materialssean cubitt

donau-krems

Sn2014: forecasts for global PC, tablet, “ultramobile” and mobile phone shipments set to break 2.4 billion units2012: 238 million TV sets sold globally

A tablet computer can hold between one and three grams of tin, a large-screen TV up to five.

The legacy of 17th century colonial Andean silver mines – the forced labor, the deaths from mercury poisoning (used in the extraction process), lung disease and accidents – are there not only in scarred landscapes and broken ecologies. The continuing extraction of wealth at the expense of indigenous miners (whose techniques of high-altitude smelting had already been stolen from them) continued through the revolutionary period to the 1930s and the Great Depression, demonstrating the specific genius of colonialism in extracting not only raw materials and forced labor but the techniques and knowledges of colonized peoples, taken in order to be concretized in machines which would become the effective masters of those who once commanded them. The 1985 collapse of tin prices, which halved its trad-able value, increased pressure on the industry. Environmental damage from silted rivers, algae-filled waste pools and wasted grounds combined with the terrible conditions endured by miners at high altitude extracting ores from exceptionally hard rock to produce waves of unrest which further hastened capital flight from Bolivia. Since election in 2005, indigenist president Evo Morales has nationalized a number of facilities run down by their overseas owners, some of whom have purchased mining rights through earlier corrupt regimes in order, it appears, not to exploit them and in that way to maintain the high level of prices the commodity has enjoyed in recent years. These high prices allow US corporations to eye up tin reserves in Alaska, enacting a form of cyborg ethnic cleansing by endangering the ecology, poisoning the indigenous Inuit and Dene, or driving them out by destroying their traditional livelihoods.

Enclosuresof Common Land

Enclosuresof Common SkillsBertram von Minden, Knitting Madonna, 1400-1410.

Enclosuresof Common Knowledge

Now, as there are some things which every man enjoys in common with all other men, and as there are other things which are distinctly his and belong to no one else, just so has nature willed that some of the things which she has created for the use of mankind remain common to all, and that others through the industry and labor of each man become his own. Laws moreo-ver were given to cover both cases so that all men might use common property without prejudice to any one else, and in respect to other things so that each man being content with what he himself owns might refrain from laying his hands on the property of others.

Hugo Grotius, The Freedom of the Seas, or the Right Which belongs to the Dutch to take Part in the East India Trade. 1609

res nullius

terra nullius

The problem (1) Extracting materials

some basic digital materials:indiumgalliumarsenicgermaniumsapphirecopperaluminiumleadgoldironzincnickeltinsilver . . . .

The problem (2): manufacturing

The number of toxic materials needed to make the 220 billion silicon chips manufactured annually is stagger-ing: highly corrosive hydrochloric acid; metals such as arsenic, cadmium, and lead; volatile solvents like methyl chloroform, benzene, acetone, and trichloroethylene (TCE); and a number of super toxic gases.

“The materials are just part of the problem,” pointed out JoLani Hironaka, director of the San Jose, California-based Santa Clara Center for Occupational Health (SC-COSH), which works on behalf of computer chip indus-try workers in Santa Clara County, where Silicon Valley is located. “There has been a tremendous growth in the number of industries manufacturing chemicals and other materials used at computer chip plants and in the amount of waste generated in the production process.”

According to Graydon Laraby of Texas Instruments, the manufacture of just one batch of chips requires on aver-age 27 pounds of chemicals, 29 cubic feet of hazardous gases, nine pounds of hazardous waste, and 3,787 gallons of water, which requires extensive chemical treatment.

http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/154/57/

"Under NAFTA, maquiladora employment increased by 54% in Ciu-dad Juárez, spurring significant population growth. Yet Juárez still has no waste treatment facility to treat sewage produced by the 1.3 million people who now live there." (NAFTA at 5, Global Trade Watch)

The Rio Grande exhibits excessive levels of ‘residual chlorine, methy-lene chloride, toluene, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium, silver, zinc, chlordane, p,p’-DDE, dieldrin, gamma-BHC (lindane), total PCBs, and cyanide’ (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality 2013).

The problem (3) recycling

In Lagos, while there is a legitimate robust market and abil-ity to repair and refurbish old electronic equipment includ-ing computers, monitors, TVs and cell phones, the local experts complain that of the estimated 500 40-foot containers shipped to Lagos each month, as much as 75% of the imports are “junk” and are not economically repairable or market-able. Consequently, this e-waste, which is legally a hazardous waste is being discarded and routinely burned in what the environmentalists call yet “another“cyber-age nightmare now landing on the shores of developing countries.”

The Digital Dump: Exporting Re-Use and Abuse to Africa, Basel Ac-tion network, 2005http://www.ban.org/BANreports/10-24-05/

http://it.truveo.com/The-Digital-Dump-Exporting-HighTech-ReUse-and/id/2654447730

The phosphors and other potentially toxic dusts must be removed from the CRT cullet and managed responsibly in developed countries, and

The ‘competent authority’ of the importing country must formally con-sent to accept the cleaned cullet as a non-waste because it essentially meets specifications to be used as a direct replacement feedstock in a primary manufacturing process to create new consumer products without further processing, other than quality control – that is, it is not going to a recycling destination and no further cleaning or processing is needed prior to enter-ing into primary manufacturing.(Basel Convention)

– Recently, the Malaysian government decided to no longer accept any CRT glass from the United States, as of December 31, 2008.

optical fiber production should increase from 147 million kilometers of fiber in 2011 to 204 million in 2017

Chaffee, C. David (2011). The Coming Market for Optical Fiber and Cable. Photonics Spectra. http://www.photonics.com/Article.aspx?AID=49953

Tri-Mer corporation, promoting their Cloud Chamber Scrubber, ‘The emissions from fiber optics manufacturing are a very serious challenge for conventional technology. The combination of submicron glass particles mixed with chlorine and hydrochloric gases creates a number of issues. The CCS removed both PM and gases at over 99% efficiency.’

Synthetic quartz, crystals are grown in autoclaves. The process requires very pure forms of silicon tetrachloride and germanium tetrachloride and highly purified oxygen, nitrogen, helium, chlorine and sulphur hexaflu-oride, each of which requires significant amounts of energy to produce while, in the various purification processes, removing impurities which have then to be recycled. The quartz is formed into a tube, and dried using chlorine before fine layers of the dioxides of silicon and germanium are deposited inside, each layer fused to glass with burners operating at 1700 degrees Celsius. The richest layer of germanium oxide glass forms the op-erating core of the fibre. The tube is then collapsed by heating again, then sleeved with another layer of quartz of a slightly different refractive index, ensuring the internal reflection is close to total, and heated once more to fuse the components into a single column known as the preform. Finally the preform is loaded into a furnace operating at 2100 degrees Celsius and extruded to a diameter in the region of 125 microns, cooled in a helium tank, coated with a protective acrylic plastic cured with ultraviolet light, and ready to use.

high-value design (cognitive labour)low-value manufacture and assembly (physical labor)

Samsung fab, Xi’an, China

PFCs are less frequently used in semiconductor fabrication than previously. Remaining dangerous chemicals include heavy metals, rare earths, solvents, epoxy, corrosives and caustics, fluorides, ammonia and lead. Process redesign focus-es on treatment of solid, liquid and gas wastes, which use acids and caustics to neutralize pH levels in wastewater

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2014/mar/-sp-toxic-waste-silicon-valley-trail

Calgon Carbon Corp.’s plant in Catlettsburg, Kentucky, specialist in cleaning filters from chip fab plants

worldwide semiconductor sales for 2013: $305.6 billion

Over 200 billion discrete components – diodes, transistors, recti-fiers, LEDs, laser diodes, CCD chips, memory, logic, microprocessing, RFID and other devices – fabricated in 2002

ultrapure water (UPW) waste water ponds, Brooklyn NY

Kaohsiung City, Taiwan

In June 2014, the Taiwanese Environmental Protection Agency fined Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) NT$20 million for water dumping infringements. In the same month, ASE announced it would be raising up to NT$15 billion to support expansion. Water, including reuse and recycling, can account for up to one and a half per cent of operating costsASE were reported to have paid seven fines for ongoing pollution dumps between July 2011 and October 2013. The same report quotes activist assertions that the company had enjoyed tax exemptions of NT$3 billion

According to research by NGO China Water Risk (2013) into the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs’ records there were ‘over 10,000 environmental violations for key semiconductor companies’, the major effluents in-cluding arsenic, antimony, hydrogen peroxide, and hydro-fluoric acid.

Samsung fabs in South Korea

Chip ‘burning’ is a test process subjecting semiconductors to high levels of heat and voltage; ion implantation is used in doping; and x-rays are used to check quality. It is unclear whether these processes contributed to a spate of cancers among workers in Samsung fabs in South Korea in the 2010s (Grossman 2011). Volatile organics like benzene, trichloroethylene and methylene chloride are also common in ‘clean rooms’ where chips are handled by human operators and may have contributed. Some three years after Grossman reported on this for Yale Environment, noting that the Semiconductor Industry Alliance protested that stud-ies of links between fabs and cancer clusters were ‘scientifically flawed’, Samsung apologized and promised compensation to a group of ex-employees who have suffered from cancer, without however accepting a link between chemicals or physical processes and their illnesses (Associated Press 2014). Liability may in any case lie with the South Korean government, to whom companies pay a levy from which claims for industrial injury are paid.

The conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human . . . The survivors of the extermination camps, the inmates of concentration and internment camps, and even the comparatively happy stateless people could see . . . that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger. Because of it they were regarded as savages and afraid that they might end by being considered beasts . . .

(Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism 1958: 299-300)

The Story of the Kelly Gang, 1906, restoration 2007. http://aso.gov.au/titles/features/story-kelly-gang/