Real 1st Post - E-Waste and how to follow

If the last post was a fairly lazy attempt at getting this thing started, let's view this post as an only moderately lazy start. SO, what I intend to do here is to lay down some preliminary research and ideas regarding this accident in an attempt to discern perhaps its technology's essence or its telos --

So, the accident itself is the waste.

What's the waste?

The problem aren't necessarily the materials themselves. A supercomputer or a Cathode-Ray television can be disposed of properly, the more volatile of metals can be removed and sold to procure a profit.

But I'm already getting ahead of myself.

The facts:
Used electronics are being forwarded to developing countries without set standards for how to dispose of various chemically volatile materials. Workers paid very little forced to endure dangerous chemical intake because of "do it quick" procedures made to separate out the precious metals of technologies. So, rather than breaking the machinery down and separating out pieces to be properly disposed, you throw a load of old CPU's onto a fire to melt them down to the inflammable precious metals inside.

So, you end up with phosphor in the air (CRTs), or you're burning plastic to get at something inside of it, forced to huff the fumes.

Are you getting bored yet with facts presented baldly? Here are a couple stills to break it up, from director Tsai Ming-Liang's 2006 film I Don't Want to Sleep Alone:


These images are rather unremarkable, but the reason I include them is that the film, which takes place in Malaysia (the director is Taiwanese, I'm pretty sure), basically starts out as this strange slow piece about sub-poverty urban squatters who come to depend on each other. It's all fine and well-done, but the film takes on this sublime edge when a mysterious fog rolls in over the city about an hour into the movie. There's one hysterically funny and vaguely disturbing scene where two would-be lovers attempt to have sex but, upon trying to take off their masks, break into coughing fits. It probably doesn't sound funny, but, uh, see the movie.

Anyway, basically, this kind of fog can serve as a sort of visual representation of the problem where these fumes spread by the burning of various electronic parts in bonfires is causing major damage to sub-poverty workers and local ecology. It's mostly occuring in large-population countries like China, India, Nigeria, etc. 80% of children in Guiyu, China have elevated levels of lead in their blood due to the improper disposal of electronics there.

The EPA has recommended that consumers simply recycle their goods, and the idea is largely that the solution to the problem lies in our being responsible consumers.
One can see some similarities to prisoner's dilemmas. It's a pain if I have to take an old CRT to Tampa to get it recycled properly. I can just hope that others take the drive to do so, and I'll just toss my junk on the curb. Then again, I just saw two monitors and an old PC sitting on the curb outside my neighbor's place (luckily, several trucks run through my neighborhood every week looking for potentially valuable trash, so it didn't end up in a dump yet...maybe they'll properly dispose of it?).
In the end, doesn't it end up being a matter of ethics?

Anyway, so attempts to solve the problem have largely focused on encouraging responsible recycling of these products (see this list of "E-Stewards") or by encouraging legislation (Responsible Electronics Recycling Act of 2010, Basel Convention).

What I'm wondering is if these methods can curb the tide. We can give all the financial incentives or legal prohibitions we want, but has that turned the tide in other extra-legal practices like the use of sweatshop labor?

It seems to me that the problem is two-fold: 1) It's part and parcel with the general exploitation of the developing world on the part of "1st world" corporate and governmental concerns. 2) It may be a catastrophe endemic to the speed of technological development.

If it's the first, well, man, good luck. We can attempt to develop methods by which to derail these trends (through rhetoric? What form would that take? Activism?).

If it's the second, well, man, good luck again. There's no reversing that tide.

And if we read the problem as being an accident of technology (in this case, let's restrict our focus to the development of computing technologies), then the problem seems even stranger. We might wish for a return to nature of sorts, a move back to the pre-industrial "pure earth." But then again, it also seems as though we're beyond that point. Short of an incredible catastrophe, these things aren't reversing and heading back into the sea. One of the assumptions of electracy is that we're dealing with communications in a post-literate situation...

So, I find that most of my ideas of solutions resemble science fiction for some reason:


Exhibit A) Ghost in the Shell
The premise here is pretty simple. The main characters are government agents who volunteered to turn their bodies into hybrids between corporeality and digital products. As a result, they're hyper badasses. As to be expected, existential questions regarding identity's relation to technology ensues. Highly recommended: plays out like an action film. See it above on youtube links or by DVD from Lib West



Exhibit B: Tetsuo The Iron Man
This one's for adventurous types only. At 60 minutes, this is the fastest paced feature I've ever seen. The concerns are similar to Ghost, but here, it's more involved with industrial products rather than computer-age stuff (so, the difference between hooking your body up to nanobots and hooking it up to industrial products like drills).

Note that both of these are Japanese. Tokyo definitely looks like the city of the future (it's caught up and surpassed the future LA of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner), but what I'm interested in in both of these films are the integration of technology into the human body.

As per the lecture from last week, we're dealing now with a technology that's, well, smarter than us, and if we're to oversee it as operators, the question is how, I guess, that role's to be facilitated. These films (and others like them) suggest that, y'know, we'll eventually integrate these things into our bodies. Of the two, Ghost in the Shell probably has the more interesting ideas about how our bodies interact and deal with technologies (see it, c'mon, it's only like 80 minutes long...)

So, what's the telos? Where do these things all end up? At its current clip, the telos of computing technologies are to move ever and ever further into human communication, determining new automatisms for interactions and relations ("automatisms" in the Cavellian sense, only extrapolated from cinematic codes to vague "communication" tendencies). If that's the essence (maybe), then the accident would be these human-driven poisonings of our natural ecosystem.

So, with this new apparatus, what's the future with this apparatus?

Uh.......