry Barlow ‘96

The “declaration” above, taken from Barlow’s 1996 manifesto for cyberspace independence, makes great use of images and language to describe the ephemeral, bodiless, and borderless nature of cyberspace. Evoking ideas that have been expressed by futurists since the early 1980s, he refers to the “weary giants of flesh and steel,” and presupposes the dissolution of national sovereignty within the bounds of digital networks. This represents the prevailing image of the “space” of the Internet – freedom from old-world governments, bodiless global fluidity, and an anonymous democracy in which every bit of information has total equality. This discourse is constantly reinforced both by scholarship that fetishizes technology, as well as the popular media.15 While once posited as free and democratic utopias, recent studies have shown that digital networks are encumbered by innumerable hierarchical, political, and industrial control mechanisms that belie the idealistic language of digital discourse.16 These apparatuses of control reveal themselves properly only when we both materialize and historicize the expansion of digital networks. This is a new and emerging field of study and multiple academic disciplines

(History, Communications, Media Theory, Information Studies, among others) have taken on the challenge of attempting to understand the digital world through its inherently physical, material,

14 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation (Feb. 8, 1996), https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html, accessed 9/12/2015. 15 Some examples of techno-fetishistic scholarship include Victor Mayer Schönberger & Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Boston: Mariner Books, 2013), Eric Schmidt & Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives (New York: Vintage, 2013), Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Vintage, 1996). 16 See Alexander Galloway’s Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiberoptics. 15 political, and infrastructural nature.17 Drawing on these recent works as a model, this thesis will probe the history of the miniature hard disk drive to inquire into the sociocultural beginnings of the technology. This story does not celebrate Silicon Valley innovation, nor will it focus at length on the microchip. Rather, this history of data storage in the PC age begins just slightly west of the cradle of humanity itself - Central Africa, an area roiled in strife, conflict, and political upheaval.

The cloud suggests the false idea of a single place in which the world’s data waits idly for accessing, but it is actually comprised of millions of individual machines running on complicated electrical processes. Since this term encompasses so many disparate elements, it is nearly impossible to craft a history of the cloud as a single entity. Rather, proper histories must break the cloud into manageable parts. In A Prehistory of the Cloud, Tung Hui-Hu traces the history of the cloud through the proliferation of military network infrastructure in the 1960s. This is a valuable study as it seeks to ground the idea of the cloud in a physical history. His research echoes some of the declarations of this thesis by proclaiming the cloud a “cultural fantasy.”18

This thesis, however, focuses not on the beginnings of cloud network infrastructure, but on the necessity of a raw material supply chain that allowed the cloud to achieve and maintain its current and ever-expanding scale. The idea of cloud computing may have originated within the expansion of digital military networks, but the cloud as a scalable product had a far different genesis.

17 One example is Nicole Starosielski’s The Undersea Network (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). As one of the first comprehensive studies in the field of Media Infrastructure Studies, this work investigates the sociocultural history of the undersea cable network and in doing so, provides a fundamental methodological pretext for this study. Starosielski investigates not only the construction and operation of undersea cables throughout history, but also studies changes in local cultures as a result of the emerging economy surrounding their operation. By interlacing technological innovation and cultural transformation and adaptation, she adds much-needed depth, nuance, physicality, and humanity to the ever-expanding digital infrastructure. 18 Tung Hui-Hu, A Prehistory of The Cloud, Kindle Edition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), loc. 221. 16

It began in 1978, in the Shaba region of the former Belgian Congo, a rather unlikely place for a digital economy to be born. That summer, discontented rebels from neighboring Angola invaded Zaire’s Shaba province in an attempt to challenge Mobutu Seko’s control over the region’s mining operations.19 With the turmoil of decolonization tearing apart Seko’s new

Zairian experiment, a disconnect appeared between nationalistic ideology and reliance on western capital. Seko wanted independence for Zaire, but he relied heavily on the influx of western money and skilled labor from Europe.20 Like other African countries that struggled after

European decolonization, Zaire needed foreign investments in its profitable mining industry in order to buoy the fledgling state. The country had and continues to have plentiful reserves of copper and nickel, but one of its most important resources is cobalt, a strategic material instrumental in aircraft and defense technology, and useful within a wide range of industries.21

The United States relied extensively on cobalt in the 1970s, predominantly for strong superalloys and permanent magnets.22 By that time, cobalt had become an absolutely essential magnetic material. Aluminum-Nickel-Cobalt (henceforth AlNiCo) magnets first entered the marketplace in the 1930s, and the much stronger Samarium-Cobalt (henceforth SmCo) magnets emerged over three decades later in the late 1960s.23 SmCo magnets became far more desirable for heavy industry and national defense, but were also instrumental in multiple commercial

19 Alan Cowell, “Zaire’s Bloody past Makes Cobalt’s Future Uncertain,” in The New York Times (August 30, 1981), www.nytimes.com/1981/08/30/weekinreview/zaire-s-bloody-past-makes-cobalt-s-future-uncertain.html, accessed 12/1/14. 20 Lieutenant Colonel Thomas P. Odom, Shaba II: The French and Belgian Intervention in Zaire in 1978 (Fort Leavenworth: Combat Studies Institute, 1992), p. 9. 21 Arthur L. Robinson, “Powerful New Magnet Material Found,” in Science, Vol. 223, No. 2 (March, 1984), p. 920. 22 Ibid., p. 920. 23 - Jan F. Herbst, “Permanent Magnets,” in American Scientist, Vol. 81, No. 3 (May-June 1993), p. 254. - National Materials Advisory Board, Magnetic Materials, NMAB-426 (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 1985), p. 13. 17 applications, such as the invention of the Sony Walkman.24 Permanent magnets, and by extension cobalt, are designated strategic materials by the United States government. This means that the U.S. depends on permanent magnets both for national security, as well as economic stability.

Due to the rising demand for the SmCo magnet, the dependence on cobalt in magnetic materials increased dramatically by the mid-1970s. A 1984 issue of Science News reports that by

1978, cobalt had become “the most widely used ingredient in permanent magnets.”25 Even more, magnets themselves had become far more necessary. In the 1960s, the sheer number of applications for permanent magnets and magnetic technology grew substantially. For example, the guidance systems on the rockets that took the first astronauts to the moon required strong magnets to control maneuvers. Additionally, the Apollo computer system itself (a complex amalgam of analog controls and digital storage) required that code be stored on cylindrical magnetic cores, direct precursors to the now ubiquitous spinning magnetic plates. 26 While these cores were likely composed of weaker ferrites, the Apollo program, and the technology developed to support it, represents a growing need for magnetic technology across multiple sectors of the economy during this time. By the mid-1970s, Samarium-Cobalt magnets powered everything from “electron storage rings,” to featherweight headphones.27 Given the permeation of this technology into the industrial, technological, and cultural fabric of the United States, the

1978 rebellion in the Shaba province of Zaire created a problem of economic instability for what had become a crucial strategic and commercial resource.

24 “Counterfeit Sound,” in Popular Science, Vol. 221, No. 5 (1982), p. 109. 25 S. Weisburd, “Rare Earth Magnets Attract Attention,” in Science News, Vol. 125, No. 14 (Apr. 7, 1984), p. 212. 26 David Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), p. 125. 27 Robinson, “Powerful New Magnet Material Found,” p. 920. 18

The United States eventually got involved in Zaire, as did European powers, which held interests in the nation, but the intervention sparked harsh criticism in the United States during a volatile decade in its history. Against the backdrop of recent failings in Vietnam, the western incursion into Zaire stirred controversy in academic and journalistic circles in the United States.

The virulent counterculture opposition to American intervention overseas certainly challenged the notion of American exceptionalism during this period, but ironically, as scholar Fred Turner has illustrated, the counterculture movement of the late 1960s and 70s was also instrumental in eventually crafting the image of computers as a force for societal good. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism,

Turner describes how Stewart Brand and a group of bohemian, tech-savvy journalists and entrepreneurs helped transform the image of the computer from a machine for use by the “man,” to a modern vehicle for personal freedom and expression.28 Brand and his cohort helped catalyze the continually snowballing hype surrounding the seemingly endless possibilities of computers and digital networks. Like John Perry Barlow (another member of the Whole Earth Network)

Brand’s vision of the “digital utopia” is simplistic and ignores the complex political relationships that corporations and governments must exploit in order to construct and maintain an infrastructure for digital data. Ironically, as it urged the expansion of digital networks, the New

Left talk of liberation in the 1960s completely ignored the imperialistic practices in the 1980s and 1990s that made their democratic, digital utopian ideal possible.

As turmoil in Zaire increased, a conflict (dubbed Shaba II) instigated by rebels whose ethnic groups lay in opposition to Seko’s own, temporarily shut down mining operations in the

28 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 19 region, an unfortunate economic situation for western capitalists.29 The rebellion was significantly aided by an infusion of Soviet capital, and it eventually incurred intervention by

Belgian and French reinforcements, as well as U.S. financial aid, in order to rescue the Seko regime and protect Western economic interests. The Harvard Crimson reported in 1978 that,

“The Soviets have consistently been on the right side: they supported the black nationalist movements against Portuguese colonialism…[and] they backed MPLA, a group that participated in the Zaire conflict, the only genuine nationalist movement in Angola.”30 This article goes on to state that prior to this conflict, the U.S. had supported continued Portuguese colonialism in

Angola, providing over thirty million dollars to quell national resistance.31

While controversial in the eyes of the Harvard Crimson, this support is not hard to understand from an economic perspective. Since cobalt had become so important in a variety of industrial and technological applications, import vulnerability of this strategic resource was a key concern for western industrialized nations. A report published by the National Materials

Advisory Board in 1985 elucidates:

“The United States imports well over $1 billion worth of chromium, cobalt, manganese, and platinum group metals annually…[T]heir production is highly concentrated in two regions of the world: the Soviet Union and southern Africa. The potential for interruption of supplies from these sources has heightened congressional interest in alternatives to continued import dependence.”32

Parts of this report are a direct reaction to the 1978 conflict. It was not a response to the crisis itself, but to the economic instability it inevitably caused. Since mining operations temporarily halted during the invasion, the price of cobalt skyrocketed by nearly a “factor of 8”

29 Cowell, “Zaire’s Bloody Past Makes Cobalt’s Future Uncertain.” 30 Neva Seidman Makgetla, “‘Massacres’ and a New Cold War in Zaire,” The Harvard Crimson (May 31, 1978), www.thecrimson.com/article/1978/5/31/massacres-and-a-new-cold-war/, accessed 12/4/14. 31 Ibid. 32 National Materials Advisory Board, Strategic Materials: Technologies to Reduce U.S. Import Vulnerability (Washington D.C.: U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, OTA-ITE-248, May 1985), p. iii. 20 during the summer of 1978.33 Yet, this inflation was only temporary. The NMAB report shows that by 1983, the price of cobalt had once again stabilized at $12.50 per pound.34 By that time,

Zaire had returned to business as usual; the failed rebellion had been crushed soon after it had begun by Belgian and French troops.35 However, within that five years, government agencies

(such as the NMAB) and private industries scrambled to offset the monumental costs incurred from cobalt’s sudden rise. The search for alternatives became essential, and eventually successful as industry turned to new magnetic materials. One can see the sharp decrease in cobalt importation between 1978 and 1984, as industries quickly adapted to this reality. In 1979, The

U.S. consumed over eighteen million pounds of cobalt. In just two years, that number dropped to twelve million.36 Industries adapted and would continue to adapt to a world in which cobalt supply was vulnerable to dramatic fluctuations at any time, and this adaptation allowed for new technological ideas.

However, this does not imply that the United States eventually ceased cobalt importation, or that the realities of violence and political instability did not continue in Zaire (or in its later incarnation as the Democratic Republic of Congo) in ways that affected supply to the U.S.

Cobalt consumption by the general public has greatly increased since the 1970s, with great complication. Cobalt remains one of the most widely-used and controversial metals on Earth, and most of the world still acquires it from Central Africa, often turning a blind eye to the gross inequality and civil rights violations that occur within the mining industry there. Furthermore, the number of commercial applications for cobalt have increased, encouraging rising demand.

The lithium batteries of most small electronic devices such as cell phones, laptops, and tablets

33 Robinson, “Powerful New Magnet Material Found,” p. 920. 34 Strategic Materials: Technologies to Reduce U.S. Import Vulnerability, p. 7. 35 Cowell, “Zaire’s Bloody Past Makes Cobalt’s Future Uncertain.” 36 Strategic Materials: Technologies to Reduce U.S. Import Vulnerability, p. 7. 21 need cobalt, and most tech companies still use cobalt from the DRC, a relationship that continues to prove deeply problematic. A recent report by Amnesty International proclaims that companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Sony knowingly purchase cobalt that has been mined using child labor. Additionally, the report details the abysmal conditions of the small, “artisanal” mines, and the gross lack of safety and regulatory oversight. Children work in the mines to pay for school; miners often develop lung disease from the cobalt dust; and death tolls are severely underreported as an incalculable number of casualties remain buried underground, their bodies sifted and mingled with leftover dirt.37

Reports like these are necessary and call valuable attention to the rampant abuse endured by those that support the technological lives of the privileged. However, what Amnesty

International and the myriad of other news outlets that picked up this story fail to carefully address is the evolution of this supply chain, and to what effect digital utopian ideals expressed by the likes of Brand and Barlow have had on this evolution. This reality of mining in the DRC in many ways resembles the immoral conditions of those in the 1970s that resulted in an uprising against Seko and his regime – especially in respect to the foreign capital that continues to influence national policy. But the forces behind the daily economic blight and pain that these miners suffer are very different, from the ones present in the 1970s. While government reports on the 1978 cobalt crisis delineated Cold War fears and problems, resources from the DRC now represent part of a world market, an economy to which nearly every nation in the world is inextricably linked. Chinese mining companies buy ore from the DRC, process and sell it to

Korean manufacturers, who in turn sell finished components to companies like Apple and

37 “Exposed: Child labour behind smart phone and electric car batteries,” Amnesty International (Jan. 19, 2016), https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/01/Child-labour-behind-smart-phone-and-electric-car- batteries/, accessed 2/3/2016. 22

Microsoft.38 The system is global, with complex multinational interests. The dominant sovereignty of the nation-state that defined Cold War politics has become a corporatized set of interweaving, yet still immutably sovereign global entities 39 The growth of cobalt’s applications can be measured in similar ways to that of neodymium and other rare earth metals. The histories of both commodities have diverged and converged multiple times since the 1980s. As technologies change and become more widely utilized, demand for these metals increase; yet domestic issues in mineral-producing countries (both environmental and ethical) consistently obstruct the speed of production.

The history of rare earth magnets within the computing industry is hazy - obscured because, unlike with African cobalt, the story of rare earth doesn’t quite as easily conform to the pattern of an exploited developing world. The names of these metals (ytterbium, neodymium, lanthanum, cerium, dysprosium) are difficult to pronounce, and their various applications remain mysterious and almost impenetrable. The historical record from the last half of the twentieth century mostly ignores them, and as a result, most historians have ignored them as well. While careful attention has been paid to multiple aspects of computer history (social, economic, and teleological), historians of computing often neglect the social ramifications of the mass production and scalability that led to the universality of computer technology. Scholars like Paul

Ceruzzi, William Aspray, and Nathan Ensmenger tend to focus strictly on the machines (or in

Ensmenger’s case the software and its developers), and less on the political forces behind their creation. The political economy of cobalt gave rise to the neodymium market, but like so many other commodities, it became necessary because of the expanding digital world. In the late

1970s and early 1980s companies adapted to the temporary shortage of cobalt, but then quickly

38 Ibid. 39 Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. xi-xii. 23 readapted to its continued availability. In that short window of time, the neodymium magnet appeared to answer what proved to be a temporary need; but neodymium remained and helped shape its own technological circumstances.

The Cobalt Panic greatly impacted companies like General Motors, which relied on permanent magnets to power various types of electric motors. The unparalleled strength and high heat tolerance of the SmCo magnet made it ideal for heavy industrial applications. SmCo products had much higher magnetic potential than their weaker AlNiCo cousins, and various industries and technologies had grown to depend on this strength as a standard.40 However, samarium (one of the least abundant light rare earth metals) was rather costly, and combined with cobalt’s sudden spike, GM and other companies found the economic situation untenable.

With both samarium and cobalt at a high margin, companies and researchers across the globe began searching for alternatives. In 1978, GM and a Japanese company named Sumitomo independently embarked on research missions to develop a magnetic material that would necessarily be free of cobalt, and one that could be acquired and produced without pronounced resource vulnerability. Five years later, this would result in the introduction of the strongest and most widely used permanent magnet in history: The Neodymium-Iron-Boron magnet.

The Neodymium-Iron-Boron magnet (henceforth NdFeB) first appeared in 1982. Science magazine introduced it early in 1983 as a possible direct replacement for the SmCo magnet, touting its lack of cobalt, and proclaiming, “Now iron is back.”41 Even given this glowing initial review, this magnet did not take off immediately. A 1983 report by the National Materials

40 T.J.E. Miller, Brushless Permanent-Magnet and Reluctance Motor Drives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 34. - Cobalt Conservation Through Technological Alternatives, National Materials Advisory Board, NMAB- 406 (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 1983), p. 82. 41 Robinson, “Powerful New Magnet Material Found,” p. 920. 24

Advisory Board (Cobalt Conservation Through Technological Alternatives) talks at length about the substitution of weaker ferrite and ceramic magnets, but fails to mention the research efforts of GM and Sumitomo, or other organizations working toward this end (such as the Naval

Research Laboratory).42 This is likely because the first synthesis of this material was accidental and developed over time. Most research up until 1980 had been focused on extracting magnetism from only a rare earth-iron combination. These experiments did not immediately entice members of congress to accept the NdFeB magnet as a viable alternative to cobalt-based magnets.

Even so, corporations in the private sector expended vast resources to produce a magnet that could alleviate the stress on their bottom lines from high-margin metals like samarium and cobalt. But it was a government agency that provided the breakthrough that eventually led to the

NdFeB magnet. A researcher at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C. named

Norman Koon first experimented with a terbium-iron-boron compound in the late 1970s, but failed to create a useful magnetic alloy.43 In fact, the first addition of boron to the traditional rare earth-iron compound was accidental and used for a purpose unrelated to stabilizing the magnetization.44 Soon thereafter, though, Koon and his team began having success with the substitution of neodymium by combining it with iron and boron. In 1980, he and his team were the first to synthesize a transition metal, a metalloid, and a rare earth into a permanent magnet.45

This was the theoretical birth of the NdFeB magnet. Norman Koon and his team presented their

42 Cobalt Conservation Through Technological Alternatives, pp. 87-89. 43 Robinson, “Powerful New Magnet Material Found,” p.921 See: Gareth Hatch, “A Forgotten Figure in the Evolution of Rare Earth Permanent Magnets,” Terra•Magnetica (Sep. 13, 2009), www.terramagnetica.com/2009/09/13/a-forgotten-figure-in-the-evolution-of-rare- earth-permanent-magnets/, accessed 12/5/14. 44 Boron was first used as a “glass former.” Magnetic Materials, p. 2. 45 Donald U. Gubser, et. al., “In Memoriam: Norman C. Koon (1938-1997),” p. 600, in IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, Vol. 34, No. 3 (May, 1998). 25 findings at the Magnetism and Magnetic Materials Conference in 1980 to great acclaim.46 Even though it did not yet have the magnetic capacity of SmCo, the invention of NdFeB galvanized a number of companies and research laboratories to begin scalable production in part because all of the materials for this magnet could be acquired within the borders of the United States. At first, some expressed concern with the temperature tolerance of NdFeB, saying that in order to use this magnet in heavy industry, one would still need to add cobalt in order to maintain magnetism at the necessary temperatures.47 However, by 1985, many had begun to realize its full potential, proclaiming, “The energy product is so large that it will revolutionize the design of motors.”48 Within two years, companies around the world developed their own patented techniques for the production of this new magnet, with General Motors and Sumitomo hitting the market first. Both of these companies published and patented their magnetic compounds late in

1982 (GM as Magnequench, and Sumitomo as Neomax). A Pennsylvania company named

Crucible followed later in 1983 with Crumax.49

As companies refined production, demand grew rapidly. Demand encouraged more aggressive mining, which caused the price of NdFeB to decrease substantially – in part because

(unlike with cobalt magnets) neodymium, iron, and boron did not represent strategic resources subject to import vulnerability in 1985. With that in mind, in order to properly illustrate how the

NdFeB magnet became an essential part of the digital infrastructure, one must first understand how the rare earth metal neodymium became an indispensable magnetic material, and how

American reserves of this metal impacted the rapid proliferation of the NdFeB magnet. From the

1960s to the late 1980s, most of the rare earth elements used worldwide were extracted from the

46 Ibid. 47 Robinson, “Powerful New Magnet Material Found,” p. 922. 48 Magnetic Materials, p. 3. 49 S. Weisburd, “Rare Earth Magnets Attract Attention,” p. 212. 26

Mountain Pass Mine, situated on the California-Nevada border, just outside of Primm.50 The successes and failures of this mine (and its parent company Molycorp) provide a window through which one can witness the birth and growth of the digital economy in the United States from a material and political perspective. The Mountain Pass Mine deserves its own history, but this study will focus on the peak of its success in the early 1980s, and will then briefly trace the contours of its decline in the 1990s and its temporary resurgence in the mid-2000s. While this mine and its products never had a direct relationship with the digital world (meaning that computer companies rarely, if ever, bought materials directly from the mine), its essential place in the supply chain calls for an investigation of its material relationship to the cloud.

The area surrounding Mountain Pass has hosted mining activity since the mid-1800s.

After the Northern California Gold Rush collapsed, prospectors moved south, first discovering lead ore at Clark Mountain, about eight miles northwest of Mountain Pass. Soon thereafter they uncovered silver deposits, and throughout the late 1800s, mines multiplied in order to take advantage of this new enterprise. By 1900, $5,000,000 worth of silver had been removed from mines around Clark Mountain.51 Other mines to the west and south were built to accommodate the extraction of lead and gold, but the remoteness of the location began to affect the growth of the area in the 1890s.52 Once the Union Pacific line from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles running through Mountain Pass was completed, mining operations began again in earnest.53 Between

1914 and 1917, World War One called for intensive production of resources to support the war

50 United States Geological Survey, Rare Earth Elements – Critical Resources for High Technology, FS 087-02 (Washington D.C.: Department of the Interior, 2002), http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2002/fs087-02/, accessed 12/5/14. 51 D.F. Hewitt, “History of the Discovery at Mountain Pass,” p. iii, in Rare-Earth Mineral Deposits of the Mountain Pass District San Bernardino County California (Washington: United States Printing Office, 1954). 52 Ibid. 53 Richard J. Orsi, Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West 1850-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 24. 27 effort and the Mountain Pass region provided copious amounts of copper, lead, and zinc.54 After the war, mining endeavors continued with varied levels of success; it wasn’t until 1949 that

Mountain Pass’s future as one of the world’s largest reserves of rare earth minerals became manifest, and by 1964, the United States dominated the mining, refining, and export of rare earth materials.55 However, the era of U.S. dominance in this industry lasted only 25 years. China entered the rare earth marketplace in the mid-1980s as part of an initiative to quadruple the size of their economy in all sectors, including technology and raw materials.56

Led by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, China began to develop its rare earth industry under the Seventh Five Year Plan (1986-1991), within an agenda that outlined growth in both the industrial and high technology sectors.57 The Chinese government placed a specific high priority on the development of foundational electronics and communication infrastructures.58 Deng

Xiaoping foresaw the importance of rare earth mining and manufacturing, and understood earlier than most their necessity to a burgeoning technology industry. Having held high office in the

Chinese government since the 1950s, Deng traveled to Japan in 1978 to learn from their recent technological revolution. Due to an infusion of western capital and support after World War II,

Japan had morphed rapidly from a pockmarked war zone into a technological behemoth and

Deng hoped that he could help inject some of that success into the fledgling Chinese economy.

He visited a Matsushita electronics factory and witnessed firsthand the “mass production of…color televisions,…fax machines and microwaves, neither of which had been introduced to

54 Hewitt, “History of the Discovery at Mountain Pass,” p. iii. 55 U.S.G.S., Critical Resources for High Technology 56 U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Technology Transfer to China, OTA-ISC-340 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, July 1987), p. 29. 57 Michael Pecht et al., The Chinese Electronics Industry (London: CRC Press, 1999), p. 76. 58 Technology Transfer to China, p. 4. 28

China.”59 Deng was amazed, not just by the technology, but by the ability of Japan’s populace to manage its general economic prosperity. He witnessed that the Japanese owned homes and cars, and he wanted this for his country as well. Shortly after his return, Matsushita began opening electronics factories in China, automatically infusing needed technological knowledge and experience into the Chinese economy.60 This 1978 trip to Japan marked the beginning of Deng’s transformation in the management of the Chinese economy, opening the door for the monumental technology transfer that would occur in the years to come.

In 1992, Deng proclaimed, “There is oil in the Middle East; there is rare earth in

China.”61 He uttered these words at a time when most of the western world had no idea this resource existed, or any clue as to its purpose. Yet by this time, China had already undertaken great strides to construct an extraction and processing infrastructure, and the rest of the world was primed for the new supply. In the United States, government publications were reticent and uncertain about China’s new role on the world stage. In the late 1980s, the U.S. saw Chinese technology as “out-of-date,” and “obsolete,” citing only military technology as relevantly developed.62 A 1987 congressional report details the benefits that U.S. technology transfer would bring to the Chinese people. It mentions specifically the need for the Chinese to learn modern management techniques, and that exposure to these would lead to greater mastery over new technology.63 This report obviously contains western bias because Deng Xiaoping had already helped to bring modern management techniques into China after his visit to Japan in

59 Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2011), pp. 305-306. 60 Ibid. p. 308. 61 Paul Krugman, “Rare and Foolish,” New York Times, Oct. 17, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/opinion/18krugman.html, accessed 2/3/16. 62 Technology Transfer to China, p. 4. 63 Ibid, p. 5. 29

1978.64 The report also states that while China bought computers from companies like IBM, little electronics manufacturing existed in 1987 – a claim nullified by all the Matsushita factories that opened in China in the early 1980s.65 It seems that the expansion of technology manufacturing in China actually worried U.S. officials as early as 1987. John H. Gibbons, director of the Office of Technology Assessment, wrote in July of that year, “China may be a constructive trading and strategic partner, or it may choose a more divergent path. U.S. decisions on technology transfer will be an important determinant of which path is followed and the implications for the world.”66 In an odd bit of foreshadowing Gibbons expressed concern over China’s growing role in world markets. But like so many others, he overlooked a key relationship by not connecting China’s rare earth project with the growing needs of the burgeoning worldwide computer electronics industry.

Gibbons’ oversight was likely due in part to the fact that the state of the Chinese mining industry at any given time remains virtually unattainable and/or unintelligible. Concrete data on

Chinese mining activities is difficult to acquire, and even the small amount that is available is difficult to reconcile with traditional notions of supply and demand.67 This makes most of

China’s mining activity in the 1980s and 1990s hard to ascertain, except through third-party sources. Furthermore, numbers and figures pertaining to the Chinese economy are often interpreted for political reasons. James Dorian’s invaluable 1994 work on the history of mining in China provides numerous statistics. However, at times his dates and numbers do not match later data, suggesting that either some of his conclusions are politically driven, or the data he

64 Vogel, Deng Xiaoping, p. 308. 65 Technology Transfer to China, p. 5, 7. 66 Technology Transfer to China, p. iii. 67 James P. Dorian, Minerals, Energy, and Economic Development in China (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 29. 30 sequenced was itself a product of politics. For example, he states that in 1991 the U.S. still maintained a lead over China in the production and export of rare earth metals. However, a 2002 publication from the USGS shows that rare earth production in China rapidly surpassed

Mountain Pass in the late 1980s due to its far more plentiful reserves. China had been steadily increasing its output for years and starting in about 1986-87, Mountain Pass substantially decreased production.68

Dorian’s book only mentions rare earths a handful of times, instead it places vital importance on China’s coal and petroleum industries. The lack of interest in what two years earlier Deng Xiaoping had labeled China’s equivalent to Middle East oil, serves to illustrate a contemporary Western ignorance concerning the global importance of rare earths. The lack of a historical record on rare earths serves to justify Dorian’s ignorance. In the 1980s and 1990s, and even in the first decade of the new millennium, apart from China and those with vested interest in the industry, few understood the true necessity of rare earth metals. According to the USGS data, by 1990, China had already surpassed the U.S. in rare earth production. Additionally, by

1991 many proclaimed that the NdFeB magnet would revolutionize motor design. China’s ability to cheaply and quickly produce these magnets accelerated the growth of their industry, and hastened the decline of rare earth mining and processing facilities in the U.S. This seems to indicate that Deng Xiaoping made his rare earth proclamation aware of developments that were already occurring. By 1992, industries worldwide had begun to adapt to the pricing structure and endless supply of product from China, as U.S. mining and metallurgy companies struggled.

68 - USGS, Rare Earth Elements – Critical Resources for High Technology. - Patrick Thilbodeau, “China Controls Key Metal for Hard Drives,” ComputerWorld (Apr. 19, 2010), www.computerworld.com/article/2550631/computer-hardware/china-controls-key-metal-for-hard-drives.html, accessed 12/6/14. 31

By 1995, China’s rare earth industry had grown to such a degree that a government- controlled mining company worked with a U.S. firm to quietly purchase GM’s Magnequench division, which was ironically first incorporated in the mid-1980s to relieve the United States of foreign import dependency.69 This purchase represents not only the beginning of the total technology transfer of the rare earth industry to China, but is also another example of the fluidity of global commodities, and the supreme sovereignty of the corporation to dictate this flow.

Chapter three will explore this sale and its fallout in intimate detail, but as with cobalt, rare earth magnets have helped to construct and define the digital landscape. Companies like Google,

Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Seagate, and Western Digital hold sway over multinational webs of commodity flows; and regardless of human rights abuses, unfair pricing, or domestic job losses, these companies and those in their supply chain retain the freedom to fruitfully multiply their product lines and continue to answer an ever-climbing demand for devices.

Rare earth metals, and specifically the NdFeB magnet, have made possible the rapid miniaturization of electronic devices, including speakers, headphones, cell phones, televisions, computers, tablets, and hard disk drives. The popularity of magnetic disk drives (especially internal disk drives) is largely due to the ability of the NdFeB magnet to manage high velocity momentum inside its ever-more-slender frames. As the scalability of this magnetic technology increased, hard disk drives became more versatile and quickly supplanted other forms of digital storage. The opinion that hard drives are absolutely necessary internal components of a computer evolved in tandem with demand for smaller form factors, increasing storage capacity, and decreasing cost. In 1984, Alan Shugart (the founder of Seagate Technology, still one of the largest manufacturers of hard disk drives) expressed his conviction that no form of internal

69 Pat Choate, Hot Property: The Stealing of Ideas in an Age of Globalization (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 345. 32 memory (not even the hard disk) would ever replace the floppy disk drive.70 Yet technology often moves rapidly, and in unexpected directions. By 1990, hard disk drives (not floppies) represented a multibillion-dollar market, and one “in which the leaders in the field are all U.S.- based companies…The industry is clearly moving toward smaller, higher capacity hard drives, particularly those made for the notebook-size computers.”71 This Computerworld article dismisses the effect of externalities on the new hard disk craze, neglecting to mention the various industrial components these companies had to purchase in order to manufacture these products.

Moreover, these components are themselves subject to their own externalities. Voice coil actuators have their own manufacturers that in turn purchase magnets from another party.

However, the popular historical memory of the digital world during the 1980s and 1990s minimizes these relationships.

Ideals of digital utopianism, and a viral culture of techno-fetishism drive technological demand, tending to obscure the constant perpetuation of global resource struggles. The hype that constantly surrounds innovations in new media and new technology delivers itself with carefully constructed language that masks the dirty, industrial fiber of the supposedly post-industrial world. The obfuscation of the material realities of computing and data storage allow the digital to maintain its image as clean, green, and bodiless. This trend is not uncommon. Businesses often seek to conceal the origins and supply chains of their products because this makes products more marketable. Computer companies are no different. The marketing of computers and digital culture has created a kind of unconscious communal agreement stipulating what computers are and what they mean. But this marketing is unique from that of other technologies. Personal

70 The Computer Chronicles, “Storage Devices,” 7:12. 71 Maura J. Harrington, “Disk Drive Survivors Emerge,” ComputerWorld, Vol. 24, No. 43 (Oct. 29, 1990), p. 131. 33 computers and the internet emerged in a climate of globalization and deregulation, and the omission of necessary global resources and relationships from the public discourse has instilled false ideas concerning the stability of our modern digital world. The popular image of computers and the internet does not at all rely on their physical reality, but instead is constructed primarily out of advertising, language, and discourse. It is this discourse that forms our basic knowledge and understanding of the machine and the network, and its history derives more from the work of

Brand, et.al. than the struggles of post-colonial Africa. As computers and computer culture transformed in the 1980s and 1990s, so did the public discourse surrounding computers. By analyzing patterns in the language of advertising, journalism, and the general public, it becomes abundantly clear how the ubiquity of rare earth magnets went wholly unnoticed, and the political and economic realities that surrounded the production of the magnets were disguised by the rhetoric. As digital culture evolved, the language and culture of digital life erased the dirty, violent, African past of a material that made it possible. The following chapter will address the power of language and its ability to manufacture thoughts, ideas, and realities. Crucial elements of today’s cloud-computing infrastructure may have begun in Africa, but The Cloud exists solely as an idea, a simulacrum, immaterial - built of sound, image, and language.

34

SECTION 2: Computer Language

“The Internet of Things will connect every thing with everyone in an integrated global network. People, machines, natural resources, production lines, logistics networks, consumption habits, recycling flows, and virtually every other aspect of economic and social life will be linked via sensors and software to the IoT platform, continually feeding Big Data to every node – businesses, homes, vehicles – moment to moment, in real time.” - Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society72

The future of networks and data rests on a foundation of hope and enthusiastic optimism.

Innovations in Big Data supposedly will lead to revolutions in healthcare, government, and general human happiness, creating a future buoyed by the idea that the more information we have at our disposal for sequencing and analysis, the better we can know and understand ourselves and the world around us. According to some techno-fetishistic speculators like Jeremy

Rifkin, Big Data could end global capitalism in favor of a “collaborative commons” of production. As Rifkin fantasizes, products will cost nothing to produce and distribute because the

Internet of Things will bring all marginal costs down to zero. In this future, absolutely everything will be connected to a global network of smart objects, constantly learning and anticipating our every want and need.73 Rifkin argues that the desire to attribute monetary value to life will simply vanish amidst the utopian efficiency of the digital world. Rifkin’s techno- utopia is an extreme case of the image supported and nurtured by companies like Microsoft,

Google, and Apple, whose advertising campaigns seek to promote the ease and effectiveness of cloud computing and big data architecture. A recent commercial for Microsoft Cloud begins with the language, “Microsoft Cloud allows us to access information from anywhere…allows us to scale up…changes our world dramatically.”74 This commercial goes on to praise the speed at

72 Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 23. 73 Ibid, p. 13. 74 “Microsoft Cloud Commercial We Feng Changing the World,” YouTube, Jan. 20, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c5WMn4zbjU, accessed 2/13/2016. 35 which one can now sequence a genome, and a weatherman proclaims that the station can avoid server rooms in favor of the Microsoft Cloud. This commercial does have an element of truth – cloud computing has become a marvel of technological efficiency. This does not negate the fact that describing data as a societal savior contributes to a public ignorance of industrial realities inherent in the construction of computers and networks.

Ads like those for Microsoft Cloud abound in today’s media landscape, and each company highlights different advantages of cloud computing. A 2011 commercial for the iPhone

4S illustrates the ease with which personal media are accessible on iCloud; likewise, Google

Drive encourages group access and editing with their cloud storage platform, emphasizing both the personal nature and public flow of data in the Google network. 75 These services promise a wireless lifestyle – freedom from the constraints of the desktop and the hard drive, and the ability to access your data from anywhere at the touch of a button. They do indeed make the world appear wireless, and most day-to-day internet use seems to lend credence to this appearance. I am typing this thesis on a tablet with a wireless internet connection while my cell phone plays a

Sibelius concerto through a Bluetooth speaker nearly fifteen feet away – all without the aid of wires. However, the wireless world only exists in this space between computers and routers, or between a cell phone and the nearest tower. Apart from that, the Internet, and by extension the cloud, is a jumbled and ragged plethora of wires and cables that circle endlessly around the globe.

Digital data is not ethereal. It does not careen freely through the stratosphere. It moves through underground fiber-optic networks of copper and plastic; it resides in gargantuan concrete

75 “Apple iCloud Commercial iPhone 4s,” YouTube, Oct. 4, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWZTMyjmcnU, accessed 2/13/2016. “Go Google: Google Drive,” YouTube, Apr. 24, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKJ9KzGQq0w, accessed 2/13/2016 36 data centers, some hidden in big cities, and others the size of cities themselves. The popular image of the cloud belies the real behavior of data. This image, however, has a historical dimension that few scholars have addressed, and to which no scholars have connected the history of raw material politics. The previous chapter bridged the history of digital storage with geopolitical forces in Africa that influenced the development of a key component in the future manufacturing of hard disk drives (the NdFeB magnet). This chapter will attempt to reconcile those dirty, material beginnings with the often contradictory, popular image and memory of data storage in the 1980s and early 1990s. It will do so through an examination of advertisements and trade publications, but also through reviewing subsequent histories written about the rise of personal computers. Scholarly histories of computing help to reconstruct and in some ways dispel the popular memory of computer culture, but they all omit necessary discussions of rare earth and mineral politics. This omission also has historical dimensions, as it illustrates how ideas surrounding the history of the digital world have so far evolved more from discourse than from pure material realities. Even histories that focus on the material construct of the computer often ignore the social and political dimensions of mass production, therein helping to perpetuate a streamlined image of the digital future.

The uses of most technological products are implicit in the machines themselves. A lightbulb produces light; a telephone transmits aural signals; the television transmits visual and aural media. But a computer’s utility does not inherently derive from its ability to compute.

Rather, a computer’s market value is measured by what one can imprint onto it. The interface carries more market value than the machine itself. The fact that one can “brick” an iPhone by downloading a corrupted file indicates that the value of an iPhone implicitly derives not from its circuitry, but from the operating system it carries. On the surface, televisions, telephones, and 37 other media technology have similar relationships to their functions. Televisions need content, and telephones require mutual operators to unlock their values. However, even though signal data is disassembled and reconstructed in the broadcasting of images on a television, or in the transmission of voice over telephone wires, the identities and functions of these machines remain linguistically and spatially intact.

Wittgenstein states, “[W]e cannot think of spatial objects apart from space.”76 This statement has become less true as computer use has become more widespread, and the shift is embedded in our very language. For example, one broadcasts programs to a television, implying a direct relationship between the content and the machine. However, one would not broadcast the same show to a computer; that does not make sense. The program would be uploaded to the

Internet. This indicates a linguistic acknowledgement of a separate virtual space through which a computer would indirectly access the content. As networks have grown, so has our perception of the spatial reality of computers. They are not necessarily a part of this physical space, but rather straddle multiple planes of spatiality. Therefore, the distinction between computer hardware and computer software is unique because the formal environment of the operating system mediates all interaction so deeply that the physical identity of data disappears almost immediately.77

Kittler argues against the division of hardware and software, proclaiming that the very notion of soft-ware is false because one can accurately measure its physicality. He explains that software can be sequentially broken down into single electrical pulses fed through individual transistors and recorded as differences in voltage.78 He is essentially correct, but this chapter is

76 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1922), p. 26. 77 Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), p. 133. 78 Frederich Kittler, “There Is No Software,” CTHEORY.NET, 10/18/1995, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74, accessed 1/25/16. 38 less concerned with software’s physical presence, and more with how its public portrayal and perception influenced discussions on hardware, thereby obscuring the material innovations necessary to keep pace with software demand (such as the NdFeB magnet). With the exception of media archaeologists (like Kittler) and computer engineers, software is generally considered immaterial (apart from the physical space it might occupy on a hard drive). It is the ever-present medium through which we interact with the computer, and it is this interface that is valuable.

Even if at the most fundamental levels software and hardware are one in the same, a computer is only valuable inasmuch as it can facilitate a useful software interface.

This wasn’t always the case. In the mid-1970s, before software applications emerged as a dominant cultural force, tech companies marketed computers strictly as machines. In 1975,

Scelbi Computer Consulting Inc. marketed its Scelbi-8B Mini Computer as a machine that

“CAN!”79 The language in this ad implies that the machine itself has the capability to perform all sorts of tasks (like sending Morse code, calculating, tabulating, manipulating data, and playing games), with delineation of the interface and software secondary to the computer. The fine print describes the device’s display as “an interface that turns an oscilloscope into an alphanumeric display system.”80 Even though researchers at Xerox PARC had conceived in 1970 what would eventually become the graphic user interface (GUI) popularized by the Macintosh computer in

1984, in 1975 most computer users still primarily accessed and manipulated data through print- outs, punch-cards, switching wires, or through an oscilloscope or primitive video interface. The proto-GUIs like those developed at Xerox PARC were reserved strictly for high-end research and military applications.81 If, as Hookway argues, an interface “delimits a specific cultural

79 Byte: The Small Systems Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Oct. 1975), p. 10. 80 Ibid. 81 Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), p. 100. 39 space,” then the spaces computer interfaces created and supported in the 1970s were seen as less critical than the machines on which they ran.82

The first personal computers created only marginal cultural spaces with their interfaces, and instead were marketed as tools. The first Apple computer emerged in the mid-1970s out of a hobbyist tradition – a rugged, physical construction that performed rudimentary functions. An early ad for the Apple One that appeared in the magazine Interface Age in 1976 highlights its multifaceted nature, but the machine’s construction remains open for the consumer to assess.

Most of the electronic components are labeled. One can actually see the microprocessor, the computer video terminal, the RAM, and the cassette board connector.83 The reduced size and simplicity of the machine allowed for easier public access to computers, and expanded the demand for the then-underutilized MOS microprocessor.84 With this first rude assemblage of circuits, Apple helped to inaugurate the personal computer revolution, and between 1975 and

1985, what started as a fringe hobbyist’s tradition of computer building grew into a cultural phenomenon. One can trace this shift in trade magazines such as Byte (originally a hobbyist publication whose first issue ran in 1975). Its inaugural issue is filled with articles detailing computer assembly, with complicated circuit routing instructions and breakdowns of the various microprocessors on the market.85 One of the headlines even reads, “Computers: The Worlds

Greatest Toy,” emphasizing the recreational nature of the machine.86 However, by 1985, Byte

82 Branden Hookway, Interface (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), p. 14. 83 “Apple Introduces the First Low Cost Microcomputer System with a Video Terminal and 8K Bytes of RAM on a Single PC Card,” in Interface Age, Oct. 1976, p. 11, http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm//wp- content/uploads/2011/12/Apple-First-Ad.jpg, accessed 2/16/16. 84 Ross Knox Bassett, To the Digital Age: Research Labs, Start-up Companies, and the Rise of MOS Technology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 279. 85 Byte: The Small Systems Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Sept. 1975). 86 Ibid. 40 grew from a pure hobbyist’s publication into a magazine oriented toward business and mass culture and communication, with little focus on machine construction.

The October 1985 issue opens with an ad for the Apple Macintosh stating, “No matter what business you’re in, you’re in business.”87 Most of the articles also focus on software and simulation, as opposed to construction and hardware.88 Software applications had made the computer vital and ubiquitous. Suddenly, with software, computers could do anything. The

October 1985 issue of Byte ran features on tremendously varied software applications, with language that proclaimed the problem-solving power of software – titles like “Simulating

Society,” “Fighting Fire With Technology,” and “Predicting Arson.”89 These articles speak of the ability for computers to solve social issues not through the machine itself, but through its third party processes, its applications.

This issue also includes a perfect exemplar of the linguistic dialectic between the depreciating public awareness of hardware, and the endless capabilities of software: “Building a

Computer in Software,” is an article about a software engineer (a “hacker” in this piece) who, since he did not have the ability to build a real computer, designed an application that simulated a computer. 90 This piece is a rather inconsequential set of instructions detailing how to program a “virtual machine,” but one sentence stands out as indicative of the culture of the tech industry in the 1980s, and of the dramatic shift between the hobbyist and mass culture of computers: “It’s not much fun to program. Poking instructions into memory one by one using the monitor is only a few steps above flipping toggle switches on a front panel. Now that may send a nostalgic shiver down your spine but being a software person, I would rather have something do the job

87 Byte: The Small Systems Journal, Vol. 10, No. 10 (Oct. 1985), p. 1. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., pp. 2-3. 90 Ibid., pp. 113-118. 41 for me.”91 This proclamation illustrates that, during the transition to mass computer consumption, hardware literacy began to wane. Two years earlier, the magazine dedicated an advice column to the problem of “Computer Literacy,” responding that computer literacy was not an issue because well-executed software had made it unnecessary to comprehend exactly how a computer functions.92 Interestingly in that same 1983 issue, to appease the remaining hobbyist audience, there appears a guide on how to assemble a modem, complete with circuit diagrams.93 This type of assemblage feature would disappear almost completely from Byte by

1985, replaced by software reviews and columns on new and developing technologies. Byte formed in 1975 as a celebration of machine construction; Over the course of ten years, popular discourse saw that the machine took the backseat to the process, the built computer becoming merely the carriage that carried the new royalty of software.94

By 1983, it was becoming less and less feasible for an operating system to boot from a single disk, or from a small parcel of random access memory on the motherboard. Consumers wanted graphics, more interactivity, and more versatility. Newer, more sophisticated operating software, with multi-tasking abilities, called for more available internal and external storage.95 A

1983 issue of Byte discusses the need for new and improved storage technologies to combat rising data demands. It discusses possible futures of digital storage technologies, highlighting hard disks, virtual memory, and a long-since defunct technology, the Drexon Laser Card.96 But hard disk drives were far too expensive in 1983 to encourage mass use, and they were still seen

91 Ibid., p. 118. 92 Byte: The Small Systems Journal, Vol. 8, No. 3 (March, 1983), p. 16. 93 Ibid., pp. 26-32. 94 I have also analyzed similar patterns in PCWorld, ComputerWorld, and a long-running San Francisco talk show called The Computer Chronicles. This pattern is pervasive both in the popular and trade media during this era. 95 Byte: The Small Systems Journal, Vol. 8, No. 3 (March, 1983), p. 4. 96 Ibid., pp. 8-10. 42 as peripherals and not an integral part of the computer system. Floppies remained the standard, even though hard disks processed data almost twenty times faster.97 In designing the Macintosh,

Apple ignored calls for hard drive storage, instead giving it only a single floppy drive to accompany its RAM storage. The Macintosh may have provided innovative graphic software in

1984, but it neglected necessary storage improvements in favor of software showmanship.

The advertising language of Apple and other computer companies in the early-mid-1980s started to move away from machine construction, therein obscuring the built environment of the computer. What was once a rather open and user-programmable device, became a closed-system, marketable product. Because tinkering and home-building of computers did not translate well to a mass audience (businesses in particular increasingly wanted to computers that would work for them), companies strived to produce more user-friendly devices. Apple, in a departure from their hobbyist origins, created the Macintosh as a completely closed machine, even going so far as to make void the manufacturer’s warrantee if the consumer opened the plastic casing to peer inside.98 Apple marketed this computer in such a way as to make the Macintosh itself of little import. It was simply a functional box that delivered an innovative GUI interface (a reconfiguration of a similar operating system developed years earlier by researchers at Xerox

PARC). In taking this approach, Apple was purposely rebranding the image of the computer to appeal to a casual audience, and casual computer users tended not to care about chips, bits, and transistors.

In late 1984, Apple bought all the ad space for Newsweek’s Special Election issue, and dedicated nineteen pages to the newly-launched Macintosh. This long-form advertisement

97 Ibid., p. 8. 98 The Computer Chronicles, “Hard Disk Storage,” 1985, https://archive.org/details/HardDisk1985, accessed 12/15/2015. 43 contains most of what would later become hallmarks of Apple’s brand. Instead of highlighting the machine’s technical specifications and functionality, this ad illustrates the personality of the machine, and how this personality allows for easy and fluid user interaction. On the second page of this insert, the computer even greets the consumer with a digitally painted “hello.”99 The rest of the ad provides a swift tutorial on how to navigate the interface, and only on the penultimate page does it allow the reader to see the guts of the machine. In a complete reversal from advertisements for the Apple One, ads for the Macintosh worked to accentuate its personality as a cultural product over its functionality as an actual computer. While this appeared wildly innovative at the time, this type of advertising only responded to and embraced the already- present cultural ignorance of computer hardware. Only one year earlier, Gary Kildall’s company

Digital Research ran an ad in Byte proclaiming, “When you buy the right software, you can’t go wrong on the hardware.”100 CompuServe, an early network information service, in catering to the multitude of computer brands in 1983, advertised, “We don’t care which computer you own.

We’ll help you get the most out of it.”101 Ads like these implied a universality to software by deemphasizing the importance of the physical computer running it. With the Macintosh, Apple took advantage of this cultural moment and gave a machine personality through its software, suddenly making the computer personally relatable. Here at last, in 1984, the Macintosh interface began creating Hookway’s “cultural space.”102

This new cultural phenomenon was quickly interrupted due to shortcomings in hardware.

As Byte subtly hinted in 1983, software application sizes inflated, functionality slowed, and in

99 “Introducing The Macintosh For the Rest of Us,” Newsweek, Special Elections Issue, Oct/Nov. 1984, http://www.jagshouse.com/newsweekinsert.html, accessed 3/13/16. 100 Byte (March, 1983), p. 33. 101 Ibid., p. 281. 102 Hookway, Interface, p. 17. 44

1985, the personal computer market entered a brief recession. The Macintosh had seen an initial boom in sales due to its capacity for graphics-oriented software, but its poor performance in business applications caused sales to stagnate by 1985.103 Furthermore, businesses which had already outfitted their offices with personal computers in years past had reached their necessary capacity and had little need for new machines.104 This recession directly contradicted 1984 estimates that PC use would double within one year, and exposed a crucial vulnerability in the

PC’s ability to become an economically and culturally essential machine.105 Scholars have neglected this brief recession, likely because it was a temporary setback in an otherwise increasingly profitable industry. However, history is often written in these small upsets.

Development hiccups represent shifting consumer interests and the multiple technologies that rose and fell, and succeeded and failed meet these interests. It happened with magnets in Africa, and it continues to happen in Silicon Valley. Yet the history of computing does not properly reflect these necessary digressions from the computer’s path to cultural dominance. Even Paul

Ceruzzi’s comprehensive A History of Modern Computing contains no mention of a recession in

1985 (only a brief mention of a slow-down in 1970).106

The PC recession of 1985 occurred primarily because the lofty promises of new software could not be fulfilled by the current hardware. The Macintosh had a beautiful graphic interface but lacked necessary storage for larger applications, and thus did not function well in business settings.107 This may have caused sales to lag in 1985, but these hardware setbacks allowed for rapid innovation in digital storage. During the PC recession, the disk drive industry continued to

103 The Computer Chronicles, “The Macintosh,” 1985, https://archive.org/details/TheMacin1985, accessed 1/25/16. 104 The Computer Chronicles, “Optical Storage Devices,” 1985, https://archive.org/details/Opticals1985. 105 U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Automation of America’s Offices (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, OTA-CIT-287, December 1985), p. 274. 106 Paul Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing: Second Edition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), p. 199. 107 The Computer Chronicles, “The Macintosh,” 1985. 45 prosper because, in many ways, disk drive technology helped to reinvigorate the PC market. In the early-mid 1980s, there was little industry standardization and the field was abuzz with creativity. In 1984, The Computer Chronicles ran programs that detailed over a dozen data storage solutions, most of which became defunct less than three years later. According to Gary

Kildall, storage devices like the floppy disk drive were essential in launching the microcomputer revolution, and would continue to be essential as demand for data continued to increase.108

Between 1984 and 1987, multiple formats fought to overtake the cumbersome floppy as data’s standard-bearer, and most faded into obscurity. Virtual memory solutions like Bubble

Memory were popular, but not particularly scalable or versatile; Some Commodore computers stored data on magnetic cassette tapes, but those quickly vanished in the wake of developments in optical storage technology; Some companies even experimented with variations on hard disk technology. The Bernoulli Box, for example, was a disk drive with which you could exchange removable, portable hard disks. Like floppy disks, these were removable and could be easily archived. Instead of keeping a binder of floppy disks, one would simply have a box of interchangeable Bernoulli hard disks. Interestingly, an ad for the Bernoulli Box in 1985 describes it as a way to “Declare Your Data Independence,” from “shared” or “finite” hard disks.109 This shows that in 1985, having physically archived backups was seen as more secure than network or shared storage. According to these advertisements, ideas of data safety, security, and independence derived from the user’s ability to individually and physically exchange data storage units.

Conversely, most of today’s public tends to view cloud storage as one of the safer places for personal media, due to ease of access from multiple devices and environments. Thus, as hard

108 The Computer Chronicles, “Storage Devices,” 1984. 109 Byte: The Small Systems Journal, Vol. 10, No. 7, July 1985, p. 51. 46 disk drives continued to shrink (becoming more portable and exchangeable), data storage devices did not trend towards more individually compartmentalized single units, like the makers of the

Bernoulli Box might have hoped. Instead, hard disk drives symbiotically evolved with and into network architecture. The ease of data transmission took precedence over the individual security of peace-meal storage solutions like the Bernoulli Box, the iOmega Zip Drive, or other extinct platforms. These ads indicate that in 1985, data security implied physical ownership and individual, single-machine access. Yet, as hard disk drives evolved, and data transfer rates increased, personal data became burdened with the need for constant transmission, and thus data security became less about direct, physical ownership of the bits, and more about a user’s permission and ability to access those bits. Improving network technology led eventually to a shift in ideology that encouraged less user dependence on private storage (like individual hard drives and floppy disks), and more dependence on public storage (like Google Drive, Microsoft

OneDrive, and iCloud).

This transformation is perhaps most visibly exemplified on a material level by Apple’s decision in 2014 to discontinue its wildly popular 160GB iPod, leaving the lower-capacity iPod

Touch as the reigning monarch of the iPod family.110 The largest size of the iPod Touch that is widely available has only 64GB (There is a 128GB model, but it is only sold exclusively through

Apple). Unlike the iPod Classic (whose function was to carry an entire personal music collection in one device), the iPod Touch has a fundamentally different purpose that relies on access, not storage. “[F]or all intents and purposes, [the iPod Touch] is an iPhone without the phone.”111

Apple intended the iPod Touch specifically as an access device, with its storage capacity a

110 Ben Travis, “Why the iPod Classic is Bad News for Music Fans,” The Telegraph, Sep. 10, 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/11086805/Why-the-loss-of-the-iPod-Classic-is-bad-news-for-music- fans.html, accessed 3/31/16. 111 Ibid. 47 secondary concern. Thus, while the iPod was originally conceived as a private music storage solution, it eventually became just another interface through which to access Apple’s iOS platform and cloud services. The shrinking hard drive may have encouraged and catalyzed the invention of Apple’s original iPod (which was essentially just a hard disk drive with a screen), but it also proved its undoing; the growing utility of cloud computing and improved bitrate technology encouraged more data to move online into public space, making individual storage devices more obsolete. However, as the Bernoulli Box illustrates, ideas of data security and independence have changed dramatically over time because, at the dawn of the personal computer revolution, the race for smaller disk drive technology was driven primarily by the express desire to get data off of large, shared mainframe systems, and into the hands of individual users.

Until 1980, hard disk storage was large, cumbersome, and expensive. In order for PCs to become ubiquitous in the workplace and at home, size was a paramount concern. Innovations that reduced the size of “backup storage device[s], central processor[s], and central memory…really led to the microcomputer revolution.”112 However, most studies on hard drives and computers analyze shrinking size, increased functionality, and decreasing cost as simply a given, or a product of corporate maneuvering and individual achievements.113 Few seek to address the geopolitical externalities present in the actual construction of these materials. This is primarily due to the fact that very few sources from the 1980s even acknowledge the presence of rare earth in consumer products. Even the Disk/Trend Report (a critical industry report published annually since the early 1970s), does not mention magnetic materials as a key to size reduction

112 The Computer Chronicles, “Storage Devices,” The Computer Chronicles, 0:48, 1984, https://archive.org/details/StorageD1984, accessed 12/7/14. 113 See: Clayton M. Christensen, “The Rigid Disk Drive Industry: A History of Commercial and Technological Turbulence,” in Business History Review, No. 67 (Winter, 1993), pp. 531-588. 48 until 1991. This thesis has already surmised that by 1991, NdFeB magnets were powering almost every magnetic motor (including the motors in hard disk drives). However, there is a long road between invention in 1982, and worldwide prevalence in disk drive technology.

NdFeB magnets first became relevant in the sphere of hard disk drives in 1986 when

Conner Peripherals introduced the first 3.5” form factor hard drive with a voice coil actuator (the

CP-340).114 A voice coil actuator is simply a magnetic motor that facilitates the movement of the read/write heads of the disk drive. From 1980-1986, most disk drives adhered to a 5.25” form factor and utilized stepper motors (mechanical motors that moved the drive heads in stepped increments). Released in 1980, Seagate’s 5.25” ST-506 was the first hard disk drive meant specifically for use with microcomputers; it met the new demand for these smaller desktops by being both portable and functional.115 The ST-506 Contained just five megabytes of storage and had a mechanical stepper motor. Compared to the larger mainframe disk drives, most of which had contained voice coil actuators since 1965, the ST-506 was seen by many in the industry as a step backward. Disk/Trend Report called it “cheap and slow,” but that the “small business systems area” was driving demand for more compact disk drives.116 Even though most industry insiders thought small-drive technology to be primitive and outdated, hyperbolic discourse encouraged by magazines like Byte, ComputerWorld, PCWorld, and programs like The

Computer Chronicles responded to and called for ever smaller and more functional technology.

Yet these media outlets were simply responding to a real and calculable demand. In 1977, the

114 James N. Porter, “An Historical Perspective of the Disk Drive Industry,” (Lecture, THIC meeting, San Jose, California, April 19-20, 2005). 115 Abdullah Al Mamun et al., Hard Disk Drive: Mechatronics and Control (London: CRC Press, 2007), p. 6. 116 James N. Porter, Disk/Trend Report (1980), p. DT7-8 49 projected revenue for the disk drive industry in 1980 was $610 million, but the actual revenue ended well above that, at $928 million – and it kept ballooning, year after year.

By 1986, most voice coil motors were made with NdFeB magnets because of their minimal weight and superior magnetic power; and by 1993 voice coil motors had become standardized across a wide variety of industries, including hard disk drives.117 This standardization is due to the low pricing structure implemented by Chinese manufacturers, as well as the unprecedented magnetic power of the NdFeB compound. In 1985, the NMAB proclaimed of neodymium magnets, “The energy product is so large that it will revolutionize the design of motors.”118 This is certainly the case with hard drives, as the voice coil motor became instrumental in launching the 3.5” form factor drive, a device that suddenly and greatly enhanced the functionality and versatility of laptop computers. A 1987 issue of ComputerWorld states that

Compaq’s Portable III contained a 3.5” hard disk from Conner Peripherals (most likely the CP-

340). Conner told ComputerWorld that it was shipping 3,000 drives per day in 1987 and anticipated doubling that number within six months.119

As hunger for 3.5” drives became ravenous, the need for NdFeB-powered voice coil actuators rose in tandem, as stepper motors would not provide optimal functioning in such small drives. “With the shrinking we’re expecting in the 5 ¼-in. hard disk drive market, those vendors who want to continue are going to have to offer 3 ½-in. disks as well.”120 The demand for these smaller disk drives continued to increase (especially in new laptop computers), as evidenced in a

1989 episode of The Computer Chronicles. When asked about the necessities in a laptop

117 Bill Black et al., “Basics of Voice Coil Actuators,” in Power Conservation and Intelligent Motion (July, 1993), p. 45. 118 Magnetic Materials, p. 3. 119 James A. Martin, “Smaller Drives Bound for Glory,” ComputerWorld (March 23, 1987), p. 106. 120 Ibid., p. 106. 50 computer, co-host Gary Kildall expressed, “It has to have an internal hard disk drive; you can’t leave it to just floppies.”121 Thus, by 1989 hard disk drives had become standardized, largely due to their rapidly decreasing sizes being conducive to the expansion of the laptop market. Yet no one in the industry ever addressed exactly how drives shrank. Like Moore’s Law for processor power, everyone simply assumed that drives would continue to decrease in size, and increase in storage capacity.

While this transformation simplified and opened up computing to a wider breadth of the population, these software-oriented notions did not have to evolve strictly as they did. Often, when thinking about the history of computing, the popular historical memory of the 1980s tends to follow deterministic logic. The domination of software and applications seems now to be a natural thing, and in general this statement is true; the introduction of the operating system in the

1970s allowed for identical applications to run on different computers, which dynamically expanded the functionality of the computer and allowed software to become standard across machines. Subsequent software became more dynamic, which in turn altered the experience of the human-computer interface; in other words, things got better – speed, graphics, everything.

The typing of this thesis on a slim tablet whose software interface responds to touch represents just how far computer technology has advanced since the 1980s.

However, the idea of constant innovation and improvement often belies physical realities.

The slowdown of the PC market in 1985 is a prime example of this. In that critical year, multiple disk formats vied for superiority; once dominant brands struggled to remain in the market; and the general public was having trouble grasping the true capacity for computers in their lives. The computer industry’s struggle subsided quickly, though, as more compact and

121 The Computer Chronicles, “Laptops,” The Computer Chronicles, 2:00, 1989, https://archive.org/details/laptops_2, accessed 12/6/14. 51 comprehensive storage solutions (like the NdFeB-powered CP-340) were better able to maintain advancements in software, therein helping to perpetuate the marketable language of an infinite, digital utopia – a language consistently but subtly echoed by computer and media historians. But while the discourse of computer history is mostly teleological, hierarchical, and one directional, the actual history of the personal computer is more rhizomatic – with multiple nodes and branches of success, failure, idealism, and economic reality all spreading apart and crisscrossing each other over and over again.122

There is an undeniable technological momentum within this rhizome that has propelled computer history onward and upward, but popular representations of this progress have made its roots, and even a number of its branches, effectively invisible. Much like Apple’s efforts to construct its products as simplistic, user-friendly closed systems that shield the user from the wires and circuits, the history and popular memory of computing has done the same to the tech industry’s necessarily industrial underbelly. This became even more glaringly apparent as digital networks began to grow and build out their infrastructures. For example, while most know

Google’s website and services, and understand Google’s function as a company, almost no one knows what Google as a physical entity actually looks like, or how much space it occupies. This is in part because Google goes to great lengths to keep its physical presence a secret in order to maintain a ubiquitous, ethereal, and immaterial image. The company currently lists a total of fifteen data centers on its website, but in 2012 Data Center Knowledge counted thirty-five, with two more under construction – a rather large discrepancy that serves to obscure Google’s global, physical presence.123 Google has also strategically tried to conceal and control the image of their

122 For a discussion on the theory of rhizomatic discourse, see A Thousand Plateaus by Giles Deleuze & Felix Guitari. 123 “Data Center Locations,” Google, https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/index.html, accessed 3/31/16. 52 interior data spaces. They did not allow a single member of the media inside one of its data centers until 2010, and since then, have only reluctantly released information on the material guts of their operation.124

Journalist Steven Levy worked in full cooperation with Google’s executive team to gain access to one of its data centers for his 2011 book, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and

Shapes Our Lives. The publication of that book made the physical Google more visible, and in the last few years, Google has sought to control this message. Recent scholarship has drawn on the depictions traced by Levy and subsequent journalists of these behemoth palaces of data.

Carruth uses the sterile, artificial, and built environment of the data center to dispel the ecological and biological metaphors we use to describe the cloud and its processes.125 Holt and

Vondreau juxtapose the expected environmental inertness of digital data, with the reality of data centers as gargantuan, energy-sucking, polluting machines.126 Google has attempted to counter arguments like these by releasing promotional materials and videos, purporting that these data centers use energy efficiently, encourage community growth, and are positive work environments for diverse groups of educated people.127 Google does create jobs, and the construction of these data centers has helped bolster communities across the country, but the ways in which it attempts to control the public image of these facilities (whether conscious or not) suggests that Lisa Parks is accurate when she describes “concealment strategies [intended

“Google Data Center FAQ,” Data Center Knowledge, May 15, 2012, http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/05/15/google-data-center-faq/, accessed 3/31/16. 124 Cade Metz, “Google’s Top Five Data Center Secrets (That are Still Secret),” Wired, 10/18/12, http://www.wired.com/2012/10/google-data-center-secrets/, accessed 3/31/16. 125Carruth, “The Digital Cloud and the Micropolitics of Energy.” 126 Holt & Vondreau, “Where the Internet Lives: Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure.” 127 Google For Work, “Inside a Google Data Center,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZmGGAbHqa0, accessed 3/31/16. 53 to] keep citizens naïve and uninformed about the network technologies they subsidize and use each day.”128

Parks may overreach in her insinuation of sinister intentions on the part of the media and tech industries. The strategies of concealment employed by modern tech companies are not inherently sinister, nor do they represent a fundamentally unique approach to the marketing of technological products. A consumer’s relationship to a specific technological product will evolve as the technology becomes easier to purchase and use. Often, once consumers become familiar with the purpose and function of a technological product, their personal relationships with it become more important than the product’s true mechanical nature. After Edison first introduced the phonograph, it was marketed as an audio reproduction machine, and early advertisements and product demonstrations highlighted its singular mechanical abilities in this regard. However, when the phonograph became a popular home accessory, its identity as an aural mechanical device was supplanted by its status as a cultural product. Instead of a machine a consumer actively used and manipulated, it became a more passive tool to bring the “voices of the worlds’ greatest artists…[to] your own home.”129 Thus, the mechanical minutiae of the phonograph were minimized by marketers in an attempt to rebrand the phonograph. The PC’s introduction into mainstream culture also similarly rebranded the computer – a previously expensive, highly technical, and inaccessible piece of technology – and transformed it into a marketable product intended for mass consumption. The closed-system marketing of Apple’s Macintosh perfectly encapsulates this transition, and Google illustrates the continuity of this trend. Google markets itself in a way that promotes its ease of use, and the dynamic range of its products, but

128 Lisa Parks, “Around the Antenna Tree: The Politics of Infrastructural Visibility,” Flow, 2010, http://www.flowjournal.org/2010/03/flow-favorites-around-the-antenna-tree-the-politics-of-infrastructural- visibilitylisa-parks-uc-santa-barbara/, accessed 3/31/16. 129 Gitelman, Always Already New, p. 70. 54 consciously downplays its physical footprint. None of this is sinister or wrong, but it does necessarily conceal the crucial industrial foundation of these companies, and helps to explain how the growth and movement of an important infrastructural element (such as the NdFeB magnet) could go unnoticed.

In a way, the transition from disparate drive storage in the 1980s toward a cloud-based networked infrastructure in the 1990s and early 2000s is a return to the idea of consolidated mainframe storage popular in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this mass migration of data from private to public spaces is itself a strategy of concealment because, even as network infrastructure expanded, users became less and less aware of the physical space their data occupied. This rising ignorance of data space allowed for the ecological and biological metaphors described by Carruth to dominate the cultural imagery. However, the last few years has seen an increased scholarly awareness of the binary opposition between the image and reality of network computing. But even though both scholars and the popular media are actively attempting to understand the nature and history of this suddenly present and very physical data infrastructure, the arguments have to move beyond language, beyond environment, and even beyond the tech industry itself. In order to begin to understand the history of data centers, one must understand their composition, and even more so the politics of that composition. The digital revolution is not merely the result of a few brilliant minds who changed the world (as popular memory typically suggests), but also the result of an increasingly global struggle for mineral resources without which none of this data would be possible. The next section will detail the history and movement of the NdFeB magnet in the 1990s and early 2000s, and will chart how the rapid proliferation of data centers is connected to massive global technology transfers, mineral prices, and the rise of China as a global economic superpower. 55

SECTION 3: Magnets, Magnets Everywhere

“A Chinese company bought Magnequench, and then they decided that they were going to move the whole company from Indiana to China…Those jobs left, and along with them went the savvy to make the magnets…We lost the jobs, and now we have to buy the magnets from the Chinese to make those missles.”130 - Hillary Clinton, 2008

In her unsuccessful bid for President of the United States in 2008, Hillary Clinton stopped in Valparaiso, Indiana, a factory town previously known as the home of Magnequench, the magnet manufacturing arm of the General Motors behemoth. She lamented how Bush and his administration had let the jobs in Valparaiso slip through their fingers into Chinese hands, and how now China held a crucial stake in America’s defense technology. In the background of an amateur audio recording, one can hear the whoops and hollers of agreement, likely from those who felt the full brunt of the employment exodus. The town did lose many jobs, that much is certain. However, what Hillary Clinton failed to fully explain at this rally was the long and complex history of domestic and international developments – both in the public and private sectors – that transferred the processing of these magnets to China, and eventually cost hundreds of jobs in this small Midwestern town. Hillary blamed the loss of jobs on the Bush administration, but the truth is far more convoluted and elusive than one administration’s negligence. Rather, it is more closely connected to the dirty history and politics of mineral mining and processing, and the exponential growth of industries clamoring for permanent magnets – notably the personal computer and tech industry. In the 1990s, as personal computers became necessary and ubiquitous, the internet grew like a virus – uninhibited and largely unregulated. A number of factors are responsible for the construction of the greatest

130 “Hillary Clinton Denounces Sale of Indiana Company to China,” April 29, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh1-gqCJMmU. 56 communication platform the human race has ever seen, but without the magnets in the hard disks and optical drives of personal computers and server networks, our digital world would look vastly different today. Hillary Clinton decried China’s grasp on this technology because it created vulnerabilities in our national defense. However, the closing of the Valparaiso plant has as much to do with data, data security, and the cloud as it does with national defense, and this connection must be further explored to understand the necessity of global resources in the building and maintenance of our digital infrastructure.

Hillary Clinton claimed that by doing nothing, the Bush administration allowed the sale of Valparaiso’s magnet factory, and therefore ensured the transfer of critical defense technology into Chinese hands. The magnets produced in this factory, she said, were crucial for the building and operation of smart bombs and guided missiles, and now China had a stranglehold on this technology.131 This statement, while partially true, omits significant elements of the historical process of technology transfer. As Thomas Hughes shows in his study of the electricity industry in the late 1800s and early 1900s, technologies tend to grow organically through the efforts of an aggregate of manufacturers who then encouraged the proliferation of education programs and infrastructure construction around invention.132 No single political entity is ever responsible for this kind of growth. In the case of electricity, while regulatory laws were put in place in order to manage this new technology, the consumer society and culture that accepted and benefitted from electricity fueled the expansion of the infrastructure and dictated the creation and/or elimination of jobs and markets across multiple sectors. The Magnequench story is similar; its effect on

American jobs and American lives has more to do with the complex and irreversible path of globalization of key technologies than with the ineptitude of the Bush administration. The

131 Ibid. 132 Hughes, Networks of Power, p. 140. 57 worldwide thirst for permanent magnets in everything from heavy industry to small consumer electronics underwrote the rapid growth of mining and magnet production around the world, especially in China.

Clinton’s indictment of the Bush administration for this problem was purely political and had little basis in historical fact. The actual plant in Valparaiso closed in 2006, but the process that led to this closure was actually set in motion by President Bill Clinton’s administration in

1995. Both he and the Foreign Investment Committee approved the sale of GM’s Magnequench division to Archibald Cox’s Sextant Group, a private investment group that operated mostly as a front for two Chinese companies (San Huan New Material, and China National Non-Ferrous

Metals Import and Export Corporation).133 Even so, it would be as inaccurate to blame the

Clinton administration for the loss of Indiana’s jobs and technical expertise as Clinton was in blaming Bush. This sale did not make headlines in 1995, nor was it even mentioned in documents that pertained to the rare earth industry, such as the USGS Minerals Information review in 1996.134 Not until the last plant closed in 2006 did any real coverage on this technology transfer appear, as a product of the looming election cycle. Journalism often tries to stoke the fires of such resentment, seeking easy scapegoats for larger historical problems, but instances like Clinton’s Magnetgate in 2008 represent only pieces of complex processes. The sale of Magnequench and its movement of operations to China had implications for almost every piece of electronic, motor-driven technology on the planet, right down to the vibration feature in cell phones. However, clear windows into the infrastructural functionality of rare earth

133 “Raw Material Status and New Developments in Processing and Applications,” Magnequench: A Division of Neo Material Technologies Inc., Coporate Presentation (2008), http://www.abmbrasil.com.br/cim/download/20080702_berndgrieb.pdf See also, Jeffrey St. Clair, “The Saga of Magnequench,” Counterpunch (April 7, 2006), http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/04/07/the-saga-of-magnequench/ 134 James B. Hedrick, “Rare Earths,” U.S. Geological Survey – Minerals Information (1996), http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/rare_earths/740496.pdf 58 permanent magnets only become visible during moments of disruption like job loss, technical failure, or corporate litigation.135

Thus far, this study has explored the history of the NdFeB magnet, and juxtaposed that history with the rise of personal computers and data architecture in the 1980s. This chapter details the complex machinations that worked to achieve a near complete technology transfer of the rare earth trade from the United States to China in the 1990s, and how these events played a pivotal role in the building of a global data storage industry. Through a series of subsequent lawsuits and patent litigations that Magnequench brought against multiple American and

Japanese companies in the late 1990s, it becomes clear that the Chinese rare earth industry worked tirelessly to consolidate control. Yet even within this industry, Magnequench had to fight to maintain its patents in China while exporting product to the rest of the world. Much of this history is little-understood and apart from some scattered journalism, has never been properly connected to the history of the cloud, or even to the history of computing in general.

Rather, most computing histories have focused either on the social and political effects of the machines themselves, or the culture they incubated, with little attention paid to the logistics of global supply chains needed to maintain their ubiquity in modern life. This negligence of the supply chain has written Magnequench and the rare earth drama almost entirely out of the history

135 Most facets of internet infrastructure only become visible through disruption and failure. In The Undersea Network, Nicole Starosielski describes how a 2006 earthquake off the coast of Taiwan that temporarily disrupted internet traffic in Asia, brought a great deal of media attention to the otherwise benign and journalistically uninteresting topic of undersea cable infrastructure. Stephen Graham has written at length about the lessons of infrastructural upsets (See Disrupted Cities and Splintering Urbanism). Graham necessarily places internet use within the context of the electrical infrastructure, calling needed attention to the vast fossil fuel expenditure required by our data-hungry world. This argument channels Hughes and his histories of technological systems, aligning new media with old wires, giving weight to the material that supports the digital. Hung Hui-Hu, in analyzing the growth of the cloud through old military infrastructure, seeks to understand how data is physically built and maintained. He wants to measure the sovereignty of data (See, The Prehistory of the Cloud). 59 of computers and the rise of the internet when, in fact, the internet as we know it owes its very life to China and Magnequench.

In 2006, a few months before the Valparaiso debacle, the New York Times published a small article outlining the world’s growing addiction to rare earth metals. This was one of the first mentions of these minerals outside of trade journals and other industry publications, at least in the context of ubiquitous use, “addiction,” and Chinese control. However, this author’s perspective is notably different from Hillary Clinton’s speech on rare earth magnet manufacturing. While Clinton talked mostly in her speech about the loss of a crucial defense technology, this article gives equal weight to both the defense and commercial applications of rare earths. It likens the utter dependence on rare earths to oil, except that the general public remains unaware of the prevalence of these materials in nearly everything.

“Rare earths are a class of minerals with properties that make them essential for applications including miniaturized electronics, computer disk drives, display screens, missile guidance, pollution control catalysts and advanced materials. In 1994, China's share of the market was 46 percent, according to industry statistics.” 136

This represents an important milestone in the public discussion of rare earth metals as up until this point (and even for a few years afterward), the reality of Chinese control of this resource did not interest the general populace at all, nor did its connection to computing and the

Internet. Throughout the late 1990s, and well into the first decade of the new millennium,

China’s growing control of rare earths went unnoticed by both the public and even the industries using permanent magnets and other rare earth-laden materials in their products. Prices remained low, so no one seemed to care. However, beginning in 2006, concern grew, and reached a fever pitch in 2010 – but only because of a momentary disruption.

136 David Lague, “China Corners Market in a High-Tech Necessity,” The New York Times (Jan. 22, 2006), www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/business/worldbusiness/22iht-rare.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&, accessed 12/10/14. 60

In late 2010, China decided to limit the export of rare earth minerals by 40% in efforts to reexamine the environmental hazards of its mining practices, and to focus more specifically on its domestic demand.137 While an understandable move for China’s domestic policy, it had severe international implications. An estimate in 2013 placed China’s share of the rare earth market (including the refining and processing market) at 97% (versus 46% in 1994), and cites rare earth production in the U.S. as effectively zero. 138 Because of this, almost every electronic product in the world was affected in some way by this export restriction. Between 2009 and

2011, the price of neodymium skyrocketed from $19/kg to $244/kg, an almost thirteen-fold price increase.139 This sent shockwaves through the international business community, and led to speculation that China was hoarding supply and seeking to manipulate the market.140 This action would not have normally garnered much coverage. Nations constantly set and reset export quotas for innumerable reasons that almost never receive mention outside of industry communications and SEC filings. Even before China took this action, the United States, the

European Union, and Mexico were already embroiled in legal actions against Chinese import restrictions on minerals like magnesium and fluorspar, but this case generated little media attention.141

Conversely, as the rare earth debacle unfolded in late 2010 and early 2011, the U.S.

Trade Representative Office stated that they would impose similar injunctions, and large news

137 Keith Bradsher, “China to Tighten Limits on Rare Earth Exports,” New York Times (Dec. 28, 2010), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/29/business/global/29rare.html, accessed 2/11/16. 138 Nabeel Mancheri, et. al, Dominating the World: China and the Rare Earth Industry (Bangalore: National Institute for Advanced Studies, 2013), p. 9. 139 Joel Hruska, “EU, Japan, and US Attack Chinese Rare Earth Monopoly,” Extreme Tech 140 “Obama Announces WTO Case Against China Over Rare Earths,” CNN, Mar. 13, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/13/world/asia/china-rare-earths-case/, accessed 4/12/16. 141 Peter Foster, “China Tightens Stranglehold on Rare Earth Minerals,” The Telegraph, June 2, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/china-business/7797015/China-tightens-stranglehold-on-rare-earth- minerals.html, accessed 2/13/2016. 61 outlets like Reuters ran the story.142 In fact, most of the major news outlets have written quite a bit on the rare earth panic since 2011 (New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, BBC, Gizmodo,

Computerworld, Los Angeles Times, Fox News, and Business Insider, to name a few). During the cobalt panic in 1978, popular media painted the danger of cobalt vulnerability strictly as a matter of national defense, but the rare earth panic told a different story, and subsequently received far more mainstream coverage. Instead of defense, most journalists concerned themselves with the effect this export restriction would have on data and green energy, using nationalist rhetoric intended to position China as an enemy to U.S. interests.

A diverse array of outlets covered this story. An article published in Forbes cited the importance of rare earth to mobile phones and flat screen televisions, while also insinuating that this move by China might constitute a prelude to war.143 This sentiment even translated into gaming culture, as a plot point within the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops II involves China limiting rare earth exports, and therein encouraging open war.144 Computerworld injected itself into this debate by juxtaposing rare earth restrictions with China’s alleged cyber-attacks on

Google.145 Reuters indicated that the rare earth embargo added to “the growing list of trade- related disputes between China and the United States,” implying that trade relationships had been strained for some time before this incident, and that rare earths were simply the final straw.146

While most of these media outlets wrote from the vantage of protecting national security, unlike

142 “China 2010 rare earth exports slip, value rockets,” Reuters, Jan. 19, 2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-rareearths-idUSTRE70I11T20110119, accessed 2/13/16. 143 Addison Wiggin, “The Truth Behind China’s Rare Earth Embargo,” Forbes, Oct. 20, 2010, http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2010/10/20/the-truth-behind-the-chinese-rare-earths- embargo/#6abbfa25314b, accessed 2/13/16. 144 David Ferris, “5 Years After Crisis, U.S. Remains Dependent on China’s rare earth elements,” EnergyWire (Jan. 12, 2015), http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060011478. 145 Patrick Thibodeau, “China’s Control of Rare Metals Threatens Jobs, Tech,” Computerworld, Mar. 17, 2010, http://www.computerworld.com/article/2516395/computer-hardware/china-s-control-of-rare-metals-threatens- jobs--tech.html, accessed 2/13/16. 146 “China 2010 rare earth exports slip, value rockets,” Reuters. 62 during the Cold War, they did not focus specifically on dangers posed to sensitive national defense technology. On the contrary, the first affected product mentioned by Reuters was the iPad and Apple’s attempts to search for alternative mineral sources.

Thus, during this panic some of the dirty realities of the tech industry supply chain became publicly visible for the first time ever. Rare earth prices and availability had never before impacted end-user products, but this disruption made clear the very real possibility of price increases. In 2011 (in what might very well be the first published admission of rare earth supply problems from a hard disk manufacturer), Seagate released the following statement to the

SEC in its year-end annual report:

The cost of many upstream materials, especially rare earth elements, which have increased significantly, these costs are expected to adversely impact gross margins by at least 200 basis points. In regards to the increase in cost of upstream materials, Seagate has historically been able to observe these cost increases and insulate our customers. However, the recent increase in the cost of rare-earth elements, combined with the pre- existing upward trend of other commodities, far exceeds our ability to offset cost reductions.147

The sudden and unprecedented price vulnerability of iPhones and other digital devices reluctantly revealed by companies like Seagate, incited a wave of journalism in an attempt to expose China as a threat to digital life and digital security. As a result, this journalism actually began, for the first time, to shed light on the industrial nature of this seemingly inert digital stuff.

Journalists and policy makers in the United States and around the world began talking about rare earth metals and their place within the digital media infrastructure. Yet, the general rhetoric used to describe China’s grip on the rare earth economy (at least in Western media) tended to avoid critically analyzing any sort of historical culpability on the part of Western corporations or

147 Gareth Hatch, “Seagate, Rare Earths and the Wrong End of the Stick,” Technology Metals Research, July 23, 2011, http://www.techmetalsresearch.com/2011/07/seagate-rare-earths-and-the-wrong-end-of-the-stick/, accessed 2/13/16. 63 consumers, instead blaming China for its role in the restrictions. Portraying China as the villain made the rare earth price rise seem “unnatural” and obscured the hard facts of global capitalism.

For example, in 2012, one year after the beginning of China’s rare earth export restriction, the U.S. Congressional Research Service published a report that proclaimed, “China’s position as the world’s dominant producer and supplier of rare earths…and its policies to limit exports have raised concerns among many in Congress, especially given the importance of rare earths to a variety of U.S. commercial industries.”148 One year later, the Congressional Research

Service followed this report with a more in-depth analysis of the global rare earth supply chain, focusing more on Mountain Pass, and the efforts of Molycorp to rebuild operations at the fledgling California mine.149 The language in this report also paints China as a threat, a perception reinforced by the lawsuit that the Obama administration filed with the World Trade

Organization against China in this matter.150 As a result of the fear of Chinese control, between

2011 and 2013 Congress debated numerous bills that would have prioritized rare earth production as a matter of national security (both physical and economical) – but they died on the floor.151 This could very well imply that these bills failed because a significant ramping up of rare earth production in the United States would raise prices and harm business in the short term.

While there is no direct evidence to support this assertion, the complicated history of rare earth magnet in the tech industry supports the idea that the tech industry and other sectors became and remain dependent on cheap, Chinese rare earth metals.

148 Wayne M. Morrison & Rachel Tang, China’s Rare Earth Industry and Export Regime: Economic and Trade Implications for the United States (Washington D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2012), Summary. 149 Marc Humphries, Rare Earth Elements: The Global Supply Chain (Washington D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2013). 150 Ibid., Summary. 151 David Ferris, “5 Years After Crisis, U.S. Remains Dependent on China’s rare earth elements.” 64

Therefore, the current state of rare earth mining and processing is due not only to nationalistic struggles over strategic resources, but is also the result of decisions made by U.S. companies attempting to remain competitive in booming technology sectors in the 1990s

(including personal computer networks and digital storage). None of the conversations in

Congress, in the media, or in industry publications take time to address the complicated historical dimensions involved in the rare earth trade. Even though most sources (either in popular media or government) drafted during the rare earth panic mention consumer technology products as primary recipients of rare earth materials, a proper rare earth history has not yet been connected directly to the tech industry. This is likely because until recently, rare earths and permanent magnets have not made themselves terribly visible as necessary components of the digital media infrastructure. However, because of these materials, the smartphone in our pockets is inextricably linked to both the job losses in Valparaiso, as well as to the subsequent rare earth panic. This correlation began in the early 1990s, in a climate of growth and deregulation.

Most histories of rare earth production in the 1990s appear as short overviews in congressional reports and industry journals, and they all tell similar stories. The following excerpt is from a 2013 study analyzing the rare earth global supply chain:

[B]y 2000, nearly all of the separated rare earth oxides were imported, primarily from China. Because of China’s oversupply, lower cost production, and a number of environmental (e.g., a pipeline spill carrying contaminated water) and regulatory issues at Mountain Pass, Molycorp ceased production at its mine in 2002. Since then, the United States has lost nearly all of its capacity in the rare earth supply chain, including intellectual capacity.152

This summary is short, dry, and achieves its congressional purpose by highlighting the dearth of rare earth manufacturing in the United States at the hands of China. This is the simplistic story to which most other sources adhere. Some writers go so far as to claim that

152 Marc Humphries, Rare Earth Elements: The Global Supply Chain, p. 14. 65

China conspired (through high-profile purchases like GM’s Magnequench) to acquire and hold hostage critical U.S. defense technology.153 Some of the concerns about China’s monopoly on defense technology are valid from the perspective of national security, but there is little evidence for conspiratorial intent. On the contrary, China’s veritable monopoly of rare earth mining and processing better illustrates the accelerating movement of consumer goods throughout increasingly global markets; In other words, it was just business.

While China did and continues to pursue U.S. defense and other industrial technologies, the growth and movement of critical materials is far more complicated, especially when considering the dynamic growth of digital devices and computer networks during the 1990s and early 2000s. Evidence suggests that China and U.S. businesses worked both together and separately to cultivate and expand new industries that called for rare earth technology (such as hard disk drives), and that China’s monopoly is a result of simple capitalism. As discussed in

Section One, by 1991, the NdFeB magnet had already become the most widely-used permanent magnet in the world. It was single-handedly responsible for the rapid miniaturization of electric motors, and helped to catalyze the mass production of laptop computers and digital networks by allowing for more compact management of larger amounts of data.154 However, even though the

NdFeB magnet was first conceived as a way by which to eliminate foreign dependency on cobalt

(an argument driven primarily by national security concerns), the U.S. government did not necessarily view rare earth manufacturing as strategically imperative. This allowed U.S. companies to take full advantage of China’s low prices, which in turn helped to drive the

Mountain Pass Mine out of business.

153 John J. Tkacik, Jr., “Magnequench: CFIUS and China’s Thirst for U.S. Defense Technology,” Heritage.org, May 2, 2008, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/05/magnequench-cfius-and-chinas-thirst- for-us-defense-technology 154 See Section One. 66

Rare earths were hardly addressed at all by any U.S. legislative body in the 1990s, only receiving casual mentions within the framework of other, unrelated legislation. A 1990 bill intended to establish National Advanced Materials Processing and Synthesis Centers, mentions

“advanced ceramics, advanced composites, superconductors, electronic materials, and advanced metallic alloys,” but fails to include rare earth processing.155 Additionally, the National Defense

Authorization Act of 1994 assessed current U.S. stockpiles, and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of

1996 acknowledged radioactive byproducts in rare earth processing. Apart from these, rare earth mining received little attention in the context of strategic materials in the U.S. legislature in the

1990s.156 In fact, as recently as 2002 (the year that Mountain Pass officially ceased all production), a Representative from New Jersey named Rodney Frelinghuysen proposed a bill in an effort to suspend duties on rare earth oxides coming into the United States.157 This bill was referred to committee and eventually died, but its proposal reflected the attitudes of companies and lawmakers during a time when rare earths remained cheap and plentiful, and also illustrated that U.S. companies and lawmakers had a vested interest in keeping it that way, even if it meant lowering the barrier of entry for Chinese goods.

Deregulation was part of the political zeitgeist of the 1990s. The Clinton administration approved the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, relaxing tariffs and regulations on trade between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico; The Telecommunications Act of 1996 essentially privatized the internet by making it easier for communications companies to have cross-medium mergers (i.e. AT&T operating as a phone carrier, cable provider, and an internet service

155 Robert Torricelli, H.R. 5825, “National Advanced Materials Processing and Research and Development Act,” 1990. 156 This pattern was discerned using keyword searches on www.Govtrack.us. 157 Rodney P. Frelinghuysen, H.R. 4138, “To Suspend Temporarily the Duty on Certain High-Purity Rare Earth Oxides,” 2001-2002. 67 provider); And GM’s Magnequench (one of the world’s largest permanent magnet manufacturers) was purchased by an American investment group, working in conjunction with two Chinese firms – San Huan New Material High Technology Inc. (henceforth SHNM), and the

China National Non-Ferrous Metals Import and Export Corporation (CNNIEC).158 While this sale became controversial during the rare earth panic, and a key point of contention for Hillary

Clinton’s 2008 campaign in Indiana, GM completed it without much fanfare.

In late June of 1995, GM announced that it had agreed to sell its Magnequench operation to Magnequench International (a shell corporation used by the three purchasers mentioned above) for $70,000,000.159 Apart from a casual mention in the Washington Post, and the Wall

Street Journal, and some local coverage in Indiana, the sale was virtually ignored because it occurred during a time when deregulation and the loosening of trade restrictions were encouraged across multiple industries. While politicians and popular media would later point to this sale as a precursor to economic decline and dangerous technology transfer, these type of sales were regularly announced in the 1990s, often juxtaposed with stories on the growth of digital communications markets. The Washington Post buried its coverage of the Magnequench sale deep within its Digest section on June 29, 1995. It consists of two meager lines – nearly identical to coverage given in The Wall Street Journal. The surrounding news items on this page also do not offer much substance, but illustrate the ways in which an economy of deregulation affected multiple industries, including telecommunications and permanent magnets. Two line- items below the Magnequench story is a short clip about the simultaneous expansion and consolidation of internet service providers, foreshadowing the Telecommunications Act that Bill

158 “Magnequench Sale Completed,” The Free Library, Retrieved Mar 28 2016 from http://www.thefreelibrary.com/MAGNEQUENCH+SALE+COMPLETED-a017515949. 159 "GENERAL MOTORS CORP," WALL STREET JOURNAL, Date Accessed: 2016/03/28, www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/lnacademic. 68

Clinton would sign into law the following year. This news-item states that within five years,

AT&T and MCI would overtake America Online, Compuserve, and Prodigy as the dominant

ISPs, illustrating the eventual consolidation of phone, internet, and cable companies. In another example of the rapid growth of ISPs, this section reports that Microsoft battled with the Justice

Department over its attempt to become an internet service provider (a venture that never materialized). Additionally, media conglomerate Time Warner was in the process of designing its first “interactive shopping mall,” in an attempt to expand its online presence. Preceding the

Magnequench story is an announcement of the Federal Reserve’s ploy to lower interest rates in order to prevent recession, a move intended to encourage investing and business growth. Lastly, the Governor of Delaware signed a bill to allow out-of-state banks to operate inside its borders, another example of ordinary deregulation.160 The sale of Magnequench happened in an era of corporate financial freedom, and amidst the fundamental transformation of the telecommunications industry. Thus, the movement to China of the world’s largest permanent magnet manufacturer positioned it to take full advantage of the rapid growth of network infrastructure.

With the available public sources, it is difficult to precisely situate the Magnequench sale in proper historical context. Most contemporary sources do not at all address specific reasons for the sale, and recent sources tend to make unsupported, blanket assumptions that China was either after smart bomb technology, or that they sought to somehow destabilize American markets.161

Recent scholarship provides a slightly more balanced view than the reactionary popular media, but far too little exists to craft a dynamic dialogue. In Rare: The High-Stakes Race to Satisfy Our

Need for he Scarcest Metals on Earth (one of the few recent semi-historical monographs to focus

160 “Digest,” The Washington Post, June 29, 1995, p. B09. 161 John J. Tkacik, Jr., “Magnequench: CFIUS and China’s Thirst for U.S. Defense Technology.” 69 specifically on rare earth metals), Keith Veronese explains that China sought to “play the ‘long’ game in the 1970s,” by setting rare earth prices below market value. In this way, the country did not necessarily make a large initial profit with its mining operations, but it acquired a generous market share.162 Veronese’s study does not paint China’s dominance as a conspiracy to control

U.S. military technology, but rather portrays China as a nation actively building its infrastructure, and caring for its own self-interest. This history falls in line with most of the arguments of this thesis. However, in attempting to explain the prevalence of rare earth metals in contemporary society, Veronese fails to properly identify the specific processes through which these materials became essential to developing technologies. In terms of NdFeB magnets, this process becomes visible, once again, during moments of disruption.

By 1995, rare earth production in the U.S. was already suffering because manufacturers had begun purchasing cheaper oxides from Chinese manufacturers. Furthermore, since NdFeB magnets had become ubiquitous among multiple established and emerging industries, and because Magnequench was already purchasing rare earth oxide from Chinese processors, the sale to Chinese firms allowed for a more streamlined acquisition of raw materials. However, the transfer of permanent magnet manufacturing across the Pacific created a multitude of initial problems for the company. First, after the sale, CNIEC and SHNM had difficulty maintaining control over the patents protecting the proprietary sintering techniques of their permanent magnets. The patents were only valid in the United States, and after manufacturing began in

China, Magnequench had trouble controlling the spread of its technology to other manufacturers in the region. The company spent years battling manufacturers, importers, and third-party buyers in an attempt to retain its share of the permanent magnet market.

162 Keith Veronese, Rare: The High-Stakes Race to Satisfy Our Need for the Scarcest Metals on Earth (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2015), p. 39. 70

In 1996, Magnequench filed a patent infringement suit against Hong Kong’s Pacific

Century Group, claiming infringement of the ‘058 patent (the patent protecting Magnequench’s sintering technique that was developed in 1982).163 It is unclear from the sparse language of the suit whether Pacific Century was manufacturing, importing, or distributing knock-off

Magnequench products, but the fact remains that as early as 1996 (one year after the sale), a market had sprung up in Asia to support them.164 At the same time, these off-brand, counterfeit magnets also flooded into the United States, and importers all over the country organized to take advantage of the surplus of nearly identical Magnequench facsimiles.

To answer this threat, shortly after filing suit against Pacific Century, Magnequench

International, along with Sumitomo Special Metals Co. Ltd. (the Japanese firm that had simultaneously patented the NdFeB magnet with GM in 1982), filed a complaint to the

International Trade Commission stating that both of their proprietary NdFeB recipes had been infringed upon, and that U.S. importers were knowingly benefitting from this infraction.165 It is difficult to determine exactly how many importers dealt in NdFeB magnets in the late 1990s, but the complaint to the ITC lists seven U.S. companies and a Taiwanese importer (who, coincidentally, exported their imported magnets to one of the U.S. importers listed in the complaint).166 Magnequench and Sumitomo sought damages for violations of six patents (three from each company). These patents cover the following:

[C]ertain rare-earth magnets, most commonly neodymium-iron-boron ( " Nd-Fe-B ") magnets, certain rare-earth magnetic materials, such as rare-earth alloy powders, and unfinished or unmagnetized magnetic products that are used to make or produce finished rare-earth magnets… i.e., rare-earth magnets or magnetic materials that contain at least

163 See Section One for details on Magnequench’s beginnings. 164 Magnequench Internat v. Pacific Century Ente, Federal Civil Lawsuit, Virginia Eastern District Court, Case No. 1:96-cv-01068-TSE , docket://gov.uscourts.vaed.1-96-cv-01068, accessed 3/20/16. 165 United States International Trade Commission, In the Matter of Certain Neodymium-iron-boron Magnets, Magnet Alloys, and Articles Containing Same. Washington, DC: U.S. International Trade Commission, 1996. 166 Ibid., p. 1. 71

one or more rare-earth elements, such as neodymium and/or praseodymium, and one or more transition metals, such as iron, and other elements, such as boron.167

This implies that the entire permanent magnet manufacturing process had become vulnerable to counterfeiting and, since suits like this didn’t begin to appear until after

Magnequench’s sale to Chinese firms, it seems likely that this initial technology transfer provided the opportunity for these valuable manufacturing techniques to leak and spread across a rapidly industrializing China.

Magnequench did not merely go after the direct importers. These distribution companies emerged in response to rising demand from a multitude of industries. Thus, a few years after their complaint to the ITC, Magnequench filed lawsuits in district courts in New York and

Indianapolis against companies that incidentally bought counterfeit magnets from the accused importers.168 These distributors sold to a variety of clients. One of the companies listed in the

ITC complaint (International Magnaproducts, Inc., headquartered in the familiar Magnequench territory of Valparaiso, Indiana) states that their consumers include automotive, medical, electronics, communications, and computer companies.169 However, the two lawsuits filed in

2001 list only electronics and computer companies as defendants. Magnequench did not pursue damages from automotive companies, medical companies, or defense contractors. The defendants in the New York case include:

Acer America Corp.; Acer Inc.’ Best Buy Co. Inc.; Circuit City Stores, Inc.’ CompUSA Inc. and its parent, Grupo Sanborns SA de CV; Philips Business Electronics North America Corp., Philips Business Electronics International B.V.; Koninklijke Electronics Co., Ltd.; Sony Computer Entertainment America, Inc.; Sony Computer Entertainment,

167 Ibid., p. 2. 168 “Magnequench International Files Patent Infringement Suits in U.S. District Courts Against Major Electronic and Computer Firms,” PR Newswire, May, 8, 2001, http://www.prnewswire.com/news- releases/magnequench-international-files-patent-infringement-suits-in-u-s-district-courts-against-major-electronic- and-computer-firms-71675227.html, accessed 3/22/16. 169 International Magnaproducts, Inc., www.magnetsim.com, accessed 3/21/16. 72

Inc.; Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc.; Toshiba America, Inc.; and Toshiba Corporation.170

The Indianapolis case listed only two defendants: Compaq Computer Corporation, and Hewlett-

Packard.

Every single one of these companies are (were) technology manufacturers or retailers in the business of selling computers. It seems likely that, if counterfeit magnetic products were this widespread, that other industries would have been purchasing them as well. But Magnequench specifically targeted the computer companies in part because, together with automotive applications, data storage accounted for fifty-five percent of the NdFeB market in 2001.171

Arguing against this suit, a representative from Compaq proclaimed that the magnetic technology “is deeply embedded in components that we purchase from other companies…we strongly believe[s] that the responsibility lies with the component suppliers, and not with the end-user equipment makers.”172 The representative from Compaq was essentially correct, and in this argument he also illustrates the true global nature of technological products by connecting them to the industrial supply chain. However, he failed to address Magnequench’s likely intentions in this matter – that in prosecuting the most publicly visible offenders, they might influence other markets to step in line.

Magnequench won its ITC complaint in 1999, which was supposed to stop the flow of counterfeit imports into the United States.173 It is safe to assume that some of the U.S. importers from which tech companies purchased their magnetic material retained stockpiles of knock-off magnets that had entered the market before the ruling. At first glance, the 2001 cases against

170 “Magnequench International Files Patent Infringement Suits in U.S. District Courts Against Major Electronic and Computer Firms,” PR Newswire. 171 Ibid. 172 Margaret Quan, “Magnet supplier names Compaq, Sony, others in patent suit,” EE Times, May 11, 2001, http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1143390, accessed 3/23/16. 173 Ibid. 73

Compaq, et. al. indicate an attempt to snuff out this excess supply. However, in 2004, five years after the ITC ruling, Magnequench filed another patent infringement suit – this time against

Microsoft and Phillips. This suit alleged that Microsoft was using counterfeit magnets in the hard drives of its XBOX, and that Philips (even after the 2001 lawsuit), was continuing to use knock- offs in its CD-RW optical drives.174 The existence of this case suggests that these counterfeit magnets continued to enter the United States well after the 1999 ITC verdict. The company understood the rate at which data storage applications and network infrastructure were expanding. They attacked computer companies simply because their market share would continue to diminish exponentially if they did not pursue the fastest growing industry using

NdFeB magnets. Suing end-user companies also provided them more exposure because the household recognition of companies like Compaq and Best Buy encouraged more media outlets to carry the story, which they did.

The efforts of Magnequench to keep control of its patents during its formative years of technology transfer do not reflect the actions of a firm desperate for defense technology. Nor do they directly implicate China in attempts to undermine Western markets. Rather, the actions of this company indicate a series of responses to economic forces catalyzed by the rapid growth of digital technology. The demand for NdFeB magnets in the data storage industry expanded exponentially, almost overnight. Between 1992 and 1999, the amount of digital storage shipments jumped from 1016 – 1018 bytes per year (a literal exponential increase).175 These hard disks required NdFeB magnets, and Magnequench’s sale allowed for the scaling-up of operations

174 Magnequench International, Inc. V. Microsoft Corporation; Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.; and Philips Electronics North America Corporation, United States District Court, Southern District of Indiana, Indianapolis Division, Case No: 1:04-cv-1160-SEB-WTL, Jul 14, 2004, pp. 4-5. 175 Tom Coughlin, “Have Hard Disk Drives Peaked?” Forbes, Oct 3, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2012/10/03/have-hard-disk-drives-peaked/#6d8540c14c5f, accessed 3/24/16. 74 to help meet this need. Furthermore, the patent lawsuits that followed in the wake of this sale support the idea that, like other contemporary industries, the growth of the permanent magnet industry in the 1990s was dynamic and intensely deregulated. These lawsuits also indicate that not all, but a significant number of computer and electronics companies benefitted from this deregulation well into the twenty-first century.

Thus it is not Chinese interests alone, but the interests of the industry as a whole which shaped the development of rare earth mining and the status of NdFeB magnets. Neodymium had already revolutionized the size and functionality of electric motors, becoming indispensable in hard disk and optical drive technology. Moreover, in the early 2000s lanthanum would wind up in various types of batteries, and europium and terbium would become integral components of flat-panel displays on televisions, smartphones, and tablet computers. But this widespread use did not happen overnight. Computer companies experimented with products that would have likely called for generous amounts of rare earth materials as far back as 1991. Buried deep within the archive of Apple’s shelved prototypes, the MindTop was the company’s first attempt at a tablet computer. While it did not sport a touch-screen, it was designed in true Apple fashion, as a bridge between mind and device (an attempt to bring the user closer to the experience of the OS than a conventional laptop).176 This device housed a 3.5” floppy, and an optical disk drive

(powered by a voice coil motor), but because of its size, could not handle a hard disk drive.177

The lack of a hard disk likely killed further development on this device, as hard disks had become standard among laptops by 1991.178 Five years prior, Apple had been essentially forced

176 Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, M1007, Apple Computer, Inc. Records, 1977-1997, Research & Development Standards, Series 3, Box 22, Folder 27. 177 Ibid. 178 See Section Two. 75 to allow consumers to open the first Macintosh to install the missing hard drive.179 As a result, by

1987 they were working with Seagate, Miniscribe, Sony, and JVC to develop future Mactintosh- compatible hard disks.180 In this way, the MindTop appeared to be a departure from market standards. Its design fit nicely within Apple’s ideology, but eschewed popular demand by disallowing larger amounts of internal storage. However, its near-existence illustrates the early research and development that would necessarily require better-quality, flat-panel, rare-earth- laden displays, while its failure indicated the demand for hard disk drives in every computer in

1991.

Both industrial research, and data industry expansion contributed to the growth of rare earth technology in the 1990s. This is reflected both in the rapid inflation of internet use around the world, as well as in the efforts of technology companies to meet these new demands. While in 1991 the MindTop represented a step backward in the development of devices that could store large amounts of personal data, it did, in a way, presage the massive movement of personal data

(data stored and shared between individual users on peer-to-peer networks) to public data (data stored in megalithic networked data centers, and accessed by devices with reduced amounts of individual storage). It is important to remember that the internet did not have to grow as it did, and that notions about the movement, security, and very nature of digital data have changed with the advent of new technology.

Silicon Valley success stories are built on the backs of tales of small, humble beginnings.

HP and Apple started in garages; Google used to share a small building with now-defunct

Altavista, and would fix wires in its 7x4’ server room with twist ties; Facebook used to buy fans

179 “The Macintosh,” The Computer Chronicles, 1985. See Section Two for a more substantive discussion of the first Macintosh. 180 Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, M1007, Apple Computer, Inc. Records, 1977-1997, Research & Development Standards, Series 3, Box 17, Folder 4. 76 from drugstores to cool its servers.181 Juxtaposed with the current success of these companies, the stories seem incredible. However, these companies did not have to succeed. As the internet grew, it became more necessary to store massive amounts of data for public access. The number of users sharing data on the internet outweighed each user’s individual ability to maintain a useful share of that data. The physical networks of data centers that Google built helped to manage escalating data demand. In 1999, when Google’s servers occupied little more than a closet, there were a total of 248 million internet users. In December of 2015, there were almost

3.4 billion, and Google spent years constructing at least 36 large-scale data centers all over the world to manage this growth.182 However, this traffic could not have been adequately handled without a massive increase in the manufacturing of hard disk servers. These servers needed hard disk drives, the hard disk drives needed voice coil motors, and these voice coil motors required

NdFeB magnets. Thus, the building of data infrastructure in the 1990s and early 2000s was facilitated primarily by the constant availability of cheap rare earth products, and only succeeded because a deregulated industrial network had grown to support it.

In 2006, two years after Magnequench won their suit against Microsoft, they closed their last remaining plant in Indiana, forcing 225 more workers to join the ranks of the disenfranchised and unemployed.183 Two years after that, Hillary Clinton stopped in Valparaiso and used the closing of that plant as an opportunity to decry the loss of American jobs to overseas markets.

181 James Niccolai, “15 Years Later, Googlers Reminisce About First Data Center,” PCWorld, Feb. 6, 2014, http://www.pcworld.com/article/2094920/15-years-on-googlers-reminisce-about-first-data-center.html, accessed 3/17/16. 182 “Internet Growth Statistics,” Internet World Stats, http://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm, accessed 3/16/16. For a list of Google data centers, see “Google Data Center FAQ,” Data Center Knowledge, http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/05/15/google-data-center-faq/. It is notoriously difficult to assess the true number of Google’s data centers and worldwide data ownership for two reasons: 1. Google only reluctantly publishes information on its data centers. 2. It may also lease server space from other companies, and this is much harder to track and assess. 183 Charles W. Freeman III, “Remember the Magnequench: An Object Lesson in Globalization.” 77

And two years after that speech, a former strategic trade advisor at the Defense Department told reporters from Bloomberg Technology, “There are plenty of early warning signs that China will use its leverage over these materials as a weapon.”184 The article in which he is quoted goes on to explain, “China dominates the market, with far-reaching effects ranging from global trade friction to U.S. job losses, and threats to national security.”185 But, as this thesis has argued, this simplistic retelling in terms of global conflict obscures a key component of computing history.

The NdFeB magnet emerged from the seeds of African conflict in order to lessen the U.S.’s vulnerability to foreign market fluctuations. However, in a rather ironic twist, both the popular and scholarly media have ignored the inextricable historical connections between the growth of digital network infrastructure and storage technology, and China’s eventual control of this key resource that made that growth possible – making the U.S. once again vulnerable to foreign market fluctuations).

Western media has become reactionary, and continues to deny any culpability on the part of companies and consumers in exacerbating this current reality. Some frame this story around threats to national security, equating China’s export restrictions to acts of war; others warn of threats to green energy and iPads, forecasting smog-filled skies and more expensive devices. But in reality, companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google must share in this fault. It is our iPads, iPhones, and MacBooks that are to blame; it is our Gmail, our Netflix memberships, and our

Amazon shopping carts that have stored and delivered our data for a price we are only now beginning to realize. The history of computing must necessarily be a history of mining, mineral processing, and global economics. Magnequench is only one company, and NdFeB magnets

184 Peter Robinson & Gopal Ratnam, “Pentagon Losing Control of Bombs to China’s Monopoly,” Bloomberg Technology, September 29, 2010, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-09-29/pentagon- losing-control-of-afghanistan-bombs-to-china-s-neodymium-monopoly, accessed 3/21/16. 185 Ibid. 78 represent only a small piece of a much larger, complex, and global whole that we must extract in order to fully understand the weight and impact of the digital world on modern life. 79

SECTION 4: Raw / Data

“I don’t need a hard disk in my computer if I can get to the server

faster…I don’t care how it’s done. I don’t care what box is at the

other end.”

- Steve Jobs, Worldwide Developers

Conference, 1997

Apple’s original Macintosh computer suffered so greatly from its lack of internal storage that the company had to modify its warrantee stipulations in order to allow users to add their own third party hard drives. Eventually, due to market demand for data storage, hard disk drives became standard-issue in most computers by 1989, including the Macintosh.186 However, Steve

Jobs continued to work toward a future in which end-user devices would be free of the need for internal storage. The development of the MindTop illustrated this fervent desire and, even though it failed, it foreshadowed the dominance of network computing.187 Jobs and Apple predicted that, even though markets demanded hard disks in single computers in the 1980s and

90s, this need would dissolve in tandem with increasing network speeds, leading to greater consolidation of user data. Jobs was right. Now we don’t need hard disks in our computers. Due to rising broadband speeds, we have surpassed our need for individual data ownership, and instead allow others to store data for us; and we trust them to maintain it and allow us access at all times.

This new connected reality has transformed multiple industries, and has led many techno- fetishistic speculators to dream of utopian futures. Jeremy Rifkin predicts that the internet of

186 See Section Two. 187 See Section Three. 80 things will bring a zero-cost “collaborative commons;”188 Nicholas Negroponte, the former director of the MIT Media Lab, pontificated in 1995 that digital social spaces would supersede the crucial physical boundaries of the nation-state.189 In many ways Negroponte was right, as social networks have become influential spaces for change and connection. They have played important roles in social uprisings like 2011’s Arab Spring, have created new and expansive gaming spaces like World of Warcraft and League of Legends, and some networks have grown to become the size of nations themselves. Facebook has over a billion users – a virtual community 1/7 the size of the human population. In addition to predicting the fading importance of the nation-state, Negroponte also stated that computers had, and would continue to become more personal until they become our accessories, and until we become computers ourselves.190

This prediction was also correct. Computers have become ubiquitous in daily life and are carried in our pockets, on our wrists, and for some, in our eyeglasses. Moreover, a growing movement of transhumanists is actively trying to bridge the gap between human and computer, in search of the ever-elusive singularity – the theoretical plane beyond which human and artifice become one.191

However, as computers and devices have become increasingly personal and physiologically integrated, their necessary relationship with the Earth has likewise disappeared from popular discourse. “Digital” has come to signify something immaterial, an image that this thesis has endeavored to correct. These ideas of the digital as simply inert and virtual has led to mass ignorance of a sinuous, complex, global digital infrastructure. By connecting an integral piece of hard disk drive technology (the NdFeB magnet) to political unrest in Africa, and also to

188 Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, p. 23. 189 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995), p. 7. 190 Ibid., p. 7. 191 For further reading on the singularity, see Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin Books, 2006). 81

China’s current monopoly of rare earth mining and manufacturing, this thesis has helped to highlight how this infrastructure grew in response to global resource politics. Issues pertaining to data sovereignty should not only be restricted to the owners of the data, but must expand to the owners of the minerals necessary to construct data machines. To build a computer is to develop a relationship with the earth. The computer and the infrastructure that supports it must be understood in the context of this relationship. Conflicts over African minerals, the health and viability of the mining industry, and the geopolitical troubles of multi-national magnet manufacturers must become integral pieces of computer history because without metals, computers would not and could not exist, and also because this mineral underbelly of the computer industry currently operates outside the control of popular influence.

As for the future of rare earths in computers and data, their relevance could shrink, but history shows that as long as prices remain low and availability high, the industry will stay the course. However, as seen with the cobalt panic, temporary disruptions often spur invention. After

China’s export restriction in 2010, there was a surge of innovation that appeared to offer promising alternatives to NdFeB magnets, and more globally distributed mining operations. The

University of Minnesota has been working to develop iron nitride magnets – a permanent magnet with reportedly twice the maximum energy product of NdFeB.192 The university’s webpage describing the magnet specifically cites China’s export restriction as the reason for developing this technology.193 It is entirely possible that the iron nitride magnet could replace the NdFeB magnet in due time, eliminating the need for rare earth metals in electric motors, and relieving dependence on China. However, NdFeB magnets are far more ubiquitous now than SmCo

192 “Iron Nitride Permanent Magnet, Alternative to Rare Earth and Neodymium Magnets,” University of Minnesota Office for Technology Commercialization, http://license.umn.edu/technologies/20120016_iron-nitride- permanent-magnet-alternative-to-rare-earth-and-neodymium-magnets, accessed 4/3/16. 193 Ibid. 82 magnets ever were, and total replacement will take time, and could be cost-prohibitive.

Additionally, in personal computers, NdFeB magnets had a new burgeoning industry in which to grow and incubate. The digital infrastructure is already so reliant on rare earths, that difficulty and expense could prevent large cloud-based companies like Google and Facebook from interrupting their supply chains.

The Chinese export restriction also encouraged the resurgence of rare earth mining operations in both the U.S. and Australia. Molycorp sought to reopen the Mountain Pass Mine, and officially began new operations in 2012. Furthermore, in seeking to establish a vertically integrated mining and processing operation, Molycorp purchased Neo Materials Technologies,

Inc. (from whom Magnequench was purchased in 2005), thereby gaining a controlling interest in

Magnequench.194 In purchasing Magnequench and reopening the Mountain Pass Mine, Molycorp saw a prime opportunity to wrestle control of the rare earth trade away from China, using high rare earth prices as a way to attract new investors to its operation. Many were optimistic. In an interview with Wired in 2012, mining analyst John Kaiser said, “In five years there will be rare earths produced all over the world and China will lose its edge.”195 Kaiser based this optimism primarily on Molycorp’s big plans for Mountain Pass, but the act of mining is predicated on uncertainty, and because of this, conditions for Molycorp have changed dramatically since

2012.196

194 “Molycorp Announces Start-Up of Heavy Rare Earth Concentrate Operations a Mountain Pass, Calif.,” Molycorp, Aug. 27, 2012, http://www.molycorp.com/molycorp-announces-start-up-of-heavy-rare-earth-concentrate- operations-at-mountain-pass-calif/, accessed 3/31/16. 195 Danielle Venton, “Rare Earth Mining Rises Again in the United States,” Wired, May 11, 2012, http://www.wired.com/2012/05/rare-earth-mining-rises-again/, accessed 4/4/16 196 For further reading on the inherent uncertainty in mining and its effects on American business, see Kent Curtis, Gambling on Ore: The Nature of Metal Mining in the United States, 1860-1910 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2013). 83

As with cobalt prices shortly after the crisis in 1978, rare earth prices eventually returned to pre-restriction levels. This hurt Molycorp’s efforts to revitalize Mountain Pass, as declining rare earth prices began to erase future profits. In March of 2015 Molycorp announced that it did not know if it could keep Mountain Pass in operation, given the changing conditions of the rare earth market; in June they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.197 Molycorp’s troubles are likely a death knell for American rare earth mining. Molycorp still owns Magnequench, but all the processing operations remain in China. The company’s hope was that, with Magnequench and

Mountain Pass, it could reinstate the U.S. as a worthy competitor in the rare earth trade. Yet once again, as in the 1990s, China’s pricing forced the mine’s closure. In March of 2016, Molycorp received permission to emerge from bankruptcy. The remains of the company were placed in the hands of its lenders, and it will continue to operate with its only remaining profitable limb

(Magnequench).198 Mountain Pass will either be liquidated or placed in the hands of an

“unnamed foreign entity,” a reminder that, even given Molycorp’s struggles, the reserves under the mine still hold value.199

For Molycorp, , cost was the ultimate prohibiting factor, even more than the time it would take to reopen Mountain Pass as the decreasing price of rare earth metals after the softening of

Chinese export restrictions raised the stakes for stateside production quotas. The repeat failure of

Mountain Pass, then, is a direct effect of global capitalism and therein represents a contradiction of Jeremy Rifkin’s argument that the growth of digital networks will eventually create a utopian, collaborative commons (in which the marginal price of goods will trend toward zero).

197 Cecilia Jamasmie, “Molycorp Shuts Down Mountain Pass Rare Earth Plant,” Mining.com, Aug. 26, 2015, http://www.mining.com/molycorp-shuts-down-mountain-pass-rare-earth-plant/, accessed 4/4/16. 198 Peg Brickley, “Molycorp Wins Approval to Exit Chapter 11 Bankruptcy,” The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 30, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/molycorp-wins-approval-to-exit-chapter-11-bankruptcy-1459379840, accessed 4/4/16. 199 Ibid. 84

Conversely, digital networks and cloud architecture have wholly relied and continue to depend on predatory capitalism to set low prices on rare earths, and thus have only further encouraged the consolidation and monopolization of rare earth mining and processing by China. This will continue to have pronounced effects on digital infrastructure. The importance of rare earths will either fade and be replaced by the newest, least vulnerable combination of minerals, or their mining and production will remain in the hands of the nation with the most viable rare earth mining infrastructure – currently China. The complicated history the NdFeB magnet, and its evolution into an absolutely essential element of the global cloud infrastructure stresses the importance of awareness of the material relationship between software and the hardware, the digital and the industrial, the process and the thing. While it may not always be the beating heart of the data storage infrastructure, its history within the tech industry serves as a reminder that even a creation as influential and seemingly monolithic as the internet will always be subject to material, geopolitical forces. The history of these forces and their effects on the physical expansion and maintenance of data must be addressed in order to fully understand the effects of digital culture on the human race. The cloud is not a virtual space, but many scattered physical spaces of transformed earth in which various metals interact with each other to manipulate signals in order to maintain the modern world order – and all of it is held together with tiny magnets of iron, boron, and neodymium.

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