IBM-486

In her chapter in Residual Media, Lisa Parks considers the ways that electronics salvaging practices decenter media technologies from the way theorists and consumers typically understand them.¹ Parks explains that the majority of consumer electronic e-waste ends up in the hands of electronics salvaging firms, who have developed lucrative and profitable business models based on structured obsolescence. Behind the veneer of eco-friendly waste-minimizing efforts, these multinational companies exploit the labour of prisoners and migrant workers to turn a profit. In the end, most of the hazardous e-waste merely moves from landfills in North America, Europe, and Australia to parts of Asia that have few or no environmental regulations. When e-waste and salvage remain in post-industrial parts of the word, governments ensure they remain invisible to the white upper and middle class; they place waste instead on Indigenous lands or near low-income neighborhoods. Waste disposal, Parks notes, almost always intersects with racial and class-based politics.

Emerging out of a refusal to discard operative technology, IBM-486 invites consideration of waste, the afterlife to which most (and eventually, all) technology is consigned. Residuality confronts consumers with what happens after a piece of technology breaks. Lack of knowledge of the workings of most consumer electronics—in part due to digital rights management—means most of its userbase overlooks acts of repair in favor of disposal, even when the repair is simple enough to execute. My retired IBM-486 finds new life through sculpture, its motherboard turned to leaves of an aluminium wire tree.

One of the most important materials in this installation is the dust that covers the sculpture. Far from being an accident of time, the dust that has settled over the chips and wires is an acknowledgment of temporality and of planned obsolescence.

In Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics, Jennifer Gabrys studies waste as media’s residue, examining the abandonment, resale, and disposal of obsolete media. She notes that “electronic waste, chemical contamination, failure, breakdown, obsolescence, and information overload are conditions that emerge as wayward effects of electronic materiality.”² Focusing on waste demands consideration of temporal materiality, infrastructure, soil, and water. Fossils, as residues of media technology, trace the imprints of lives—both the manufacturer’s corporate life and the actions of the consumer. She argues that dust offers a more accurate sense of media objects than technological progress does; as new electronics render the old obsolete, the later begin to accumulate dust through disuse. The dust motes my camera captured are as much a part of the installation as any other material. No longer operational, the IBM-486’s role as a sculpture is to collect dust and to speak through such a collection.

Salvaging consumer electronics makes visible the usually invisible manufacturing labour that users of consumer electronics have the privilege not to think about. Addressing media infrastructures, Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski note that:

interwoven within political-economic agendas, media infrastructures have historically been used in efforts to claim and reorganize territories and temporal relations. Their material dependence on lands, raw materials, and energy imbricates them within issues of finance, urban planning, and natural-resource development.³

Platforms are neither environmentally nor politically neutral. Just as the burden of e-waste disposal is disproportionately placed on classed and racialized bodies, media infrastructures are contingent on the underpaid labour of those who manufacture consumer electronics, often in deplorable and dangerous working conditions. Quoting Mimi Nguyen, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun notes that digital freedom and excess imposes an equal and opposite reaction on the “bodies of Asian and Asian American immigrant women workers (in sweatshops and factories of varying working conditions) [that] provide the labor for the production of . . . circuit boards, those instruments of identity play, mobility, and freedom.’’⁴ We often avoid considering the environmental and social imprint of technology since to do so highlights our complicity in the process. The production of newer, sleeker, faster computers deliberately obscures the material residues of these objects. This sculpture displays the residues, demonstrating that technology still has a whole life after it breaks.

Notes

¹ Lisa Parks, “Falling Apart: Electronics Salvaging and the Global Media Economy,” in Residual Media, ed. Charles R. Acland (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 32-47.

² Jennifer Gabrys, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 4. Jussi Parikka makes a similar argument about dust in A Geology of Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), noting that dust “marks the temporality of matter [and] talks to issues of global labor [and] media materialism of digital culture.”

³ Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015, 5.

⁴ Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 13, quoting Mimi Nguyen, “Queer Cyborgs and New Mutants,” in Asian America.net, eds. Rachel Lee and Sau-ling Wong (New York: Routledge, 2003), 300.