Medianatures

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MediaNatures Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic WasteItalic text

edited by Jussi Parikka



Introduction: The Materiality of Media and Waste


“And what if the ethical, or at least aesthetic, transformations of history were understood as waste’s precipitates?” – Dominique Laporte (2000: 16)


Medianatures picks up from Donna Haraway’s idea about naturecultures – the topological continuum between nature and culture, the material entwining and enfolding of various agencies, meanings and interactions. Medianatures gives the concept of naturecultures a specific emphasis, and that emphasis is at the core of this collection. It is a good concept and a framework to investigate the ways in which our electronic and high-tech media culture is entwined with a variety of material agencies, where the notion of “materiality” is taken to its literal meaning referring to for instance “plasma reactions and ion implantation” (Yoshida 1994: 105), as in processes of semiconductor fabrication, or the alternative list of media studies objects and components that is used from an e-waste management perspective: “metal, motor/ compressor, cooling, plastic, insulation, glass, LCD, rubber, wiring/electrical, concrete, transformer, magnetron, textile, circuit board, fluorescent lamp, incandescent lamp, heating element, thermostat, brominated flamed retardant (BFR)-containing plastic, batteries, CFC/HCFC/HFC/HC, external electric cables, refractory ceramic fibers, radioactive substances and electrolyte capacitors (over L/D 25 mm)” and which themselves are constituted from a range of materials – plastics, wood, plywood, copper, aluminum, silver, gold, palladium, lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, selenium, hexavalent chromium and flame retardants (Pinto 2008).

In short, media are of nature, and return to nature – where the production process for our media devices from screens to circuits, networks to interfaces is about standardization and mass-mobilization of minerals and other materialities; and at the other end, discarded media technologies themselves are part of such regime of natural “things” – whether picked apart in an Asian recycling village, or then left to decay in urban or rural places. The natural affords our cultural agencies and assemblages – including media practices and concrete devices – and all of that comes back to nature, whether in terms of our bodies organic or the devices as material remains. The articles selected express this deep materiality at the core of media technological culture, and the various ecological ties these themes have with current political economy. They range from perspectives in environmental sciences concerning e-waste and management of electronic media after it is through its usual mediatic function to computer science and ideas in green computing – as well as articles and reports concerning the production and dismantling of things such as Cathode Ray Tubes and LCD-displays. Hence, this living book is not only about life, but about death and dead media – but dead media in a very concrete sense of media as the concrete death of nature, biological processes and organisms (including humans).

More generally, this is about management of life and waste. In prosaic tongue, it’s about where you dump your shit you do not want on your doorstep – shit as one of the most important factors in terms of the multiple, connected management of subjectivity, language , body and public space , as Dominique Laporte (2000) has well argued. In more elaborate terms, it relates to how we manage media cultural devices as part of global info-tech capitalism, and it’s relation to limits of natural resources; of various materialities concerning human labour, materials science as well as politics of those various ecologies. It also reflects the boundaries of media studies perspectives – to expand from content to the material political economy of things and devices as well as to expand from software to hardware perspectives again – something that Sean Cubitt too has underlined as a crucial ecological step for media theory (ref?). In addition, it shows on a disciplinary level the various perspectives from which you can approach media technologies: from the point of view of materials that are necessary to build them (rare earth minerals), the global trade networks, the waste management, and so forth.

In terms of the multiplicity of ecologies, Félix Guattari’s work on “three ecologies” cannot be neglected. An early forerunner learning from green politics and applying those ideas in relation to critical analysis of what he called “integrated world capitalism”, Guattari argued the need to understand contemporary culture in terms of not one, but three ecologies. The environment, social relations and human subjectivity constitute cross-articulated regimes of the ethico-political (Guattari 2000: 28). It is crucial to understand these as interlinked, and as formative in their transversal nature for processes of subjectification. In other words, subjectification happens not only in the social, or in the human psyche, but across a range of boundaries where our natural ecology in its materiality is already thoroughly embedded in the regimes of signs as well – and the other way round. Guattari calls for the need to develop transversal modes of thought across Universes of reference to understand the full power of such ecologies – and how each regime has its forms of pollution (Guattari mentions Donald Trump as a destructive form of parasitic algae).

More recently, scholars such as Matthew Fuller (2005) have elaborated these ideas towards media ecologies. This approach takes Guattarian influences, and mixes them together with a specific mediatic approach, emphasizing media however as one further, but as intertwined, regime of energies and materialities. Indeed, one can notice how crucial this extra layer is in terms of articulating the already mapped three ecologies. One could claim that the mediatic ecology – which in this later development is not a continuation of for instance Neil Postman’s conservative ecological thought – is in a privileged position to understand how post-fordist “Integrated World Capitalism” (Guattari’s term) is participating in a co-defining regime of human subjectification, social environments and exploitation of nature on a global level. Guattari was referring to the Integrated World Capitalism as the tendency to move from “producing goods and services towards structures producing signs, syntax and – in particular, through the control which it exercises over the media, advertising, opinion polls, etc. – subjectivity.” (2000: 47). In his recent writing, Michel Serres has talked about the two regimes of pollution where the hard pollution is the destruction of nature, the soft pollution the destruction of the world of signs. Serres (2011: 41) clarifies: “By the first I mean on the one hand solid residues, liquids, and gases, emitted through the atmosphere by big industrial companies or gigantic garbage dumps, the shameful signature of big cities. By the second, tsunamis of writing, signs, images, and logos flooding rural civic, public and natural spaces as well as landscapes with their advertising.”

Yet, what is missing the link between the two – the “hard” regime of entropic energy consumption and production of not only things, but of material waste; and the immaterial regime of semiotics and signs – what we usually call media. Indeed, actually media ecological approaches and a range of other recent voices in scholarly writing have been able to point that this dualism is unsupportable, and instead of strengthening the illusion of the regime of media as immaterial and based in meaning, we need to take a look at it as completely embedded in material sciences. Think about the perverse complex ecology of it all: a specific design solution concerning a screen or computer component has an effect on its becoming-obsolescent sooner than “necessary” not of course without the product itself being embedded in a capitalist discourse emphasizing newness as a fetishistic value driving the purchase decisions, and after being abandoned for another device, what is often called “recycling” is actually waste-trade where old electronic media is shipped to for instance India to be dismantled with very rudimentary – and dangerous – processes that attach to the lungs and nervous systems of the poor workers. We should neither forget where the minerals for the components come from – like coltan mined in Congo and the from it refined tantalum powder that is very heat-resistant an ideal for certain parts in mobile phones, Playstation-game consoles and so forth; while being the part that lets us engage in media cultural joy, the mineral itself is part of the events and historical processes concerning extremely bloody wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo where a range of European mining companies have had their own dubious part to play, including funding the war efforts in order to secure the extraction of the mineral. (Cuvelier and Raeymaekers 2002).

Relations abstract, things concrete, but all linked together as real parts of the global capitalist media industry.

In other words, materiality of media is to be taken literally. Our media devices are the product of various processes of mining, processing and standardizing minerals and other rare earth materials into finished mass-consumer products, and at the other end, after their use-value is exhausted, they become again things. Of course, abandoned and obsolete media technologies are not always just abandoned, but participate in another process – often as complex and multiple as the one involving processing. Often the products assembled in Asia are returned to Asia despite the increasing amount of bans in those countries, for example China, to import electronic waste. Jennifer Gabrys (2011: 138) has pointed towards the complexitites of this new metamorphic economy, and its material, persisting nature - “[r]ecycling does not remove remainder or wastage; instead, it displaces and transforms waste.” This point about transformation – both in terms of materiality, of dismantling, reusing, or just left to decay and in terms of their status as obsolete and out-of-use – is also spatially distributed, across the globe; this touches mostly developing countries, Asia, India, Africa as well as is discussed in Eastern-Europe (Ciocoiu, Burcea and Tärtiu 2010). For instance Nigeria is one address for electronic waste without however being able to process it – toxic e-waste filled with lead, cadmium, and mercury, as well as when releasing dioxins and polyaromatic hydrocarbons when burned which remains one way to “resolve” the problem of piling up electronic junk such as screens in ports and landfills. (Schmidt 2006).

Hence, focusing on the materiality of components and waste of electronic media suggests extremely long and uneven networks of spatial distribution – also labour distribution – of media cultures, as well as a completely different temporality to that of what is usually marketed as part of digital technologies. As Gabrys argues, instead of speed, efficiency and progress, we are confronted with the time of dust and soil. These are long-term temporal perspectives that more often are measurable in terms of scientific time scales that involve geological and environmental science perspectives. If humanities and social sciences have mostly been occupied with the human scale of time – of years, decades, or in the best-case time of civilizations of hundreds or thousands of years – perhaps we need to look at such time-scales of thousands and even millions of years, that reveal how materials live?

Sean Cubitt has been one of the most perceptive critics of the material and environmental contexts of electronic, and especially screen media. Already his Ecomedia –book (2005) mapped the discussions concerning ecologies in media, and more recently, he has continued to look inside the screen as well to understand the materials science behind them–-and the environmental chain after media use. The fabrication of screens such as LCD’s involves use of many rare minerals, for instance selenium and germanium, Cathode Ray Tubes are also a difficulty for any waste management due to their toxic content, and more recent plasma screens will present potentially even a bigger problem due to the weird electro-chemical reactions of plasma cells coated in phospor. (Cubitt 2009, See also the video of Cubitt talk at Anglia Ruskin University “Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security in Digital Culture, September 10, 2009, http://barney.inspire.anglia.ac.uk/inspire_j/ds1.html). Electronic media and screen are perfect – albeit grim – examples of the process of topological entanglement of various layers of globalization; rare earth materials, spectacle-based industries of marketing and digital media, desires of networked connectivity, the soft tissue of underpaid workers of colour risking their health, outsourcing of manufacturing to developing countries, waste management (or more frankly, problems) similarly (forced) part of the developing countries business models, etc. An increasing amount of production is moved to such places – for instance semiconductor industries emerging in Singapore and Malaysia – and same goes with dumping of the materials, from China to India, Pakistan, and African countries.

To continue with Cubitt who connects this entanglement with a new call for different kind of avant-garde and view to screen media:

The digital realm is an avant-garde to the extent that it is driven by perpetual innovation and perpetual destruction. The built-in obsolescence of digital culture, the endless trashing of last year’s model, the spendthrift throwing away of batteries and mobile phones and monitors and mice . . . and all the heavy metals, all the toxins, sent off to some god-forsaken Chinese recycling village . . . that is the digital avant-garde.

A look at the range of reports concerning the materials as well as networks of screen components gives a further insight to this. Think of the range of elements a the CRT in your living room or on your desktop is made of. “A typical computer color monitor/TV is composed of a plastic housing (casing), CRT, a deflection yoke, printed wiring board (PWB) with integrated circuit (IC), connecting wires, metals (precious and non-precious), and rubber.” (Nnorom, Osibanjo, Ogwuegbu 2011). The actual listing of materials is only the beginning; as important is the process of what happens when the electron gun part of the CRT fires on the phosphor part of the screen to create what we usually focus on as media studies object – images. This process itself produces chemical reactions, releases x-rays, which means the need to protect us from our media with further layers of lead, and so forth. (Ibid.) Indeed, if you list the materials in a typical desktop computer (plastics, lead, aluminium, gallium, nickel, vanadium, beryllium, chromium, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, and silica) you are able to come up with a corresponding list of health risks (that range from allergic reactions to various cancers, skeletal problems, asthma, bronchitis, ulcers, liver and kidney damage and for instance damage to brain functions). (Schmidt 2002: 190). However, the things are fabricated so that the end-user interpellated in marketing discourses, and sitting home and at work attached to the machine, is in “protected mode” (cf. Kittler 1997) whereas the people compiling the machines – and dismantling them, are ones who encounter the raw, dangerous materiality of our media technologies. (See for instance Clapp 2006).

CRT’s are huge energy consumers as well, which is another thing that is to be considered. Even if we could argue that the digital has a special theoretical relation to zero-entropy (Pasquinelli 2011), the digital softness and swiftness of content delivered on our screens is reliant on yet another relation of transmission – namely energy. The fact that every search engine search consumes energy (estimates vary) is indicative of the fact that the smallest gesture at the interface is connected to these huge consumptive practices and installations having to do with energy: server farms demand gigantic amounts of energy, packed in the key symbols of the industrial era (just like some of the new server farms, for instance in Finland, are being installed in abandoned factories of the Fordist era): Since 2005, Google has been installing 1160 servers into a single shipping container, complete with batteries, power, cabling, water-cooling and fans, drawing as much as250 kilowatts of power. The containers are stacked and networked in buildings holding 45 containers, each drawing down 10 megawatts apiece (including additional cooling and water pumps) in one facility dating back to 2005, which now has three such build¬ings. The design was subject of a patent applied for early in 2008. Since then, Google has been building server farms across the US and globally: in Oregon, Virginia, Iowa, South Carolina and Oklahoma, in Dublin, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Austria, and in India and Malaysia among other sites. Google has made technical decisions on such questions as voltage to achieve maximum efficiency: about 20 percent of power goes to non-com¬puting uses (mainly cooling).” (Cubitt, Hassan and Volkmer 2011: 151-152).

In any case, such points are good reminders of how “voltage” and energy consumption is related to the processing power and size of our media technologies. The shift from vacuum tubes to transistors was a big step in terms lower energy consumption in devices, and more recent developments in computing involving massively multicore chips is a further step towards efficient use of voltage and hence energy (Yu 2010). Audiovisual content of contemporary media cultures has this archaic relation to energy consumption, which means that when an increasing amount of our devices are channeling more heavy content – for instance mobile phones as one central distributor of high quality visual and audio entertainment – it forces an energy consumption focus on the processor and software design. (Silven and Jyrkkä 2007).

In short, one needs to be more aware of the fact that any computation operation is an energy operation and software links not only to hardware but to a wider material grid. From basic operations as the search engine query, to for instance such a crucial part of our visual culture as encoding a piece of video, we are dealing with computational costs (See Silven & Jyrkkä 2007) and tackling with such costs (monetary and environmental) for instance through automated internal transitions and energy efficiency in the actual use-time of processors – and distributed environments like data centres (Lang and Patel 2009) is becoming one of the important issues for design.

But the material and energetic perspective does not apply only to recent information technology. Media history is one long story of materials and experiments with materials – what conducts, what does not, what reflects, what insulates and so forth; as such, we could map a whole media history of experimentation with materials – only with the modern media industries, a mass-production and standardization of materials for production has become such wide scale. As such, it is interesting to take longer historical perspectives to this issue of materials and energy as well. Nineteenth century was addressing these questions already, as we can see from many examples. There is not only a media history of television, telegraph, telephone, television, computer, and so forth, but a media history of selenium (crucial for television), add a couple of examples…

Interestingly, already the energetics of mediatic apparatuses – and society in general – was discussed by such experimenters as Nikola Tesla who never tired to emphasise the importance of energy and electricity – both in terms of how the participate in understanding the modern physical world of waves (as such, also the basis for mediatic phenomena of light and hence seeing, as he underlines). And more importantly, how electricity and transportation of energy was becoming a crucial issue for Tesla at the end of the 19th century, hundred years before contemporary culture of server farms:

Therefore the phenomena of light and heat and others besides these, may be called electrical phenomena. Thus electrical science has become the mother science of all and its study has become all important. The day when we shall know exactly what "electricity" is, will chronicle an event probably greater, more important than any other recorded in the history of the human race. The time will come when the comfort, the very existence, perhaps, of man will depend upon that wonderful agent. For our existence and comfort we require heat, light and mechanical power. How do we now get all these? We get them from fuel, we get them by consuming material. What will man do when the forests disappear, when the coal fields are exhausted ? Only one thing, according to our present knowledge will remain; that is, to transmit power at great distances. Men will go to the waterfalls, to the tides, which are the stores of an infinitesimal part of Nature's immeasurable energy. There will they harness the energy and transmit the same to their settlements, to warm their homes by, to give them light, and to keep their obedient slaves, the machines, toiling. But how will they transmit this energy if not by electricity? Judge then, if the comfort, nay, the very existence, of man will not depend on electricity. I am aware that this view is not that of a practical engineer, but neither is it that of an illusionist, for it is certain, that power transmission, which at present is merely a stimulus to enterprise, will some day be a dire necessity. (Martin 1894: 301)


At first, it seems that Tesla was thinking in the same manner as 1990s hype about the post-material world – from Nicholas Negroponte (“from atoms to bits”) to reports on how information society might lead into e-materialisation as a phase of new energy economies and green futures:

E-materialization is likely to be the source of some of the biggest impacts the Internet has on energy intensity and pollution. That is because the most energy intensive industries on the planet are the industries that extract raw materials and convert them into useful commodities, such as plastic and other chemicals, paper, and construction materials such as the famous “bricks and mortar.” In addition, the transportation of these heavy materials engenders a great deal of energy consumption. If atoms can genuinely be replaced by bits, and distributed by the Internet, rather than trucks, trains and planes, the energy savings will be significant. Since the energy-intensive industries are also those responsible for the vast majority of hazardous waste and toxic chemical pollutants, e-materialization holds the potential to prevent the creation of that pollution in the first place. This is much better than disposing of or treating that pollution later. (Romm 1999: 38).

And yet, Instead of the 1990s enthusiasm of post-energy economy of information, Tesla’s vision relates to energy – the CO2 industries reliant on coal and wood are not replaced by immateriality, but by the specific electrical forces that he in his quirky way goes on to describe and demonstrate. The point is not the accuracy – or inaccuracy – of some of Tesla’s ideas, but how he envisions new media and society revolving around energy anyway. As such, it offers a richer way to think about the informatics as well, that is impossible for us to understand as without its entropic effects.

Media archaeological perspectives can offer alternative views to media, science and energy, as well as other more political ideas. This relates to design and how starting to think the materiality of mediatic devices from design practices already. One of the problems of current regime of “planned obsolescence” – a term that stems already from the 1930s – is the short use-span of electronic media whether mobile phones, televisions, or laptop computers. As such, this is emphasized through design solutions that strengthen the black box nature of media technologies that are not to be opened up, fixed, or reused. Focusing on design from the point of view of sustainability and Extended Producer Responsibility means a focus on materials used as much as the processes in which materials are processed, including such measures identified by Pinto (2008) as: • Inventory management • Production process modification • Volume reduction • Recovery and reuse • Sustainable product design involves: • Rethinking on procedures of designing the product (flat computers) • Use of renewable material and energy • Creating electronic components and peripherals of biodegradable material • Looking at a green packaging option • Utilizing a minimum packaging material In more artistic vein (see the section Ecosophy), similar themes have been addressed by circuit bending and hardware hacking methodologies – for instance Garnet Hertz’s Dead Media Lab (http://www.conceptlab.com/deadmedia/), which extends the media archaeological idea of dead, abandoned media to environmental concerns. This is the context where Hertz and Parikka (2012) have talked about zombie media instead of dead media – the idea that technological devices never die, but decay and leave environmental residues, or then are repurposed, reused in a more environmental friendly way – in which case, also pointing again towards design practices. It points towards such basic things like casing, reusability and replaceability of parts, accessibility through design, etc.

But it is essential to remain critical of “sustainability” discourse in design and in information technology in general, and at least pick open some of its core assumptions. At least the false idea of digitality as automatically reducing CO2 and other environmental waste, and hence an automatic way to more sustainable (capitalist) production and development is one of the underlying myths, as for instance Fuchs (2008) among others argues. Sustainability is a good example of what Slavoj Zizek has referred in various of his talks and writings as the refashioning of capitalism into something “with a friendly face” – sustainability as one possible investment focus, even if, at its core, nothing per se changes about capitalism as a mode of production keen to expand and intensify its accumulative nature. Ecology is in danger of becoming a personal, ethical project (Zizek 2009: 53-54, 98. Cf. Yeomans and Günalay 2009). Indeed, as Gartner Research (Plummer et. Al. 2008) projected in their 2008 consumer trend prediction, Green IT and tracking carbon dioxide footprints for information technology is something that producers and sellers have to start taking into account. So pushing forward from mere “sustainability” which assumes the idea that we can continue as things were – in terms of our political economy, our subjectivity, and the accepted miseries of the world – as long as we make it sustainable for us and the ecology is an imperative – as such, the discourse of sustainability on its own is unsustainable, and needs to be back with a stronger, ecosophical project that maps environmental concerns as part of aesthetics, economy and politics of subjectification.

This is the paradoxical situation: increasingly, digital economy has to take theses aspects concerning the massive environmental catastrophe into account and focus on management of not only production and management of not only the desired use, but also the desired non-use. Waste management (see the section on “Waste”) is a growing theme in terms of literature concerning this side of the eco-technological connection, and touches on this bit of the production chain that is throwing wide concerns to capitalist accumulation too; and yet, it also presents a possibility for intensification of the processes of capitalism to the area of seeming uselessness – garbage and waste. Whereas management of hazardous materials from e-waste has been a topic discussed since the 1980s, and already 1990s saw the key international policies suggested (the Basel Convention in 1994), the United States has still not ratified the call.

This topic raises various implications;

On the specific level concerning waste and garbage, it relates to legislation, policies, fair and transparent waste management of electronic media, production and dismantling processes and an understanding of the energy-intensive nature of high-tech media in a manner that needs to be followed through and addressed from the point of view of its environmental effects. Despite it receiving finally more and more attention, reports already in the 1980s (see Yoshida 1994 for examples) reported the wide use of dangerous chemicals in semiconductor industries. Mapping such links is the work of true media ecology – media in and as part of ecology.

For humanities and media studies, approaching e-waste can be connected to material accounts of media and contemporary culture. On the one hand, we need to be looking more closely at the intensity of the waste as a living dead material – meaning that “waste” is nto only waste, but a form of life itself, and in need of its own biopolitics as such. As beautifully expressed by Gabrys (2011: 1401-141) “The architecture of the landfill accretes through the sedimentation of trash, layers covered with earth and compacted into airless cells. The landfill settles, shifts, and subsides, generating methane gases and carbon dioxide. […] But this shifting architecture decomposes into the soil to expel greenhouse gases and heavy metal runoff, as well as intractable and scattered objects that refuse to decay.”

For the way in which we approach our media technology this has implications too. It is about time to really develop vocabularies for those media devices of ours in their materiality – not reduced from their politics and social connections, but as messy, topological and processually entangled in worlds of so many layers from nature to society and to psyche. This relates to the recent project of new materialism, a theoretical wave of coming up with ontological and epistemological ways to understand agency and micropolitics of matter. Here, I want to use as a springboard a perspective to apparatuses that comes from the feminist philosopher of science, Karen Barad. In her passage, she talks about scientific apparatuses and their materiality as intensive, formative and always participating in the reconfiguring of the world. As an experiment, think of this passage quoted below as applying to our electronic media technologies too – and start noticing the implications for a materially informed idea about the devices themselves not just coming from but contributing to the material, natural world:

So with the help of Barad – what are apparatuses – media apparatuses (not in the manner of the film theory apparatus-theory)?

1) apparatuses are specific material-discursive practices (they are not merely laboratory setups that embody human concepts and take measurements); 2) apparatuses produce differences that matter―they are boundary-making practices that are formative of matter and meaning, productive of, and part of, the phenomena produced; 3) apparatuses are material configurations/dynamic reconfigurings of the world; 4) apparatuses are themselves phenomena (constituted and dynamically reconstituted as part of the ongoing intra-activity of the world); 5) apparatuses have no intrinsic boundaries but are open-ended practices; and 6) apparatuses are not located in the world but are material configurations and reconfigurings of the world that re(con)figure spatiality and temporality as well as (the traditional notion of) dynamics (i.e. they do not exist as static structures, nor do they merely unfold or evolve in space and time). (Barad 2007: 146)

Technology and apparatuses are far from static, and so is “matter” or “nature” too, both filled with catalyzing forces and becomings in a manner that testifies to their vibrancy (Bennett 2010). Technologies are intensively involved in the world and hence share an eco-technological link, or in other words, a material-mediatic continuum. For media studies, this continuum is important to elaborate to really tap into the ecological contexts of medianatures as a theme that needs urgent attention. For the wider field of environmental sciences, product design both for end-consumers as well for industries – for instance greener data grids and servers or components – the challenge is as urgent.


The publication consists of three sections. The first is titled “Material” and engages with some of the processes and materials of which technical media is produced. As such, this means a new look at media materialism in a way that is slightly less McLuhan (“the medium is the message”) but insists that the material is the message – or as the longer quote from Fumikazu Yoshida (1994: 105) goes: “the relationship between high-technology and environmental problems focuses on high-technology like microelectronics and new material, while biotechnology develops on the basis of new sorts of substances: this is contrary to the saying, ‘the message is more important than the material.’ These substances , even if they have little value in themselves, have long-term and combined effects on human health which are not yet sufficiently clear.”

The second section, Energetics, focuses on energy-consumption and includes various perspectives from handheld mobile devices to data-grids and server economies. The question is how do such new forms of digital economy and energy-use (on the abstract informatic level computers are zero-entropy machines) relate to old regimes of energy production, and for instance CO2 emissions.

Thirdly, we focus on Waste management – a growing part of literature on the materiality of electronic media and information technology cultures. It relates to the global distribution of such waste products as well as the capitalist tendency to be able to recycle shit into economic value (Laporte 2000). In the midst of increasing amount of international regulations since the 1990s, e-waste is still being exported to developing countries (China, and increasingly India and Pakistan) and follows the international labour trends: work in those countries is cheap. Or as Pinto (2008) bluntly states: “The dumping of e-waste, particularly computer waste, into India from developed countries (‘green passport’ according to Gutierrez), because the latter find it convenient and economical to export waste, has further complicated the problems with waste management.”

The last section is titled “Ecosophy”, following Félix Guattari’s (2000) concept: ecosophy refers to the creative moment across the three ecological layers he identified as nature, the social and the human subjective ecology. As such, it refers to creation of new practices, and relations within and across ecologies, recognizing that the normal “environmental ecology” perspective is in itself insufficient to tackle the links between capitalist modes of production and specific forms of living attached to that economy. This is why the section addresses some ethico-aesthetic perspectives that tap into “ecology” and media in a different vein: the texts and links to projects talk about artistic, social science and media theoretical ways to rethink relations to materials, environment and technologies.

In general, the texts selected for this collection are mainly of three kinds three: academic peer-reviewed scientific articles; NGO produced reports concerning e-waste and its global contexts; social science and media theory interventions into the energetics and nature of contemporary media ecology – including ethical and artistic perspectives. In addition, Appendix 1 includes Jennifer Gabrys’ (2011) book Digital Rubbish – A Natural History of Electronics ref, which is an excellent reading in terms of the complex links of media, waste, labour and temporality – something I have tried to convey to this collection as well. One option is to start reading first from the Appendix. Whether from the beginning, or from the end, or the middle – I hope you enjoy digging into trash and waste. All things new have to have a bit of dirt in them anyway.


Acknowledgements

A warm thank you to Joanna Zylinska, Gary Hall and Clare Birchall for inviting me as part of the project. I would not have been able to plant this little living thing without the help from my research assistant Matthias Wannhoff (Humboldt University). In terms of the idea, I want to thank Sean Cubitt and Garnet Hertz for constant inspiration regarding the waste-materiality of electronic media culture. Further thanks to Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and Humboldt University Berlin for providing me time and space for the work. Other thanks to a lot of people, including Robert Jackson (for reminding me of Laporte’s waste(d)-research, Ned Rossiter for tips, and the audiences both at Utrecht University and Humboldt University where I delivered talks on Medianature(s) during Spring and Summer 2011.


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Section I: Materials

1) Greenpeace Research Laboratory
Toxic Chemicals in Computers Exposed: Determining the presence of Hazardous Substances in Five Laptop Computers

2) Jason Holden and Christopher Kelty
The Environmental Impact of the Manufacturing of Semiconductors

3) Fumikazu Yoshida
High-Tech Pollution

4) Bernd Kopacek
ReLCD: Recycling and ReUse of LCD Panels

5) Richard W. Clapp
Mortality among US employees of a large computer manufacturing company: 1969-2001

Section II: Energetics

6) UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology
ICT and CO2 Emissions

7) Olli Silven and Kari Jyrkkä
Observations on Power-Efficiency Trends in Mobile Communication Devices

8) Partha Pratim Ray
The Green Grid Saga -- A Green Initiative to Data Centers: A Review

9) Jonathan G. Koomey
Estimating Total Power Consumption by Servers in the U.S. and the world

10) Willis Lang and Jignesh M. Patel
Towards Eco-friendly Database Management Systems

11) Matteo Pasquinelli
Four Regimes of Entropy. For an Ecology of Genetics and Biomorphic Media Theory

Section III: Waste

12) Jim Puckett and Ted Smith (ed.)
Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia-report

13) Jonathan Linton, Julian Scott Yeomans, and Reena Yoogalingam
The Facilitation of Industrial Ecology, Product Take-Back, and Sustainability through the Forecasting of Television Waste Flows

14) Julian Scott Yeomans and Yavuz Günalay
Unsustainable Paradoxes Inherent in the International Legislation of Electronic Waste Disposal

15) Violet N. Pinto
E-waste hazard: The impending challenge

16) Priyadharshini.S et al.
A survey on Electronic waste management in Coimbatore

Section IV: Ecosophy

17) Ethics of Waste in the Information Society - A special issue of International Review of Information Ethics

18) Jussi Parikka
Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Expansions, Contractions and Foldings

19) Garnet Hertz
Dead Media Research Lab

20) Redundant Technology Initiative

Appendix 1

21) Jennifer Gabrys
Digital Rubbish. A Natural History of Electronics


Original Sources

1) "Toxic Chemicals in Computers Exposed: Determining the presence of Hazardous Substances in Five Laptop Computers", Greenpeace Research Laboratory Technical note 05/06, September 2006.

2) Jason Holden and Christopher Kelty, "The Environmental Impact of the Manufacturing of Semiconductors", Rice University, Connexions June 2 (2009).

3) Fumikazu Yoshida, "High-Tech Pollution", Economic Journal of Hokkaido University 23 (1994), 73-138.

4) Bernd Kopacek, “ReLCD: Recycling and ReUse of LCD Panels”, Proceedings of the 19th Waste Management Conference of the IWMSA (WasteCon2008).

5) Richard W. Clapp, "Mortality among US employees of a large computer manufacturing company: 1969-2001", Environmental Health: A Global Access Science Source 2006, 5: 30.

6) “ICT and CO2 Emissions”, UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, December 2009, number 319 Postnote.

7) Olli Silven and Kari Jyrkkä, “Observations on Power-Efficiency Trends in Mobile Communication Devices”, EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems Volume 2007, 1-10.

8) Partha Pratim Ray, "The Green Grid Saga -- A Green Initiative to Data Centers: A Review", Indian Journal of Computer Science and Engineering Vol. 1 No. 4, 333-39.

9) Jonathan G. Koomey, "Estimating Total Power Consumption by Servers in the U.S. and the world", Berkeley National Laboratory and Consulting Professor, Stanford University, Final report, February 15, 2007.

10) Willis Lang and Jignesh M. Patel, “Towards Eco-friendly Database Management Systems”, 4th Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) January 4-7, 2009, Asilomar, California, USA.

11) Matteo Pasquinelli, “Four Regimes of Entropy. For an Ecology of Genetics and Biomorphic Media Theory”, Fibreculture vol. 17 Media Ecology-special issue, edited by Michael Goddard and Jussi Parikka, April 2011.

13) Jonathan Linton, Julian Scott Yeomans, and Reena Yoogalingam, "The Facilitation of Industrial Ecology, Product Take-Back, and Sustainability through the Forecasting of Television Waste Flows" ISEIS Paper EIA04-056, vol. 2, 2004, 539-50.

14) Julian Scott Yeomans and Yavuz Günalay, “Unsustainable Paradoxes Inherent in the International Legislation of Electronic Waste Disposal”, Open Environmental Sciences, 2009, 3, 14-9.

15) Violet N. Pinto, “E-waste hazard: The impending challenge”, Indian Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 2008, August 12 (2): 65-70.

16) Priyadharshini.S et al., “A survey on Electronic waste management in Coimbatore”, International Journal of Engineering Science and Technology (IJEST), vol. 3, No. 3, March 2011.

18) Jussi Parikka, “Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Expansions, Contractions and Foldings”, Fibreculture journal, issue 17.

21) Jennifer Gabrys, "Digital Rubbish. A Natural History of Electronics" (University of Michigan Press, 2011).