StyleSheet IJIE

Announcement

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

ISSN 1614-1687

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Ethics of Waste in the Information Society

edited by Matthias Feilhauer and Soenke Zehle

Editors of this issue:

Matthias Feilhauer

E-Mail:

matthias.feilhauer@web.de

Dr. Soenke Zehle

Saarland University, Germany

E-Mail:

s.zehle@mx.uni-saarland.de

Editors of IRIE

Prof. Dr. Rafael Capurro (Editor in Chief),

University of Applied Sciences, Stuttgart, Germany,

Wolframstr. 32, D-70191 Stuttgart
E-Mail:

rafael@capurro.de

Prof. Dr. Johannes Britz,

University of Wisconsin-

Milwaukee, USA University of Pretoria, South Africa

E-Mail:

britz@uwm.edu

Prof. Dr. Thomas Hausmanninger,

University of

Augsburg, Germany, Universitätsstr. 10 , D-86135

Augsburg
E-Mail:

thomas.hausmanninger@kthf.uni-

augsburg.de

Prof. Dr. Makoto Nakada,

University of Tsukuba,

Japan,

Tennodai, Tsukuba, 305-8577 Ibaraki

E-Mail:

nakadamakoto@msd.biglobe.ne.jp

Dr. Felix Weil,

QUIBIQ, Stuttgart, Germany,

Heßbrühlstr. 11, D-70565 Stuttgart
E-Mail:

felix.weil@quibiq.de

Editorial Office

Marcus Apel

Rotebühlstr. 145, D-70197 Stuttgart

E-Mail:

MarcusApel@gmx.info

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Editorial: On IRIE Vol. 11

IRIE,  designed  as  a  pure  online  journal,  new
issues  announced  by  email,  downloadable  and
fully  readable  as  e-paper  –  in  2003  the  founding

editors really thought they have created a zero
waste journal. But now we learned that much

more has to be taken into account if one really
wants to calculate the ecological bottom line of
IRIE, including the electricity consumed by hosting

the journal as well as reading it and above all the
construction

and

disposal of the hardware en-

gaged. Ultimately this expansion of the scope of
our respective self assessment leads to an expan-

sion of the scope of information ethics itself.

Figure 1: Monitor trade – Lagos, Nigeria - © Kristian Buus,

(

http://kristianbuus.com

), Greenpeace Int

With this issue, IRIE – dedicated to the develop-

ment of information ethics as a reflexive practice
and conceptual horizon – aims to engage itself

with the broad range of materials involved in the
very acts and processes of communication, infor-

mation, and knowledge production. This includes,
but is not limited to, the instruments we employ,

use, and discard in ever-shorter cycles of con-

sumption, outpacing our efforts to develop appro-
priate mechanisms of disposal and recycling: from

old television sets to LCD and plasma displays,
from old disk drives to flash cards and RFID chips.

Figure 2: E-waste open burning in China

http://ewasteguide.info

)

Used locally, but designed, produced, and dis-

carded across the world, the usage of these in-
struments – things – raises a lot of questions

whose technical and political implications are
increasingly being explored in an emerging regula-
tory regime, but whose info-ethical dimensions

deserve greater attention as they require us to
revisit cherished assumptions regarding the scope

and desirability of information-societal develop-
ments as we know them.

Figure 3: Monitor (CRT) Storage - Hong Kong's New Territories

area, © Basel Action Network (BAN) 2009,
(

http://www.ban.org

)

The contributions to this issue offer the concept of

network ecologies as a way to open info-ethical
reflection to geophilosophical perspectives (Zehle),

revisit the history of electronics activism and
regulation (Smith, Fonseca and de Carvalho Matie-

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Editorial: On IRIE Vol. 11

lo), reflect on the need to rethink waste or debris

as resource for socio-technological innovation and
survival (Vallauri, Renno), attend to the ecological

impact of networks of distributed labor (Miller) and
the biopolitical dimension of the simultaneous
governance of waste and work (Rossiter), remind

us of the material embeddedness of all info-
ethical, geophilosophical reflection to encourage

the embrace of an ethics of passage (Carter), and
insist on the need to take abundance rather than
scarcity as point of departure and reference and

develop holistic approaches attentive to their
complex relationship (Verzola).

Together, the authors offer themselves as interlo-
cutors in info-ethical exchanges, some directly,

some from within different (perhaps even incom-

mensurable) analytical frameworks, recalling that
acts of translation are always already involved in

any attempt of ethical reflection.

Sincerely,

Matthias Feilhauer, Soenke Zehle

and the editors



Please do not print this issue unless you

really need to ;-)

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

www.i-r-i-e.net

ISSN 1614-1687

Soenke Zehle:

Network Ecologies:
Geophilosophy between Conflict and Cartographies of Abundance

Abstract:

In the context of network-ecological thought, information ethics is perhaps best understood as a transversal

reflexive practice, aimed at identifying the stakes attending the creation, consumption, and disposal of infor-
mation technologies. To situate itself as well as potential interlocutors, such a thought requires correspon-

dingly complex cartographies, a multidimensional mapping of practices and presuppositions, of individual,
collective, institutional actors as well as the conditions of possibility of their mutual engagement. Such carto-

graphies do not assume the existence of the „local― or the „global― as a given. Instead, they attend to the
way human and non-human actors and the discursive and material practices they are involved in contribute

to construction and reconstruction of geocultural formations. Reapproached from within such a „network-
ecological― horizon, information ethics becomes geophilosophy, generating new modalities of intervention in
the conflictual dynamics associated with the social-economic life of waste.

Agenda:

Author:

Dr. Soenke Zehle

1) Transcultural Media Studies Project, FR 4.3, Saarland University, 66041 Saarbrücken, Germany



+49-(0)681-302-3292



s.zehle@mx.uni-saarland.de



www.uni-saarland.de/tms

2) Media Art and Design, Academy of Fine Arts, Keplerstr. 3-5, 66117 Saarbrücken, Germany



+49-(0)681-92652-188



s.zehle@hbksaar.de



www.media.hbksaar.de



Relevant Publications:



„Kein Anschluss? Green IT ist noch nicht Fair IT.― c't 5 (2008).



„Network Ecologies: Documenting Depletion, Exhausting Exposure‖. Urban China 33 (2008).



„Toward a Cosmopolitics of the Commons: When Eco-Politics Meets Info-Politics.― In Butt, D.,
Bywater, J., Paul, N. (Eds), Place: Local Knowledge and New Media Practice. Newcastle upon

Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.



incommunicado reader

. Eds. Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle. Amsterdam: Institute of Net-

work Cultures, 2005.



„Notes on Cross-Border Environmental Justice Education.― In Adamson, J., Evans, M. M.,

Stein, R. (Eds), The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 2002.



„Het Virtuele Water : Over de Hydropolitik van de IT-boom.― In AS: media tijdschrift 160
(2001).



„Eco-Politics at the Site of Virtual Production: Environmental Justice Organizing in Silicon Val-
ley.― In Angermüller, J., et al. (Eds), Hybrid Spaces: Theory, Culture, Economy. Münster: Lit
Verlag, 2000.

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Soenke Zehle:
Network Ecologies: Geophilosophy between Conflict and Cartographies of Abundance

Info-Ethics as Geophilosophy

The idea of nature as an aesthetic and normative

exteriority appears to offer a safe position of ethico-
epistemological privilege from which to condemn

various aspects of information-technological moder-
nization. But it is perhaps only by acknowledging
that the contradictory consequences of the spread

of electronics cannot be easily mapped onto an
antagonism of nature versus technology that the

idea of network ecologies becomes comprehensible.

Defined here as a conceptual framework as well as a
broad transversal practice that mobilizes multiple

understandings of the ecological - cultural, econom-

ic, political, social - in its approach to digital media
and its wide-ranging effects, network ecologies are
an attempt to reframe questions associated with the

(toxic) materiality of information technology in non-
dichotomous ways.

To speak of network ecologies is to conjoin two
terms that appear to refer to different and distinct

epistemological and ontological domains. In its most
basic sense, „network ecologies― might simply be

(mis)read  as  a  reiteration  of  a  culture/nature  di-
chotomy,  of  old  questions  regarding  the  „two  cul-
tures―  assumed  to  constitute  and  maintain  such  a

dichotomy, and of the difficulty of bridging the gap
that both defines and divides them.

Instead, „net-

work ecologies― is an attempt to bring into play,
remix and translate two sets of concepts, one origi-

1 Such a a broad understanding of ecology is informed by a

number of philosophical perspectives, including the work of
Felix Guattari and Isabelle Stengers and their concerns with

the modalities of the production of subjectivity, the emphasis

on an affirmation of the capacity for self-organization, and
the potential of a truly cosmopolitical understanding of poli-

tics (beyond subject-object distinctions and a logic of repre-
sentation).

2 Many references to ecology reaffirm not only a separation

between natural and symbolic environments, but an under-

standing of the ecological as a sphere ruled by equilibrium
rather than conflict and complexity, and correspondingly cast

(and constrain) information, knowledge, and media ecologies
as so many efforts to promote hygiene (order) in our spheres

of communication. This is not what is meant here. There are
no two cultures, or more precisely, their existence is a conse-

quence of very specific disciplinary and methodological set-
tlements. These have been stabilized by an intra-institutional

division of labor (especially, but not exclusively, in the univer-
sity) that frequently invokes essential epistemological and

ontological differences without being able to substantiate

them (which is one reason why network ecologies have no
single disciplinary location in the academic research matrix).

nating in the world of socio-technological infrastruc-
tures of interdependence, their protocols and modes

of production, another in the world of biological
processes, their complexity and organicity.

Needless to say, these worlds overlap, and are

involved in a process of mutual constitution and

configuration, but the dominant „distribution of the
sensible― (Jacques Ranciere) maintains their separa-
tion. As such, one of the first tasks of a network-

ecologically inspired information ethics is to make
visible how and why such a distribution of the

sensible is maintained, attend to its roots in specific
discursive and regulatory regimes, and explore its
effects, including the separation of activist agendas
and organizing efforts that could challenge this
distribution if they were to overcome such a separa-

tion and in fact propose (and enact) a different
sense of „worlding―. Far from a thorough ideal-

typical conceptualization, the following sketches
identify distant points on a continuum to focus on
what is involved in efforts to cut across this separa-

tion of worlds.

The world of socio-technological infrastructures of

interdependence is still largely dominated by a
cyberlibertarian approach that celebrates the prom-

ise of dematerialization-through-technology. This
includes an affirmation of the potential for democra-

tization, mainly of expression and access, especially
through the comparatively low cost of digital repro-
duction, less often understood in the broader terms

of a reconfiguration of cultural, economic, and
political relations and other forms of democracy

beyond a logic of representation. Similarly, a variety
of concepts of freedom are invoked to promote a

capacity for self-organization vis-à-vis statist go-
vernmentalities as well as corporate self-regulation.
The focus on civil and political rather than economic,

social, or cultural rights is shared by actors from
state, market and (un)civil society. Far beyond its

information-technological  milieu of origination,  such
a  perspective  has  been  adopted,  incorporated  and
translated  into  multiple  local  idioms  and  political

traditions, ranging from anarchic to neoliberal. Often
framed by a vision of technological transcendence

and  the  promise  of  a  new  type  of  clean  (paradoxi-
cally  post-industrial)  industrialization,  this  approach
has facilitated the reproduction of the  Silicon Valley

template – the establishment of governmentally-
subsidized high-tech clusters – across the globe and

3 As such, the term „network ecologies‖ serve as a heuristic

device, an analytical tool to explore the constitution and the
(material) effects of such a separation.

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Soenke Zehle:
Network Ecologies: Geophilosophy between Conflict and Cartographies of Abundance

attached itself successfully to numerous iterations of
IT policies aimed at the promotion of employment

and wealth through creativity and innovation.

The world of biological processes continues to frame

environmentalisms, whose mainstream and conser-
vationist varieties (and their roots in colonial wilder-

ness aesthetics) have by now been thoroughly
examined but failed to fundamentally alter their
anti-urban bias and corresponding lack of interest in

urban populations. Many environmentalists have
codified a purified wilderness aesthetic of distinctly

Euro-American provenance as the epitome of an
ecopolitical sensibility, obscuring the extent to which
the very idea of a „wilderness― has historically been
intertwined with colonial

terra nullius

doctrines and

the displacement of indigenous peoples. Still a

dominant, if no longer uncontested, perspective in
international environmentalism, mainstream con-

cepts of sustainability have further compromised the
potential reach of ecopolitical approaches by fore-
grounding market-based responses to environmental

crisis. Alliances with labor organizations (green jobs,
occupational health and safety) have been the

exception not least because for many environmen-
talism concerns itself with non-human nature alone.
Often understood in terms of „post-material‖ needs,

such environmentalisms have been conceptually and
institutionally articulated over and against the tradi-

tions and organizations of class-based politics.
Because of their essentialist tendencies, such envi-

ronmentalisms have been similarly reluctant to
engage questions of migration.

The aim of network ecologies is not a politics of

nature that promises to simply ground an informa-

tion-technological discourse seemingly limited by its
fascination with a new brand of post-industrialism.
Nor are network ecologies needed to advance

corporate accountability, resource efficiency, zero
waste, bans on the export of hazardous wastes, or

other approaches already promoted by electronics
activists. But ecological crisis is not so much (or not
only) the consequence of an objective assessment

of ecological degradation that identify ‗limits of
growth‘, ‗maximum footprints‘, etc. Crisis occurs

because of challenges to hegemonic conceptualiza-
tions of nature and their administrative-technocratic
institutionalization in specific regimes of accumula-

tion and appropriation. Network ecologies can
perhaps map this crisis.

Like most ecopolitical concerns, e-waste is simulta-
neously a cultural, ecological, economic, ethical,

legal, natural-scientific, philosophical and technolo-
gical issue that evades – perhaps even defies –

disciplinary and methodological territorialization.
Approached from within the analytical horizon of

network  ecologies,  „e-waste―  remains  a  complex,
even elusive referent, not  easily stabilized either as
an  object  of  regulation  and  governance  or  as  an

active agent in the restructuring of economies and
environments. Consequently, at least in the context

of this issue, the aim is less to specify a definition to
be operationalized (this already occurs in existing
policy and research efforts) than to think of the

shifting meaning of such a term as complementary
points of entry for info-ethical inquiry and conceptu-

alization.

In the context  of network-ecological thought, infor-
mation  ethics  is  perhaps  best  understood  as  a
transversal  reflexive  practice,  aimed  at  identifying

the stakes attending the creation, consumption, and
disposal of information technologies. To situate itself

as  well  as  potential  interlocutors,  such  a  thought
requires  correspondingly  complex  cartographies,  a
multidimensional  mapping  of  practices  and  presup-

positions, of individual, collective, institutional actors
as well as the conditions of possibility of their mu-

tual engagement. Such cartographies do not assume
the existence of the „local‖ or the „global― as given.
Instead, they attend to the way human and non-

human actors and the discursive and material prac-
tices they are involved in contribute to construction

and reconstruction of geocultural formations. In
short, reapproached from within such a „network-

ecological―  horizon,  information  ethics  becomes
geophilosophy,  generating  new  modalities  of  inter-
vention  in  the  conflictual  dynamics  associated  with

the social-economic life of waste.

Migrating in and across both of the worlds of socio-

technological infrastructures of interdependence,
and the world of biological processes, our informa-

tion-technological gadgets have become complex
combinations that involve hundreds of materials,

multiple knowledges and numerous sites of produc-
tion, use, and disposal. It is because of this com-
plexity that network-ecological reflection might as

well take these gadgets as its point of departure and
reference. Such reflection is necessarily transversal,

cutting  across  many  sectors  and  fields  –  of  design
and  development,  of  research  and  scientific  know-
ledge  production,  of  activism,  governance  and

regulation. This transversality also makes it more
complex – much more complex than the common

invocation of the „local― and the „global― might have
it – and necessarily involves choices: what does and

does not end up on such a map, what kind of visibil-
ity is such a map meant to create, what kind of
activity and what kind of politics is it designed to

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Soenke Zehle:
Network Ecologies: Geophilosophy between Conflict and Cartographies of Abundance

enable? It is here that the question of ethics asserts
itself, giving information-ethics a key role to play in

the cartographic practice that is geophilosophy.

Sustainable Electronics

The scope and topicality of the current debate

around  fair,  green,  and  sustainable  electronics  is
itself  in  need  of  explanation.  Notwithstanding    the
intensity  of  current  „Green  IT―  public  relations  and

re-branding strategies of electronics companies, the
sudden visibility of „e-waste― cannot simply be

accounted for by way of reference to a new spirit of
corporate responsibility. On the contrary, the current
visibility of the topic is itself the consequence of a
decade-long effort to make visible the „dark side of
the chip― – mostly a struggle against dominant

representations of electronics as a clean industry as
well as against the corporate and governmental

actors promoting such a view.

The emergent transnational network of organizing

around environmental and social justice issues in the
global networks of electronics production is arguably

one  of  the  most  vital  area  of  a  „network  culture―
that  is  only  gradually  engaging  broader  ecopolitical
concerns.  In  their  efforts  to  initiate  and  frame  this

debate, these actors (see below for a list) have
already (and successfully) criticized conceptual

frameworks that consider environmentalism a post-
materialist luxury rather than a matter of survival. In
doing so, they have already expanded the ecopoliti-

cal idiom to include issues of occupational health
and safety or extend the „fair trade― framework to

resource extraction. Electronics activism has defined
a comprehensive agenda of environmental and

economic justice, drawing on a number of perspec-
tives such as environmental debt, environmental
and resource rights, political and social ecology,

resource efficiency, and occupational health and
safety. Perspectives that reframe 'end-of-life'

through  experimental  strategies  of  re-use  are  tap-
ping  into  multiple  traditions  of  hacktivism,  reverse
engineering  and  related  peer-to-peer  approaches

that have been adopted beyond the field of free
software development to advance the construction

of „free‖ or „open― (non-proprietary) hardware.

In addition to giving rise to concrete initiatives in the

areas of fair production, procurement and disposal,
electronics activism also encourages a re-

appropriation  of  the  notion  of  sustainability.  Since
the  1992  UN  „Earth  Summit―,  sustainability  has
featured  prominently  in  policy  initiatives.  For  some

the policy outcomes have been discredited by their

vagueness and widespread subordination to corpo-
rate visions of self-regulation. For others, however,

the  sustainability  trope  should  be  more  usefully
reconceptualized  in  terms  of  the  outcomes  of  eco-
logical  distribution  conflicts.  According  to  ecological

economists, neoclassical economics must be chal-
lenged not only because of its one-size-fits-all

commitments to „trade liberalization― and export-
oriented growth, but because its conceptual idiom is
incapable of articulating the conflicts such commit-

ments – and the policies based on them – necessari-
ly provoke and aggravate. The agendas of main-

stream and increasingly corporate environmental-
isms articulated around the idea of sustainability

often render these conflictual dimensions of strug-
gles over nature invisible.

Beyond consensus-oriented paradigms of environ-

mental governance, network ecologies must take

seriously this antagonistic dimension. Reapproached
from such a conflictual perspective, e-waste finds
itself less a passive object of environmental gover-

nance than an active element in numerous situa-
tions of conflict. Its generation and (still largely

illegal) dissemination is inscribed in the matrix of old
North-South and new East-West conflicts over
resource access and distribution, anxious foreign

policy exchanges debating the merits of a securitiza-
tion of global resource flows (indicating a resignifi-

cation of e-waste as element in national resource
strategies), volatile financial markets thriving on

resource  futures,  and  the  explosion  of  foreign
(especially Chinese)  direct  investment in raw mate-
rials  extraction  across  the  Global  South.  A  simple

return to a politics of nature can neither identify the
eco-social cost of such developments nor enable

corresponding forms of political mobilization. Here,
too, information-ethics has a key role to play in the
comparative analysis of concepts of (distributive,

environmental, social) justice, and in the affirmation
of concepts of the political that address antagonism

as key feature of eco-politics rather than merely
manage it in a politics of consensus.

Cartographies of Abundance

Of all the suggestions proposed by contributors to

this issue, it is perhaps the affirmation of the prima-

cy of abundance over scarcity that is most startling
in dealing with what offers itself so obviously as an
environmental and social crisis – the generation of

massive amounts of discarded electronics and their
global disposal. The crisis media strategies that

feature images of e-waste disposal sites from across
the world stress the urgency of new forms of regula-

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Soenke Zehle:
Network Ecologies: Geophilosophy between Conflict and Cartographies of Abundance

tion. And indeed, given the scope of the crisis, such
images call for a politics of emergency. Notwith-

standing its positive effects (immediate phase-out of
toxic substances, higher occupational and health
standards, open architectures that facilitate recy-

cling and reuse), such a politics may come at a cost
if it reduces the possible impact of such images of

social  and  environmental  transformation  to  a  mere
invocation  of  the  logic  of  accountability,  itself  the
core  concept  of  a  politics  of  representation  that

delegates key tasks of cultural, economic, and social
innovation.

If charting cartographies of abundance can be a first
step, it can only do so from within a broad (geophi-
losophical) horizon that does not limit itself to a
logic of accountability, as important as such de-

mands have been (especially in the call for extended
producer responsibility to advance new green design

and take-back strategies). Rather than bringing into
being new forms of governance, attending to the
question of waste has a much broader potential to

disrupt the dominant „distribution of the sensible‖.
What runs across all contributions is a call to shift

from the language of waste to one of potentiality, to
open possibilities of interaction far beyond the
superficial sense of ―Web 2.0‖ features – possibilities

of participating, instead, in the design and construc-
tion of our information and communication technol-

ogies, and of creating corresponding (cultural,
economic, social) conditions of possibility.

Abundance offers itself as an effective term to
counter the exclusive emphasis on scarcity, and at

least complement narrow senses of „freedom from―
(interference). Abundance is about the „freedom to―

create, share, but also live in an unpolluted envi-
ronment or access resources essential to biological
and cultural survival. The illegal disposal of e-waste

is troubling not merely because it is illegal; whether
„legality― makes it any less hazardous remains to be

seen,  as  this  involves  a  variety  of  struggles  over
thresholds  and  standards  whose  determination  is
itself  the  outcome  of  multiple  contestations.  Toxic

releases in the course of production, consumption,
and disposal should disturb us because they endan-

ger local resource commons (air, soil, water), linking
places affected by such pollution, but also people
resisting it in multiple and inspiring ways in a geo-

graphy of its own.

Because of such „network ecological‖ linkages that

cut across borders, to think of abundance is to think
not only of the commons, but also of the common –

of possible figures and socialities in whose name
such cross-border strategies of mutual exchange

and support may be advanced. This, too, is a ques-
tion raised by the images of crisis, but their possible

impact will remain limited if we do not take seriously
the exaustion not only of the power of exposure
(compassion fatigue) but of a whole range of idioms

of solidarity that have lost their ability to engender a
post-statist politics that moves across borders

(tricontinentalism). Another key question for infor-
mation-ethics to address: given the globality of the
issues under consideration, what is the idiom of

relation capable of articulating a new ethics of
encounter and mutual engagement?

To ask for such a shift in emphasis – from scarcity
to abundance, from accountability to the common -
is to ask where the dominance of scarcity originates,
and where our mutual (ecological) involvements (of

which cross-border flows of products and pollution
constantly remind us) is marginalized in the indivi-

dualist production of subjectivities: where does this
knowledge come from, where is it created and
maintained, what are the architectures and infra-

structures for such processes of education? A net-
work-ecological thought of abundance links the

waste in a disposal site to the waste of a „university
in ruins―, of academic knowledge production increa-
singly compromised by the need to maintain com-

mercial paradigms of accelerating research-to-
market, and degree systems that are themselves

based on a logic of scarcity. To reflect on waste
from such a perspective is to ask where the desig-

nation as „waste― is made – in the design phase,
where proprietary approaches lock users into single
vendors, in standardization debates where closed

formats prevent the sharing of content and material,
in educational processes where certificates valorize

familiarity  with  proprietary  products  but  don't  re-
ward  autonomous  learning  and  alternative  know-
ledges?  Clearly,  „waste―  generates  multiple  discur-

sivities and agencies. And to explore the transversal
connections and exclusions at work firmly links

„waste― to the realm of the political.

Caution is, as always, called for in approaching the

selective incorporation of the grassroots into aca-
demic strategies of rebranding and reinstitutionaliza-

tion, as select linkages to extra-academic milieus are
perfectly compatible with the pursuit of otherwise
rather narrow strategies of „excellence― and „inno-

vation―. But it is important to remember that carto-
graphies of waste include new research geogra-

phies, where a great deal of the empirical research
is actually conducted outside the academy. Strug-

gles  over  the  public  release  of  occupational  health
and  safety  studies  in  electronics  manufacturing  are
a  case  in  point,  but  so  are  the  (unauthorized)  re-

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Soenke Zehle:
Network Ecologies: Geophilosophy between Conflict and Cartographies of Abundance

leases of safety and toxics information from suppli-
ers, who are thereby retrieved from the relative

anonymity  of  supply  networks  and  reattached  to
corporate  brands,  breaking  the  fire  walls  between
design  and  manufacturing  established  through

outsourcing strategies. It is for this reason that this
issue foregrounds activist actors and agendas. And

when we encounter „e-waste―, it us up to us wheth-
er we accept the narratives that constitute these
objects as waste, or whether we take the opportuni-

ty to think about them „from the end―, exploring
„waste― not solely as a problem of environmental

regulation but as a radically different vantage point.

Organizations



Asia Monitor Resource Center
<

http://www.amrc.org.hk



Asian Network for the Rights Of Occupa-
tional Accident Victims
<

http://www.anroav.org



Basel Action Network
<

http://www.ban.org



Bricolabs Shared Network
<

http://bricolabs.net



Business & Human Rights Resource Centre
<

http://www.business-humanrights.org



Dyne <

http://dyne.org



Edu-Factory Collective
<

http://www.edu-factory.org



European Coalition for Corporate Justice
<

http://www.corporatejustice.org



European Work Hazards Network
<

http://www.ewhn.eu



Greenpeace International
<

http://www.greenpeace.org/electronics



Hazards Magazine
<

http://www.hazards.org



IMF - International Metalworkers Federation
<

http://www.imfmetal.org



Make IT Fair <

http://makeitfair.org



Maquiladora Health & Safety Support Net-
work <

http://mhssn.igc.org



Maquila Solidarity Network
<

http://en.maquilasolidarity.org



Peer-to-Peer Foundation
<

http://p2pfoundation.net



International Labour Foundation for Sus-
tainable Development
<

http://www.sustainlabour.org



World Economy, Ecology & Development
<

http://pcglobal.org



Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition
<

http://www.svtc.org



Centre for Research on Multinational Corpo-
rations <

http://somo.nl



Students and Scholars Against Corporate
Misbehaviour <

http://sacom.hk



Taiwan Environmental Action Network
<

http://www.iepanet.org



Toxics Link <

http://www.toxicslink.org

For additional contacts, see the Good Electronics

Network <

http://goodelectronics.org

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

www.i-r-i-e.net

ISSN 1614-1687

Ted Smith:

Why we are „Challenging the Chip“:
The Challenges of Sustainability in Electronics

Abstract

Ted Smith, co-founder of some of the first organizing efforts in the field of electronics activism, recounts the

transformation of Silicon Valley from an agricultural center into the first hub of a global electronics industry
and the rise of electronics activism in response to growing evidence of the industry's environmental and

occupational health hazards. From their original focus on Silicon Valley, activists have broadened their effort
to focus on end-of-life issues, especially through the demand for extended producer responsibility. They also

address the globalization of production hazards, addressed through an „International Campaign for Responsi-
ble Technology‖ that links local actors and organizations in North America, Europe, and Asia in a global effort

to advance a comprehensive agenda of labor rights and environmental justice.

Agenda

Author

Ted Smith



Ted Smith is the founder of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (

www.svtc.org

) and the International

Campaign for Responsible Technology and is Chair of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition

(

www.electronicstakeback.com



tsmith@igc.org



Relevant Publications: Smith, Ted, Sonnenfeld, David A., Pellow, David Naguib (Eds).

Challenging the

Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry

. Philadelphia: Temple

University Press, 2006.

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Ted Smith:
Why we are "Challenging the Chip": The Challenges of Sustainability in Electronics

Background and History of
Occupational and Environment
Health Concerns

Fifty years ago, the agricultural valley south of San

Francisco, California was known as the Valley of
Heart‘s Delight because it produced such abundant

fruits and vegetables. Today it is known worldwide
as Silicon Valley, and the high-tech revolution that
started here has transformed the world. Many of the

workers who used to work in the fields picking fruit
and vegetables became electronics workers, making

semiconductor  chips,  disk  drives  and  circuit  boards
for  the  high-tech  revolution.  Little  did  they  know
that  they  were  guinea  pigs  in  a  terrible  toxic  ex-

periment.

The first public indications that the electronics
industry – which called itself the „clean industry‖ –

was in fact a hazardous industry that depended on
toxic chemicals to make its products came from
research by the Santa Clara Center for Occupational

Safety and Health (SCCOSH), formed in the mid-
1970s. SCCOSH documented occupational illness in

electronics workers and published the first materials
on the chemical hazards in the industry.

Alida Hernandez was one of the many fruit process-
ing workers who were ‗re-invented‘ as a ‗clean room‘

worker and didn‘t realise that she was sacrificing her
health in a pattern that would soon be replicated
around the world. No one ever told her that her

exposure to electronics solvents at IBM‘s disk drive
factory in San Jose, CA, would lead to her cancer.

She is just one of many who have suffered dreadful
diseases without realising what they had signed up
for.

As the toxic troubles emerged in other parts of the

US and then throughout the world, other casualties
were discovered - the ‗collateral damage‘ of the
high-tech revolution. Unfortunately, there are too

many stories of other electronics workers suffering
similar illnesses and giving birth to children with

serious birth defects. While the electronics industry
has vigorously resisted comprehensive health stu-

dies of its workers, data continues to emerge con-
necting work in electronics factories to serious
health problems for workers and their children. This

is especially crucial since all around the world most
electronics production workers are women of child-

bearing age. Here are some examples:



Three epidemiological studies done in the US all
found high rates of miscarriages among semi-
conductor workers.



IBM maintained a ‗corporate mortality file‘ which
documented that, over a 30-year period, IBM
workers with exposure to chemicals died
younger and more frequently from toxic-related

cancers than the national average.



The Scottish Health and Safety Agency con-
ducted a health study of workers at National

Semiconductor in Scotland

and found dispro-

portionately high rates of cancer among them.



After  years  of  resistance,  the  Semiconductor
Industry  Association  has  contracted  with  Van-
derbilt  University  to  conduct  a  chip  industry
worker health study to assess the cancer risk to

semiconductor workers. The results are ex-
pected in 2010.



In their groundbreaking article ‗Cancer and
Reproductive Risks in the Semiconductor Indus-
try‘, Joseph Ladou, MD, and John C Bailar III,
PhD, documented the serious health concerns of

semiconductor workers.

The environmental and health problems have not

been limited to production workers. In 1982, with
the discovery of widespread chlorinated solvent

pollution in the groundwater throughout Santa Clara
country (now called Silicon Valley), SCCOSH spun

off  a  community-based  organization  called  Silicon
Valley  Toxics  Coalition  to  focus  on  the  environ-
mental  aspects  of  high-tech  pollution,  primarily

related to the production processes. More than 100
groundwater pollution sites were discovered at high-

tech facilities throughout Silicon Valley and 29 of
them – including IBM, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Ad-

vanced Micro Devices, National Semiconductor and
other well known companies - were eventually listed
by USEPA as „superfund sites‖

, a classification used

for the worst contamination sites in the country.

Hundreds of families came forward to file lawsuits
alleging that their children‘s birth defects and cancer

were caused by drinking polluted water. Similar
patterns of groundwater pollution were well docu-

mented in several other high-tech centers around
the U.S., including Austin, Texas, Albuquerque, New
Mexico, and Phoenix, Arizona.

1   Ladou.
2   Clapp.
3   Hesa.
4   SVTC, Maps of Silicon Valley Groundwater Contamination.

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Ted Smith:
Why we are "Challenging the Chip": The Challenges of Sustainability in Electronics

The initial focus on groundwater pollution and
cleanup evolved into a broader focus on air pollution

and then pollution prevention. Some limited pro-
gress has been made to implement policies to
reduce these hazards in Silicon Valley as the indus-

try began its global expansion.

The  initial  focus  on  Silicon  Valley  expands  in
two  directions:  a  focus  on  end-of-life  and  a
focus  on  the  globalization  of  production  haz-

ards

A. The focus on Product End-of-
Life Problems and Extended
Producer Responsibility

In the 1990s, the focus on electronics and the

environment began to broaden from production-
related hazards to product related hazards, particu-
larly the end-of-life challenges of disposing of mil-

lions of obsolete electronic products that contained
significant quantities of hazardous materials such as

lead,  cadmium,  mercury,  brominated  flame  retar-
dants,  etc.    The  European  Union  developed  two
watershed  laws  –  the  Restriction  on  Hazardous

Materials (RoHS) and the Waste Electronic and
Electrical Equipment (WEEE) directive to reduce the

hazardous  materials  in  electronic  products  and  to
establish  Extended  Producer  Responsibility  to  re-
quire  electronics  manufacturers  to  accept  life  cycle

responsibility for their products. There were no
similar initiatives in the US at the time, and in fact

the US electronics industry – along with the US
Trade representative – made unsuccessful attempts

to block the E.U initiatives.

Activists in the U.S. were alarmed to learn about

these U.S. industry efforts, and organized their own
campaign that showed that producer responsibility,

far from being the kind of „command and control‖
regulation lambasted by US industry in the past,
simply

internalizes previously externalized

costs of

pollution, offers electronics companies

flexibility to

innovate

in how they meet its targets for recycling

and chemical phase-outs, and encourages them to

compete on grounds of design and recycling effi-

ciency

What is Extended Producer Responsibility ?

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a policy
approach that holds manufacturers accountable for

the full costs of their products at every stage in their
lifecycle. EPR is a strategy that requires producers

take back their products at the end of their useful
lives, or pay a recycling contractor to do so, thereby

internalizing  the  costs  of  recycling  or  disposal  in  a
manufacturer‘s  bottom  line.  When  companies  know
that  they  will  bear  the  costs  of  product  return  and

recycling, they are more likely to redesign their
products for easier and safer handling at each step

in  the  lifecycle.  This  approach  enforces  a  design
strategy  that  takes  into  account  the  upstream
environmental  impacts  inherent  in  the  selection,

mining and extraction of materials, the health and
environmental impacts to workers and surrounding

communities during the production process itself,
and downstream impacts during use, recycling and

disposal of the products. In short, by requiring a
company to take its products back, EPR aims to
force the company to make the products cleaner in
the first place.

The European Union Model and the Soul of
Globalization

In the 1990s, American labor, health, and environ-

mental non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
concerned about the electronics industry‘s impact

sought to turn the process of economic and political
globalization to their advantage. Forming the

Inter-

national Campaign for Responsible Technology

(ICRT)

in the 1990s, NGOs that had worked mainly

at the local level first built national and then interna-

tional ties to share information and strategies and
conduct campaigns across borders (see „From Grass

Roots to Global,‖ in Challenging the Chip:Labor
Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global

Electronics Industry). NGOs discovered a promising,
comprehensive policy solution in EPR, as embodied
in the European Union‘s (EU) proposed directives on

electronic waste and toxics reduction. Activists
recognized that by raising standards for the produc-

tion and disposal of electronics in Europe, the EU
directives offered the best tool for raising standards
in the United States without sweeping its toxic

waste under developing countries‘ rugs.

EPR promised to promote higher environmental and
workplace safety benefits worldwide, rather than
shifting risk abroad and fueling a downward spiral in

standards. By requiring producers to take back their
products, redesign them for easier recycling, and

phase out some of the most dangerous toxics, the
EU‘s directives sought to reduce risk at each stage

5 See EPR Working Group for more information

http://www.eprworkinggroup.org

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Ted Smith:
Why we are "Challenging the Chip": The Challenges of Sustainability in Electronics

of a product‘s lifecycle wherever it occurred in the
globalized electronics industry. Rather than exerting

downward pressure on environmental and labor
protections, EPR could turn globalization into a force
that conditioned access to major world markets on

meeting more stringent norms for design and dis-
posal. In the era of global markets, EPR pushes

transnational corporations to meet the highest
standards set in any major market because it is
expensive to manufacture different product lines for

different regional markets. In addition, if companies
were to produce more hazardous and less hazard-

ous versions of their products for different markets,
they would be opening themselves up to public and

regulatory criticism (as well as potential liability) for
employing an environmental double standard that
poses greater risks to some customers and regions.

As a sign of the internationalization of electronics

regulation and activism, the ICRT‘s first step in
embracing EPR was to defend Europe‘s ability to
enact it against the US government‘s and the indus-

try‘s objections. In 1998, the

American Electronics

Association (AEA)

, a major trade association, con-

vinced the US Trade Representative (USTR) and the
Mission to the European Union to fight the European
directives.

The trade associations argued that

mandated phase-outs of toxic materials would
undermine the „functionality, safety and reliability‖

of their products, and „impede the development of
new technologies and products, increase costs, and

restrict global trade in these products‖

(Hunter and

Lopez paper for AEA, 1999)

. The trade associations

also alleged that requiring producers to assume

financial responsibility for collecting and processing
e-waste violated the General Agreement on Tariffs

and Trade (GATT) rules against trade restraints. The
US Mission in Brussels agreed, arguing to the EU
that the directives raised „unnecessary barriers to

trade, particularly the ban on certain materials,
burdensome take-back requirements for end of life

equipment, and mandated design standards‖.

In May 1999, a group of environmental activists

from Europe and the US met in Soesterberg, The
Netherlands, to develop a way to defend the direc-

tives from US lobbying and to create a strategy to
„get out ahead‖ of the next generation of electronics
problems, rather than continuing to play „catch up‖

by trying to clean up the problems created by the
previous generation of products. There was a keen

awareness that Moore‘s law was driving change so
quickly that governments were hopeless in their

6 <http://www.aeanet.org>.

efforts to regulate such a constantly moving target.
The Soesterberg group developed a new vision of

sustainability to track the dynamism of Moore‘s law:

Each new generation of technical improvements

in electronic products should include parallel and

proportional improvements in environmental,

health and safety, as well as social justice at-

tributes.

Adopted by the Trans-Atlantic Network for Clean
Production, May 16, 1999

The ICRT then wrote a legal response to the indus-
try‘s claims, showing how industry had erred in
arguing that the EU directives were not protected by

GATT‘s exemptions. The ICRT also mobilized a
coalition of hundreds of labor, environmental, and

community organizations expressing support for the
EU directives and calling on then Vice President
Albert Gore to rein in the USTR‘s lobbying efforts.

While industry cast the directives as a matter of
„free trade‖ versus „protectionism,‖ activists used

the letter to Gore to transform the debate into one
about corporate responsibility, sovereignty, and

democracy. Later that same year, as part of the
major WTO mobilization in Seattle, the ICRT organ-
ized a protest against e-waste at Microsoft head-

quarters to further pressure US industry to back off
in its efforts to undermine the EU directives. Micro-

soft was chosen not only because it was a co-host
of the WTO meeting, but also because its constant
software updates push demand for more processing

speed and drive the pace of computer hardware‘s
rapid obsolescence and the growth of e-waste. As a

direct result of this organizing, the USTR backed
down from its lobbying in Europe.

Importing EPR into the United States

During the years 2000-2003, as approval of the EU
legislation was increasingly imminent, an expanding

coalition of NGOs took the lead on introducing EPR
into US debates – initially called the Computer
TakeBack Campaign

, it later expanded into the

Electronics TakeBack Coalition. Although local and
state governments, electronics recyclers, the US

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and indus-
try began discussing how to build an electronics
recycling infrastructure and allocate recycling costs,

they focused on improving practices for dealing with

7 <

http://www.cleanproduction.org/Electronics.Green.php

8 <

http://www.electronicstakeback.com

IRIE

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Ted Smith:
Why we are "Challenging the Chip": The Challenges of Sustainability in Electronics

products at the end of their lives. Had NGOs not
advocated for an EU-style solution, the problem

would  have  been  seen  simply  as  one  of  paying  for
managing  e-waste  responsibly,  rather  than  as  an
opportunity  to  address  the  effects  of  electronics  at

each stage of their lifecycle.

The Future of EPR in the United States

Producer responsibility for electronics has made

impressive inroads in the United States since the

late 1990s. The industry has conceded, in the words
of an invitation to a recent AEA forum on regulation,
that „it is clear that European environmental policy
is setting a pattern for the rest of the world‖

Some of the leading producers have now accepted
that they will have to incorporate the cost of han-

dling their products at the end of their useful lives
into the prices they charge US consumers. The

debate is no longer about „whether‖ to adopt EPR
principles – it is now about „how‖ to do so.

B. The Grassroots Global
Response to Electronics
Production Hazards

By the dawn of the 21st century, most electronics

manufacturing had moved to Asia and other low-
cost areas of the world, bringing with it the same

sets of environmental and health concerns that had
been discovered in the US and Europe but which
were at that point unknown in the new regions.

Soon activists in the developing world began to
encounter and uncover occupational health hazards

and environmental pollution associated with the
latest round of rapid expansion. Global networks of
activists began to emerge to address the hidden

hazards of high-tech development and they are now
working to develop comprehensive, holistic and

coordinated strategies to bring accountability to and
promote sustainability within the global electronics
industry. Included within these networks are groups

that  focus  on  workers  rights,  occupational  health
and  safety,  environmental  pollution,  and  hazardous
waste prevention and cleanup.  Some newer voices
are  beginning  to  question  the  underlying  model  of

Moore‘s  law  that  promotes  rapid  obsolescence  and
the  „throw  away  culture‖  that  is  fueled  by  huge
advertising  budgets  informed  by  state  of  the  art

marketing strategies as well as by young consumers

9 JIG.

grasping for the latest gizmos and whiz bangs. Still
others are beginning to examine the role of software

development  which  operates  in  tandem  with  the
hardware  development  –  each  encouraging  con-
sumers  to  continue  to  buy  more  complex  products

and discard older models. Some have dubbed this
the WINTEL model, named for the 2 main oligopo-

lies Windows (Microsoft) and Intel.

As workers and communities outside of Silicon

Valley began to discover this ‗dark side of the chip‘,
they also began to come together to confront its

‗clean‘  image.    Community  and  worker  based
movements  began  to  emerge  in  other  countries  -
PHASE II in Scotland, Asia Monitor Resource Centre
in Hong Kong, TAVOI in Taiwan, CEREAL in Mexico,
etc. as the grassroots  efforts began to grow into a

global movement. Many of these groups are now
working together internationally through various

networks to develop worker training on occupational
health and safety, to clean up and prevent air and
water pollution, to press the electronics industry to

phase out use of the most toxic chemicals, and to
advocate for a safer, healthier and more just work-

place for production workers.

As the pace of corporate-led globalisation acceler-

ated, grass roots activists realized that they too
needed to develop a robust grassroots global re-

sponse. That is why many of these groups came
together with the

International Campaign for Re-

sponsible Technology

to convene the first Global

Symposium on Strategies for a Sustainable High-
Tech Industry, in 2002, in San Jose, California.

Participants came together to address several re-
lated issues, including:



Rising community and workers‘ health problems.



Deteriorating workers‘ rights.



Increasing water and air pollution.



Growing crisis of electronic waste.



Escalating corporate influence on global
institutions such as the WTO.

An action plan was developed that included a com-
mitment by participants to pool their experiences

into a new book, which became ‗Challenging the
Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the

Global Electronics Industry‘, published in 2006.
Contributors to this pioneering volume include many
of the world‘s most articulate, passionate and pro-

gressive visionaries, scholars and advocates. Here
they not only document the unsustainable and often

IRIE

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Ted Smith:
Why we are "Challenging the Chip": The Challenges of Sustainability in Electronics

devastating practices of the global electronics indus-
try but also chronicle creative ways in which activ-

ists, government agencies and others have at-
tempted to reform the industry -- through resis-
tance, persuasion, and regulation.

One book reviewer captured the importance of the

effort:

‗Challenging the Chip is certainly the most compre-

hensive review of the social, health and environ-

mental consequences of the electronics industry to

date and provides a critical platform for developing

new theoretical and empirical research on the

political economy and ecology of the industry. The

plethora of topics explored also highlights the multi-

plicity of disciplines that can contribute to debates

about the chip industry, including the social sci-

ences, public health, and environmental sciences. A

most impressive feature of the book is the way in

which it developed out of a collaborative partnership

of intellectuals and activists with a shared vision of

sustainability and justice.‘ - Electronic Green Jour-
nal

Since the book‘s publication there have been many
additional efforts by NGOs to move ahead with a
„labor rights and environmental justice‖ agenda for

electronics workers and communities. ANROAV -

the

Asian Network for the Rights of Occupational Acci-
dent Victims

- has increased its focus on electron-

ics workers‘ health and safety and has included
panels and workshops at its last two annual meet-
ings.

The European Work Hazards Network

has

also included electronics health and safety work-
shops at its conferences, as has the national

Com-

mittees on

Occupational Safety and Health Network

(COSH)

in the United States.

Good Electronics

another network based in Europe that focuses on
working conditions in electronics.

There is also growing interest in India and China,

countries with the most rapid high-tech growth and
consequently with the most at stake in terms of
workers‘ rights, worker and community health, and

electronic waste impacts. Following the publication

10 Meij.
11 <

http://www.anroav.org

12 <

http://www.ewhn.eu

13 <

http://www.coshnetwork.org

14 <

http://goodelectronics.org

of Challenging the Chip there were forums held in
Bangalore and Kerala, India, organised by

Asia

Monitor Resource Centre

, Waste Not Asia, and

other labor and grassroots groups. Likewise, a book
tour was arranged in China by

Greenpeace

which

energised large groups of students and others at

several campuses in south China and in Beijing. The
Chinese version of the book also will be available
soon. Media attention is growing throughout Asia

and throughout the world – a recent presentation at
an eco-waste forum in Manila was featured in an

article in the Manila Times. And the emergence this
past year of the dazzling Internet video

The Story of

Stuff

has informed and excited millions of activists

around the globe.

It has been a long time since the Valley of Heart‘s

Delight began to disappear in its transformation to
Silicon Valley. Hopefully it is still not too late to learn

the lessons of this experience to protect emerging
‗Silicon Valleys‘ in India and throughout Asia. The
growing grassroots global movement is increasingly

speaking truth to power, putting a human face on
the dark side of globalisation, and providing a vision

for a new sustainable electronics industry. It is
about time we learned from the lessons of the past,
since the future continues to be built before our

very eyes, and, as we know, it is being built on even
more powerful and less understood technologies

such as nano technology. Our challenges are only
just beginning.

Works Cited

„Cancers in 'Silicon Glen' Scottish electronics indus-

try victims fight for future generations.―

Hesa

Newsletter

No. 34 2008. 22-3. <

hesa.etui-

rehs.org/uk/newsletter/files/Nwsl-34-EN-
p22.pdf

Bnet. „SIA Selects Vanderbilt University to Conduct

Chip Industry Worker Health Study; Industry-

Funded Study Will Assess Cancer Risk to Semi-
conductor Workers.― 2005.
<

findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2005_

August_2/ai_n1484125

Clapp, W. Richard. „Mortality among US employees

of a large computer manufacturing company:
1969–2001―.

Environmental Health: A Global

15 <

http://www.amrc.org.hk

16 <

http://www.greenpeace.org/electronics

17 <

http://www.storyofstuff.com

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Ted Smith:
Why we are "Challenging the Chip": The Challenges of Sustainability in Electronics

Access Science Source

2006, 5:30.

http://www.ehjournal.net/content/5/1/30

JIG. „Material Composition Declaration for Electro-

technical Products.―
2007.<

www.ce.org/Standards/Joint_Industry_G

uide-Ed2.pdf

LaDou, J., Bailar J. „Cancer and reproductive risks in

the semiconductor industry.―

Int J Occup Envi-

ron Health

2007 Oct-Dec. 13(4): 376-85.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/180850

51?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.
Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_Default

ReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

>, <

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oucancersummary07.pdf

Meij, J-M. „Review: Challenging the Chip.―

Electronic

Green Journal

1:26 2008.

http://repositories.cdlib.org/uclalib/egj/vol1/iss

26/art26

SVTC. „Maps of Silicon Valley Groundwater Con-

tamina-
tion―.<

svtc.svtc.org/site/PageServer?pagename

=svtc_scc_groundwater_map

Websites



American Electronics Association (AEA)
<

http://www.aeanet.org



ANROAV - Asian Network for the Rights of
Occupational Accident Victims
<

http://www.anroav.org



Asia Monitor Resource Centre
<

http://www.amrc.org.hk



Committees on Occupational Safety and
Health Network (COSH)
<

http://www.coshnetwork.org



Electronics Take Back Coalition
<

http://www.electronicstakeback.com



EPR Working Group
<

http://www.eprworkinggroup.org



European Work Hazards Network
<

http://www.ewhn.eu



Good Electronics Network
<

http://goodelectronics.org



Greenpeace
<

http://www.greenpeace.org/electronics



International Campaign for Responsible
Technology (ICRT)
<

http://svtc.svtc.org/site/PageServer?pagen

ame=svtc_icrt



The Story of Stuff
<

http://www.storyofstuff.com

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

www.i-r-i-e.net

ISSN 1614-1687

Felipe Fonseca and Daniela de Carvalho Matielo:

Notes from the Field:
E-waste in Brasil - Lixo Eletrônico and MetaReciclagem

Abstract

As probably every other country in the world, in recent years Brazil has seen an immense increase in the

production and consumption of electro-electronics equipment, which generates, as expected, an equally large
amount of e-waste. However, there is a general lack of information about health and environmental issues

among actors involved with the e-waste cycle, and very limited public discussion about the topic. Also, proper
legislation to regulate the destination of all this material does not yet exist. The National Policy on Solid

Residuals, which has been discussed in the Brazilian Congress since 1991, had shown signs of including e-
waste management. But the responsible working group in the Chamber of Deputies has recently decided to

make an amendment to its 33rd article, dealing with the regulation of reverse logistics (take-back) and man-
datory recycling of special waste, and no longer considering electronic equipment as such. In response to
that, the collective Lixo Eletrônico decided to publish a manifesto and open an online petition drawing atten-

tion to the change in the bill. The article offers an overview of the situation and the issues involved and
explains the action that is being carried out by the Lixo Eletrônico Collective, presenting the first outcomes

and next steps.

Agenda

Authors



Felipe Fonseca is a Brazilian media activist and a co-founder and collaborator of Metá:Fora,
MetaReciclagem, Co:Lab, MeMeLab, Xemelê, EstudioLivre, Cultura Digital, DesCentro, Conversê and

Lixo Eletrônico.



felipefonseca@riseup.net,



w ww.metareciclagem.org, www.lixoeletronico.org



Daniela de Carvalho Matielo is Brazilian communities and technologies researcher and project
coordinator. She has participated in the development of the Acessa São Paulo program for Digital

Inclusion and is currently a PhD Student at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.



http://dacamat.com.br

http://weblab.tk

http://twitter.com/danimatielo

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Felipe Fonseca and Daniela de Carvalho Matielo:
E-waste in Brasil - Lixo Eletrônico and MetaReciclagem

1. The Lixo Eletrônico Collective
and the Brazilian Context

The Lixo Eletrônico

collective evolved from a per-

ceived need to open up the public debate about e-
waste in Brazil. Its weblog was created following

the release of a study on e-waste management in
the country, comissioned by the Dutch organisation

Waste.nl and carried out by members of the
MetaReciclagem network.

The results of the study

revealed several critical issues regarding e-waste
management:



the existence of a local market that relies on

small-scale cooperative recycling businesses and
the informal handling of electronics, which are
usually discarded with the normal trash and end

up in landfills;

the small amount of information available in this e-

waste market regarding proper safety and environ-
mental measures for managing and recycling e-

waste; among the few specialized recycling compa-
nies, the complexity of a proper full-cycle solution

for the materials, being often necessary to export
the waste to be handled in other countries which

have proper recycling plants, thus making the whole
process more expensive;



the absence of a legislation that regulates the
discard of e-waste and poses rules for an
environmentally sound management.

Regarding the legal framework, Brazil is a signatory

to the Basel Convention, which states that hazard-
ous waste should be managed as closely as possible
to the source of generation, but it lacks proper

national legislation to deal with the issue. The
National Policy on Solid Residuals has been in dis-

cussion in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies since
1991, but has not yet been approved. The bill

addresses all types of solid waste and regulates the
disposal of these materials. Although included in the
original draft, electronic waste was exempted from

this regulation. It was in this context that the Lixo
Eletrônico website was launched in September 2008,

aiming to open the debate about e-waste to general

lixoeletronico.org

2 da Silva, Martins, & Oliveira 2007. A small-scale governmental

reuse effort exists, see

www.computadoresparainclusao.gov.br

discussion and proposing a model which encom-
passes the social, environmental and economic

issues related to e-waste management.

2. Developing a Local Model for E-
waste Management

Being informed of and in contact with projects from
all over the world while keeping an eye on the local

context, the Lixo Eletrônico collective is developing a
model for e-waste management that responds both

to a global issue and to local specifics. Its guidelines
were outlined in a series of articles called „The e-

waste  life-cycle―  which  were  published  in  the  Lixo
Eletrônico  blog,  and  consist  in  a  threefold  action
strategy:  production/consume,  disposal/reuse,  and
recycling

. Each of these axes involves several

complex questions.

Production/consume is seen as a continuum, in
which both consumers and manufacturers influence
and affect each other's decisions. In that sense, not

only the industry but also the media and the con-
sumers are responsible for the ever growing sensa-

tion  of  obsolescence  of  technological  devices.  To
fight  that  trend,  Lixo  Eletrônico  recommends  (and
adopts)  measures  in  three  perspectives:  foster  the

responsible consumption by gathering and publish-
ing information about the manufacturing processes

and other practices of the industry, as well as help-
ing to increase awareness of related publications

such as Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics;
stimulate the reuse of electronics by showing ways
to extend the life span of technologies using alterna-

tive strategies such as adoption of free software and
repurposing hardware (e.g. using an old computer

as a file server or firewall); and provide information
about how to discard electronics in an environmen-
tally sound manner.

While Brazil has been increasingly integrating into a

globalized economy, there is still a huge gap in
terms of access to information technologies. For that
reason, rather than adopting the perspective that

every discarded electronic device should be directly
sent to recycling, Lixo Eletrônico contends that

every potential use of electronic devices should be
attempted before such devices are sent to final

disposal. Some of the founders of Lixo Eletrônico
have also been acting as key members of the
MetaReciclagem network, which in a more local, de-

3 Fonseca 2008.

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International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Felipe Fonseca and Daniela de Carvalho Matielo:
E-waste in Brasil - Lixo Eletrônico and MetaReciclagem

centralised fashion has encouraged a great deal of
experimentation regarding the critical reappropria-

tion  of  information  technologies  for  social  change,
either  by  reassembling  computers  or  repurposing
them  in  initiatives  related  to  education,  art  or

craftsmanship.

Building on this experience, Lixo Eletrônico proposes
a model in which local nodes (social organisations,
small-scale, cooperative businesses and the like)

develop knowledge related to the repair, reuse and
disassembly of electronics, and start acting as a

network that operates receiving electronics, making
them  work  again  (as  electronics  or  otherwise)  and
delivering  them  to  social  projects,  as  well  as  for-
warding  the  unusable  parts  to  proper  recycling
facilities.  The  best  way  to  achieve  scale  for  the

network without losing autonomy would be to
establish the bases for a distributed logistics net-

work, a non-financial, self-organised auction system
in which people could offer their electronics for
donation and interested organisations and projects

would be able to receive these donations.

The recycling business usually relies on regulations
that (as mentioned above) are not currently avail-
able in Brazil. Even if that wasn't the case, e-waste

recycling is a rather complex issue: unlike common
examples as PET bottles or tin cans, for which a

fairly  well-developed  recycling  industry  exists  in
Brazil,  the  proper  recycling  of  electronics  requires
the  separation  of  materials,  which  poses  a  difficult

challenge: every electronic device is composed of
dozens of different materials, all of them welded one

into the other. The separation requires the use of
machinery not widely available. In fact, Lixo Ele-

trônico has learnt that a great number of Brazilian
companies which claim to properly recycle electron-
ics usually adopt all kinds of questionable practices.

The most common one is to tear up the equipment
to extract the very small amount of expensive

materials - gold, silver - and then put all that is left
in containers which are sold to unlicensed opera-
tions in places like China, Ghana, India and others.

More often than not, these materials will be proc-
essed with no attention to environmental, labour or

social regulations, and will likely end up in a landfill
somewhere else in the world.

As long as adequate recycling processes and tech-
nologies are not in place, the sector makes a high

profit by acting irresponsibly. Because the recycling
of electronic materials as a whole (including every
part of electronic devices) in the current state of

technological development is hardly sustainable,
legal mechanisms ought to be established to fund

those activities. Given the need for proper legista-
tion that addresses the issue of e-waste manage-

ment, the bill on the National Policy of Solid Residu-
als, which has been under discussion in the Con-
gress for more than 15 years, could be a response

to this need. Unfortunately, recent changes to the
proposed policy suggest that this will not be the

case.

3. The Electronic Waste Manifesto

Over the summer of 2009, the bill on the National

Policy of Solid Residuals started moving again inside
the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. However, for no
apparent reason, the responsible working group has
decided to make an amendment to its 33rd article,
dealing with the regulation of reverse logistics (take-

back) and mandatory recycling of special waste, no
longer considering electronic equipment as such.

There was no official explanation for the change,
but a few groups and NGOs involved with the theme
of e-waste management implied that it had been

done because of the pressure of the Brazilian Asso-
ciation of Electric and Electronics Industry (ABINEE).

In response to this move, Lixo Eletrônico decided to
publish a manifesto and open an online petition

drawing attention to this change in the bill:

ELECTRONIC WASTE MANIFESTO FOR THE
INCLUSION OF ELECTRONICS IN THE NA-
TIONAL POLICY OF SOLID RESIDUALS

Let‘s pressure the Chamber of Deputies to reinstate

electronics into the amended 33th article of the

National Policy of Solid Residuals dealing with re-

verse logistics (take-back) and mandatory recycling

of special materials.

There are approximately 160 million cell phones and

60 million computers currently in use in Brazil. The

prediction for 2012 is that there will be an estimated

amount of 100 million computers, one for every 2

people in the country. In 2008, the income of elec-

tronics market reached R$ 123 billion (about US$

61.5 million), having been growing since 2002.

Electronic devices can make companies more com-

petitive, make people‘s lives easier, offer leisure and

entertainment, and are an important tool for indi-

vidual and social development.

On the other hand, electronic equipment produces

toxic waste in great amounts and has complex

recycling processes. According to studies on the

risks for the environment and people‘s health carried

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Felipe Fonseca and Daniela de Carvalho Matielo:
E-waste in Brasil - Lixo Eletrônico and MetaReciclagem

out by the Brazilian commission of the UNEP (United

Nations Environment Programme), most of these

products contain toxic substances like anti-flame

polymers, plastics, heavy metals like mercury, lead

and cadmium.

In addition to contaminating the environment, such

substances may cause severe damage to the health

of people and animals, causing failures in kidney,

lungs and brain that compromise the entire nervous

system. It is a growing issue and many countries

already have specific legislations to deal with it. The

European Union, for instance, has regulated a policy

on the Electronic Residuals by the Environmental

European Commission; and USA has many laws by

the US Environmental Protection Agency as well as

specific legislation from e.g. New York and California

states.

In Brazil, we have an opportunity that is being

literally wasted. A bill regarding a National Policy for

Solid Residuals (PL 203/91) has been discussed

since 1991 in Brazilian Congress. It is imperative

that such policy contemplates electronic equipment

and frames it as a special product for mandatory

recycling and take-back.

Electronics are increasingly becoming part of our
lives, bringing benefits at the same rate as they

produce waste at a pace we cannot currently deal
with. Regulating and specifying its destination is an
urgent and necessary condition for us to keep on

benefiting from technological advances in a sustain-
able fashion, without the environment and human

health paying a higher price.

In addition to releasing the manifesto and the

petition, Lixo Eletrônico also used mailing lists, social
networks and microblogging tools to spread the

word about the situation. Within one month, the
petition had been signed by over a thousand people
and was featured in major media channels. Even

more important, the assistants of three of the
congressmen who are part of the working group

contacted Lixo Eletrônico. One of them offered some
information  regarding  the  removal  of  electronic
waste from the bill, while the other two thanked the
collective  for  making  the  debate  public,  and  men-
tioned  that  it  would  help  them  bring  the  subject

back to the legislative discussion.

4. Next Steps: Amplifying the
Discussion

Lixo Eletrônico will keep the petition open until the

final voting of the National Policy of Solid Residuals

in the Brazilian Congress. Still, besides the existence
of a proper legislation there must be ways to moni-
tor those activities and to draw public attention to

the consequences social, environmental, economic -
of the development of IT and electronic devices.

With the aim of sharing information, experiences
and perspectives about how the issue is being dealt

with in other parts of the world, the Lixo Eletrônico
collective,  together  with  the  Obsoletos.org  project
from  Spain,  and  the  MetaReciclagem  Network,  has
organized  a  working  group  for  the  IV  Congress  of
Cybersociety (2009)

The Congress is an international event with a very
broad and interdisciplinary focus. It has been organ-

ized by the Observatorio de la CiberSociedad since
2002 and brings together researchers and practitio-

ners  to  discuss  how  the  development  and  use  of
technology  relates  to  education  and  learning,  com-
munication,  politics  and  participation,  culture  and

identity, security and every other aspect of our daily
lives, which are being permeated by the use of

technologies. Even though an important effect of
the increasing use of technology is the amount of e-
waste that is being generated in the world, 2009 is

the first time the Congress in which a working group
is specifically addressing the topic. The aim of

promoting the discussion in an event such as the
Congress of Cybersociety is to raise awareness

about the fact that e-waste management is not only
a matter of disposal logistics but entails social,
environmental, political and economical trends.

Works Cited

Fonseca, F. O Ciclo do Lixo Eletrônico. Blog Lixo

Eletrônico. 2008. <

lixoeletronico.org/blog/o-

ciclo-do-lixo-eletr%C3%B4nicovis%C3%A3o-
geral

da Silva, B. D., Martins, D. L., & Oliveira, F. C. „O

Lixo Eletrônico no Brasil.― 2007. São Paulo, Bra-
zil.
<

lixoeletronico.org/system/files/lixoeletronico_0

2.pdf; rede.metareciclagem.org

www.cibersociedad.net/congres2009/

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

www.i-r-i-e.net

ISSN 1614-1687

Ugo Vallauri

Beyond E-waste: Kenyan Creativity and Alternative Narratives in the Dia-
lectic of End-of-Life

Abstract:

The main focus of green IT campaigns and policy interventions in developing regions has been on efforts to
counter the flows of e-waste coming from the West. This paper argues that while such interventions are

necessary,  they  often  fail  to  acknowledge  the  complexity  of  information-technological  developments  across
the global South. Complementary narratives can uncover a more nuanced perception of the role played  by
second hand ICT equipment in development. E-waste is at first contextualized within the wider debate on the
contested  role  of  technology  in  post-development.  Examples  of  the  multi-dimensional  role  of  technolog  in
development initiatives in Kenya are used to provide evidence of existing cultures of reuse and of their poten-

tial to inform and influence a shift in Western ICT consumption patterns, in line with contemporary debates
on de-growth. Examples of alternative approaches to development in the context of ICT abound, and it's key

to focus on those that have roots in the creation of value right where others would see only waste – translat-
ing the ethos of the grey economy in projects that reclaim economical and educational spaces.

Agenda

Author:

Ugo Vallauri



ICT4D Collective, Geography Department, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20
0EX, United Kingdom





+ 44 - 785 - 2570279,



u.vallauri@rhul.ac.uk



www.twitter.com/ugomatic

www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/postgrads/Profiles/Vallauri.html

Relevant publication:



Vallauri, Ugo: Digitizing Kenya. Some cracks in the digital divide, in Wajibu, 24 (2), 2009

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Ugo Vallauri
Beyond E-waste: Kenyan Creativity and Alternative Narratives in the Dialectic of End-of-Life

Recent campaigns from organizations such as

Greenpeace and MakeITfair have greatly contributed
to increasing awareness on the environmental risks
associated with the end of life of ICT equipment, the

poor working conditions in the IT industry, and the
serious environmental and human consequences of

the multiplication of electronic gadgets in everyday
life.

As a result, in particular the discussion around

e-waste has grown within both the academic and

the ICT4D practitioners' community. Together with
the debate came a strong and consistent visual

imagery  usually  combining  piles  of  dusty,  old  and
malfunctioning desktop personal computers (PCs) in
rural  schools  with  footage  of  burning  circuitry  from
discarded CRT screens in urban and peri-urban Sub-
Saharan  Africa  –  brilliantly  exemplified  by  a  recent

Frontline PBS (2009) documentary covering the
topic. The popularization of this imagery has sup-

ported  reflections  on  the  relationship  between  the
previously  disconnected  geographies  of  IT  produc-
tion,  consumption,  and  disposal.  In  several  African

countries, such criticism has already resulted in
policies either completely blocking the import of

second-hand IT products, as in Uganda from 2009,
or severely discouraging it, as in Kenya, where the
government introduced in the 2008 Budget a 25%

excise duty on all used personal computers coming
from outside East Africa. Other countries, such as

Zambia and Nigeria, are considering similar meas-
ures. Such decisions can partially be linked to the

active  lobbying  of  local  firms  and  international  IT
corporations interested  in  expanding their  presence
in  the  new  commercial  frontiers  of  the

emerging

markets -

especially at a time of progressive satura-

tion and recession in the Western markets.

Howev-

er,  these  measures  also  clearly  indicate  a  growing
negative  perception  of  used  electronics  and  in
particular  of  refurbished  PCs  among  African  policy-

makers.

1. Post-Development, De-Growth
and ICT

The issue at stake is not the obvious ethical unac-
ceptability of the illegal trade and dumping of elec-
tronic waste into countries such as China, Ghana,

India, Nigeria, or Hong Kong, but instead whether
the dominant e-waste-discourse on environment

for example, Norbrand, 2009, video and leaflets on makeit-

fair.org

Cisler, 2005

and ICT fails to explore and acknowledge other,
more diversified perspectives on the use of second-

hand electronic products in developing countries.
But rather than contesting the validity of existing e-
waste campaigns, I make the case for the consider-

ation of a range of other narratives that take into
account not only the environmental risks but also

the  promising  opportunities  associated  with  the  full
inclusion  of  the  South  in  the  global  information
society.  Mapping  the  multi-dimensional  and  contro-

versial aspects of the reuse and the recycling of IT
products in developing countries is a necessary

element in assessing the global ecological sustaina-
bility of ICT for development.

This need to explore alternative narratives resonates
with work in the post-development tradition, briefly

explored here by way of engaging Serge Latouche's
most recent work. Latouche focuses on the concept

of  de-growth  (more  widely  known  as  the  French
―decroissance‖)  as  the  concept  has  proved  popular
in  inspiring  new  social  movements  in  France  and

Italy.

With de-growth, Latouche takes the post-

developmental critique a step forward, challenging

Western societies to learn to

de-grow

from exces-

sive consumption, GDP-driven policies, and lifestyles
based on environmental degradation – a vision in

line with the green IT campaigns to ―use, reuse and
only eventually recycle‖ of Western IT charities.

The use of de-growth in the context of ICT is ex-
tremely rare, apart from Schauer (2008), who

focuses on the risks of the rebound effect, in partic-
ular on the contradictions between material de-

growth supposedly facilitated by ICT with the pro-
gressive digitalization of all artifacts and the in-

creased ecological footprint caused by low prices of
ICT equipment and consequent high diffusion of all
sorts of devices. Such a multiplication of devices is

at the heart of Latouche's own critical position on
technologies in the context of development – first of

all  in  regards  to  current  trends  of  introduction  and
transfer  of  new  technologies,  which  distract  from
and  hinder  locally  determined  self-development

strategies. This accusation of a sort of ―techno-
colonialism‖ is common in post-development

thought, and it refers to the imposition on develop-
ing regions of new technological solutions, designed
with aims and objectives not necessarily in line with

those of the regions they are pushed to. But even
more importantly in this context, Latouche also

condemns African ―second-hand consumption socie-
ties‖ made of Western waste such as unserviceable

Latouche 2007, 2008

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Ugo Vallauri
Beyond E-waste: Kenyan Creativity and Alternative Narratives in the Dialectic of End-of-Life

mobile phones, recuperated personal computers and
the likes. But by doing so, Latouche fails to ac-

knowledge the values of informal African economies
based on repair, reuse, adaptation and creativity –
paradoxically a theme at the very essence of the de-

growth he envisions for the West.

2. The Grey Economy of the
Information Society

Ravi Sundaram has offered a different approach,

taking into consideration the fertile ground of the
informal economies of Indian ICT. In Recycling

Modernity (1999), Sundaram already criticizes the
neoliberal vision of India as an homogenous techno-
space, one where all that matters is the ―young,

upper-caste, often English-speaking programmers in
large metropoles, particularly emerging techno-cities

like  Bangalore  and  Hyderabad‖.  But  Sundaram's
analysis,  far  from  being  an  hymn  to  a  nationalist
rejection  of  new  media  technologies,  goes  well

beyond a critique of the cyberlibertarian ideology of
new economy hubs in developing regions – it points

to  the  ―grey  economy‖  of  hardware  reuse  and
recycling  as  well  as  of  software  pirating,  a  flexible
practice  of  survival  for  those  excluded  from  the

techno-elite, contributing in urban and rural areas
alike to lowering costs of access and re-

appropriation of the information society. The as-
pects of survival and of extreme necessity linked to

the grey economy are critical in explaining it as a
form of resistance to the global market dynamics of
ICT diffusion, clearly in opposition with a simple

fascination for digital tinkering, typical of the cyber-
elites.

Even ten years after these reflections on the mul-
tiple levels of engagement of the Indian society

with ICT, a new version of the same developmental-
ist ideology currently dominates ICT-debates in

Kenya. Neither the Kenyan government nor major
development agencies reflect positively on the
demands of the grey economy and on the needs of

the most marginalized groups. Instead, at a time
when the completion of the first undersea fibre optic
cable is finally bringing broadband to the region, the
Kenyan government's ICT Board (2009) is attempt-

ing to brand the country as the ultimate Business
Process Outsourcing (BPO) destination, a sort of
―ultimate India‖ engaging with the infinite capitalist

struggle for the cheapest labour. Yet despite policy
responses to e-waste (the new excise duty on used

IT-imports), today's Kenya can't do without used
electronics.

3. ICT4D in Kenya

Examples of alternative approaches to development
in the context of ICT abound, and it's key to focus

on those that have roots in the creation of value
right where others would see only waste – translat-

ing  the ethos of the grey  economy in projects that
reclaim  economical  and  educational  spaces  well
beyond  anecdotal  evidence,    offering  a  sustainable

alternative to top-down approaches of technology
transfer.

Second-hand PCs and the education sector

Computers for Schools Kenya (CFSK, www.cfsk.org),
a Kenyan NGO providing Kenyan secondary schools
with access to computer labs fitted with refurbished
PCs, suggests a different narrative for the environ-

mental problematic linked to ICT4D. Apart from the
actual computers, CFSK provides ICT training for

teachers and assistance in the periodic maintenance
of the IT equipment supplied. Over the past few
years, CFSK has distributed over 10,000 PCs to

more than 400 secondary schools within Kenya,
much more than the Ministry of Education itself has

achieved, whether with new or refurbished PCs, and
at a much lower cost per seat. As part of its activi-

ties, CFSK provides schools with a concrete solution
for the substitution of the deployed refurbished PCs
at the end of their life-cycle with newer refurbished

PCs, and only installs hardware when proper facili-
ties exist in the school, such as an appropriate

classroom,  security,  equipment to limit risks deriv-
ing  from  power  failures  –  a  major  problem  for
maintenance  of  both  brand  new  and  second-hand

PCs in Kenya. CFSK procures its PCs both locally,
through corporate social responsibility programmes

of local and international companies, and interna-
tionally, through donations from IT charities, such

as  Computer  Aid.  On  top  of  that,  CFSK  is  a  local
innovator,  not  only  because  it  manages  to  extend
the  life  of  its  PCs,  but  more  importantly  because

their technicians have developed a method to give a
new, ―third life‖ to malfunctioning second-hand CRT

monitors,  by  re-engineering  them  into  low-cost
television  sets.  CFSK  is  directly  involved  with  han-
dling  obsolete  and  no-longer  working  PCs,  and  has

recently established an e-waste management cen-
tre, to locally recycle components whenever possi-

ble, and ship the rest out of the country for envi-
ronmentally sound recycling.

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International Review of Information Ethics

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Ugo Vallauri
Beyond E-waste: Kenyan Creativity and Alternative Narratives in the Dialectic of End-of-Life

End of life and planned obsolescence

The example of CFSK also addresses another aspect

of the link between information technology and the
environment: the question of what is indeed the

end-of-life  of  a  product.  The  concept  of  planned
obsolescence  can  help  in  shedding  light  on  how  a
product  is  perceived  as  obsolete  and  as  such  loses

its trading and use value.

The case of the computer

industry is a classic example. Computer processor

designers  are  busy  with  the  next  generation  even
before  starting  distributing  the  current  one.  Soft-
ware  engineers,  especially  in  the  proprietary  soft-

ware  world,  don't  feel  compelled  by  the  limitations
of  most  consumers'  hardware  in  coding  their  prod-
ucts.  As  a  result,  computers  and  other  electronic
devices'  life-span  is  constantly  artificially  reduced,
while new needs emerge as fabrications of market-

ing strategists. However, different groups of users
redefine what's useful to them in resisting opposi-

tion to market logic. This autonomous way of mak-
ing use of the existing resources and of adapting

them to specific needs resonates well not just with a
common sense desire to reduce, reuse and recycle,
but also with studies highlighting how the most

energy-intensive aspects of computing lie within the
manufacturing process, and that therefore extend-

ing  the  life-span  of  existing  computers  is  the  most
environmentally  friendly  option,  and  should  be
pursued  at  all  levels

. The Kenyan government's

decision to introduce an excise duty on the importa-
tion of second-hand computers in 2008, however,

had a severely negative impact on the activities of
organizations such as CFSK; the new excise duty is

also an inadequate measure to tackle and regulate
the electronic waste already existing in the country.

Mobile creativity in the informal sector

The interaction between an extended life-span,
wider access to technology, and local innovation

provides further evidence for reconsidering the role
of used electronics. One example is that of the

Kenyan M-Pesa service, the first successful wide-
scale implementation of a mobile payment system in
Africa, ahead of many yet to come implementation
in more ―developed‖ countries.

The story of M-Pesa

is peculiar because it is a technology requiring very

basic mobile phones for the end users, as all money

London, 1932 and Slade, 2006

Williams, 2004

mobile money in Swahili

transfers are completed simply via SMS.

This does-

n't only imply that the technology is open to all

literate mobile phone owners, but also more signifi-
cantly that by being compatible with the lowest
common denominator of mobile devices, ―old‖ but

reliable technology, M-Pesa has quickly become
relevant to millions of Kenyans - almost 7 million

users are currently registered to the service, out of
35 million inhabitants - including those relying on a
second or third-hand or refurbished mobile phone.

This is the kind of ―pro-poor‖ innovation fostered by
technology research and adoption in developing

regions, which Heeks (2008) refers to as the engine
of a new wave of more effective ICT4D 2.0. By

providing an easy way to distribute micro-payments
across urban and rural areas alike, M-Pesa facili-
tates the growth of economic and social opportuni-

ties to under-served communities, while at the same
time reducing needs for travelling across the country

to transfer  money to otherwise ―unbanked‖ citizens
–  ironically,  a  sort  of  technologically-caused  de-
growth.

By focusing exclusively on 'broken' mobile phones in

Africa, Latouche fails to capture that in Kenya, like
everywhere else on the continent, mobile phones
literally

never

die, because of the technical expertise

of thousands of meticulous workers constantly
dismantling phones, studying circuit by circuit, re-

adapting spare parts, never giving up until they
learn how to fix the handset or to unlock it. But this

creativity  goes  further:  modified  phones  with  dual
SIM  cards,  helping  to  cope  with  poor  network  cov-
erage  or  high  interconnection  fees,  solar  or  car

battery-powered mobile chargers for area not yet
covered by mains electricity – the list of opportuni-

ties sought after by

jua cali

entrepreneurs is end-

less, in a constant form of struggle for the appropri-
ation of a technology designed elsewhere and

originally with the devices' planned obsolescence in
mind.

4. Conclusion

While it is correct to demystify the dominating hype
surrounding the diffusion of ICT in developing

regions around the world, it would also be short-
sighted to underestimate the positive excitement

generated by technology introduction in education,

Hughes and Lonie, 2007

'hot sun' in Swahili, it refers to thriving informal sector

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Ugo Vallauri
Beyond E-waste: Kenyan Creativity and Alternative Narratives in the Dialectic of End-of-Life

agriculture and every day life, and how this ―magic‖
element can often result in surprising ―unintended

consequences‖

. A secondary school in Maasai Land,

a semiarid rural area in the South of Kenya near the
border with Tanzania, received in 2006 refurbished

computers to equip a laboratory, but didn't at the
time have access to electricity. This could at first be

read as a classic example of a solution looking for a
problem: discarding used computers to a place
where they cannot be of any use. And yet, within a

few months, the tangible excitement generated by
the availability of computers in the local community

was successfully used to lobby the local authorities
to extend rural electricity to reach the school. As a

result, not only the students were given the oppor-
tunity to learn basic computer skills, but – perhaps
more importantly – they were also finally able to

read and study after sunset.

Despite  the  ecological  and  economic  constrains  in
which  they  are  inscribed,  African  cultures  of  reuse
and  continuous adaptation and  local innovation are

a powerful alternative narrative tool addressing not
just the ICT world, but consumer society as a whole.

The understanding and appreciation of this different
approach towards all waste and in particular unne-
cessary e-waste is critical in formulating a global

ethical discourse on the multiple dimensions of the
sustainable information society. The debates on the

final destination of electronic waste are broadened
and contextualized by such a concurrent analysis of

the mechanisms behind the planned obsolescence of
products, and of existing practices across the globe
that can feed into visions of 'ge-growth' and sus-

tainable forms of technological reappropriation that
break this cycle. The patterns of infinite reuse and

recreation  of  value  without  material  production
employed  by  Kenyan  individuals  and  organizations
offer  powerful  examples  of  what  the  de-growth

means in the context of the information society. At a
time when the system of global capitalism is show-

ing its limits like never before, translating these
inspiring examples into practices of more critical ICT
consumption can help citizens and governments of

developed and developing countries alike to reconfi-
gure the myth of the global information society into

more acceptable, just and sustainable terms.

References

Ali, Maryam and Bailur, Savita: The challenge of

sustainability in ICT4D – Is bricolage the an-

swer? Proceedings of the 9th International Con-

Ali and Bailur, 2007

ference on Social Implications of Computers in

Developing Countries, São Paulo, Brazil, May

2007

Cisler, Steve: What's the matter with ICTs, incom-

municado Reader, institute of network cultures

2005.

Frontline PBS: Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground,

www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/ghana804/

2009

Gathara, Victor: Fibre comes East...Is Kenya Pre-

pared?,

DFID

Kenya

and

Somalia,

www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/ict4d/workingpapers/Gathero

.doc

, 2009.

Heeks, Richard: ICT4D 2.0: The Next Phase of

Applying ICT for International Development.

Computer, June 2008. 26-33.

Kenya ICT Board:

Kenya BPO

Value Proposition

Strategy,

www.ict.go.ke/pdfs/do-it-in-Kenya.pdf

. 2009

Latouche, Serge: La scommessa della decrescita.

Feltrinelli 2007

Latouche, Serge:Breve trattato sulla decrescita

serena.Bollati Boringhieri 2008.

London, Bernard: Ending the recession through

planned obsolescence, 1932. In White, Micah:

Consumer Society is Made to Break. Adbusters,

2008

Norbrand, Sara: Out of Control. E-waste trade flows

from the EU to developing countries. Swed-

Watch,

http://makeitfair.org/the-

facts/reports/out-of-control/at_download/file

2009

Osibanjo, O. and Nnorom, I.C.: The challenge of

electronic waste (e-waste) management in

developing countries, Waste Management &

Research 2007

Schauer, Thomas: Technology and the Growth

Problematique. Proceedings of the First Confe-

rence on Economic Degrowth for Ecological Sus-

tainability and Social Equity 2008

Slade, Giles: Made to Break. Technology and Obso-

lescence in America, Harvard University Press

2006

Sundaram, Ravi: Recycling Modernity: Pirate elec-

tronic cultures in India. Third Text, 13 (47),

1999

Williams, Eric: Energy Intensity of Computer Manu-

facturing: Hybrid Assessment

Combining

Process and Economic Input-

Output Me-

thods. Environmental Science &

Technology,

2004. 38, 6166-6174

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

www.i-r-i-e.net

ISSN 1614-1687

Raquel Rennó:

Dejetos Materiais e Informacionais como Elementos Culturais

Abstract

To reflect on waste is to think of it beyond cycles of consumption, as an integral element of cultural proc-

esses. The essay broadens the analysis of waste to speak of cultural remainders in a more comprehensive
sense, including populations that exist (and have to subsist) at the margins of the official city, often through

acts of reappropriation generally considered piracy. Such reappropriation is central to the informal economies
whose control evades the cybernetic approaches to governance, and whose cultural logic offers a counter-
rationality to dominant processes of consumption. Piracy is a strong element of informal economies, and its

mode of production and distribution operates through fragmentation, occurring in the interstices of the city or
in an ephemeral manner in order to escape surveillance. Strategies of evasion and the fluidity of the market

of illegal goods, the ephemeral appropriation of space by street peddlers, by garbage collectors and inhabi-
tants of residual spaces offers a broader view of a dynamic of info-technological recodification that is not

restricted to groups of tactical media, political activists, or the terrain of digital media such as Internet and
mobile telephony.

Agenda

Author

Raquel Rennó



CNPQ (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, Brazil), UOC (Universitat
Oberta de Catalunya), ZZZINC – Investigación e Innovación Cultural





raquelrenno@gmail.com



http://www.raquelrenno.com

http://www.zzzinc.net

Relevant Publications:



Do Mármore ao Vidro: mercados públicos e supermercados, curva e reta sobre a cidade? (Sao Paulo:
Annablume, 2006)



Non_sensor (Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia, 2005)

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Raquel Rennó:
Dejetos Materiais e Informacionais como Elementos Culturaise

Dejetos e a Teoria da Informação

distintos m

odos de se apropriar da informação e

objetos residuais demandam uma intensa capaci-
dade de adaptação e de criação de novos sistemas
de linguagem. Abordar os dejetos ou „aquilo que

sobra‖ nos obriga a combinar diversos níveis de
sistemas comunicacionais que vão do espaço físico

propriamente dito, grupos sociais excluídos pelo
poder público e privado, os resíduos deixados pelas
ruas (dentro e fora das lixeiras) e que vão sendo

reorganizados  pelos  moradores  dos  espaços  resi-
duais  e  utilizados  na  construção  de  casas,  no  co-
mércio  de  material  reciclado,  até  níveis  que  envol-
vem resíduos comunicacionais, fonte dos moradores
de favela que fazem o

gato

, a gambiarra

desvian-

do o curso previsto dos fluxos operantes na cidade.
O próprio trabalho de pesquisa para analisar estes
fenômenos envolve a coleta e a combinação de

elementos aparentemente distantes, fazendo uso de
teorias que devem combinar o novo, revisando o

que já foi estabelecido, sem poder pertencer a
nenhuma estrutura rígida ou previamente estabele-

cida em sua completude.

Dentro da tradição da Teoria da Informação, Wie-
ner

pautou a teoria cibernética na idéia de contro-

le; o nome cibernética vem da palavra grega

kuber-

netes

, que significa piloto. Nesse sentido, tanto

seres vivos quanto máquinas lutavam constante-
mente contra a tendência à entropia. Para ele a
informação deveria ser medida pela capacidade que

havia na transmissão de vencer a tendência natural
à entropia, isto é, à dispersão da energia (e de

informação).  Wiener  sabia  do  paradoxo  que  isso
impunha, já que  a informação de maior rapidez  de
compreensão  (de  menor  dispersão)  e  de  menor

complexidade carrega menor taxa informativa.
Mesmo pontuando que a entropia não pode ser

considerada

a priori

como algo negativo, citando o

exemplo da dispersão da energia solar como possi-

bilitadora da existência da vida na Terra, a visão
ainda era de um sistema de

input

output

(e con-

seqüente

feedback

) onde o dentro e fora do sistema

estavam bem definidos. Ele apontava que a infor-
mação era o modo de permutar com o mundo

Termo que deixa de designar apenas a rampa de luzes no

palco e passa a significar no Brasil serviço elétrico malfeito,
improvisado, especialmente com a finalidade de obter energia

elétrica de maneira illegal.

Proposta desenvolvida no decorrer do livro

Cibernética e

Sociedade. São Paulo: Cultrix, 1993.

exterior e se adaptar a ele, mas foi apenas a partir
do trabalho de Maturana e Varela que se propõe a

idéia de mundo exterior como algo não homogêneo
e dependente das possibilidades de compreensão e
percepção de cada ser vivo, assim como as trocas

entre organismo e sistema alteram ambos. A dis-
persão da informação é parte da troca, e elementos

que antes poderiam ser considerados não-partícipes
de um sistema (resíduos) são apropriados por
outros, reconstruindo estruturas, assumindo novas

funções e em muitos casos alimentando posterior-
mente o próprio sistema de onde foram excluídos.

Wiener sabia que a flexibilidade em adaptar-se às
alterações no ambiente permite a expansão de

organismos vivos e, conseqüentemente deveria
servir de modelo para as máquinas a serem desen-
volvidas. Sendo assim, não se pode confundir a

teoria do controle como mero fator de regulagem,
mas sim um elemento que possibilitaria a aprendi-

zagem ao alterar sistemas de desempenho.

A idéia de resíduo, de dejeto tem a ver com o ruído,

algo que está fora de um sistema codificado. Quan-
to mais energia se produz, mais fragmentos são

gerados. Deste modo, a medida da entropia é um
modo de se mensurar também o nível de produção
de energia. Mais que isso, a maior capacidade de

absorção do ruído é um fator que possibilita a
complexificação de um sistema. Essa tarefa de-

manda ainda mais energia e conseqüentemente,
maior a entropia.

Dentro de um sistema social muitas vezes o que se
considera residual é associado a algo fora de lugar,

fora da norma, algo que não pertence mais a uma
estrutura e que está disponível para reutilização.

Apropriar-se de informação, espaços e objetos que
surgem aleatoriamente tem a ver com a capacidade
de adaptação de um indivíduo ou grupo, ainda que

essa adaptabilidade seja por vezes fruto de uma
situação de emergência e carência extremas. É um

trabalho subversivo ou da

contra-racionalidade

como propõe Santos, porque está na contramão do
processo homogêneo de consumo. Não segue as

normas previstas „de cima para baixo‖. Ao mesmo
tempo, por não pertencer mais a nenhum sistema

organizado é instável, móvel, um incômodo na
cidade. Uma situação de potencialidade e
instabilidade, mas também de disponibilidade.

Resíduos e Sociedade

A possibilidade de transformação na cultura se dá
pelo choque entre elementos de sistemas distantes

e pela incorporação ou reincorporação do residual,

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Raquel Rennó:
Dejetos Materiais e Informacionais como Elementos Culturaise

gerando um mosaico, um conjunto complexo que
evidencia novos usos de vários elementos. Esse

processo é claramente mais complexo e possível em
culturas do excesso, onde a combinação de elemen-
tos múltiplos e distintos é parte do mecanismo de

construção de sistemas. O conforto traria uma
certeza de uma permanência simbólica que os

excluídos não possuem.

É preciso compreender em que medida a residuali-

dade gerada pela constante exclusão e ignorância
em relação ao reaproveitamento de materiais e

organização dos grupos sociais periféricos é um
processo que impede que se crie a necessária
elasticidade cognitiva da qual se beneficiariam tanto
„excluídos‖ quanto „excludentes‖. Tampouco serviria
cair em diferenciações das „minorias‖ ou de grupos

„menos favorecidos‖ como um modo de conheci-
mento que não reconhece.

Os movimentos na sociedade que buscam excluir os
economicamente menos favorecidos, os imigrantes

ou quaisquer grupos que não sejam considerados
parte da sociedade chamada „oficial‖ (que são

tratados como dejetos e que ao mesmo tempo
trabalham diretamente com a coleta e reciclagem
informal do lixo), criam não somente um problema a

estas pessoas que se vêem incapazes de se integra-
rem, mas implicam também na alienação do grupo

que exclui. Não se trata de evitar a construção dos
resíduos, o que seria impossível. Trata-se de tomar
consciência do processo de criação do lixo para que

ele possa ser recuperado de modo criativo e não
seja somente fruto de um ciclo de consumo, mas da
cultura. Flusser

diz que a história humana não é

uma linha linear que vai da natureza em direção à
cultura, „mas um círculo que gira da natureza à

cultura,  da  cultura  ao  lixo,  do  lixo  à  natureza  e
assim  por  diante‖.  Por  isso  falar  de  dejetos  é  re-
tomar  na  análise  um  elemento  que  é  parte  dos

processos culturais.

Desta forma, há a coexistência da aceleração do
capital mas que ao mesmo tempo encontra no
espaço local e virtual tanto seu modo de concretude

quanto sua resistência. O espaço torna-se um objeto
de consumo descartável, mas também é apropriado
e reconfigurado por aqueles que não podem partici-
par de seu consumo. Os modos como os sem-teto,
favelados (no caso dos resíduos físico) e os hackers

e ciberativistas (no caso dos resíduos informa-
cionais) transitam pelo espaço são também possui-

FLUSSER, Vilém.

O mundo codificado. Trad. Raquel Abi-

Samara. Sao Paulo: Cosac e Naify, 2007, pp-60-61

dores de uma fragmentação e possibilidade de
adaptação que põem em xeque as estratégias

velozes de ocupação do capital. Se há o resíduo
artificialmente criado pelo „ciclo de vida do produto‖
em Marketing, e os discursos lineares e „eficientes‖

da publicidade, há os resíduos culturais produzidos
por sociedades onde o excesso e a grande quanti-

dade  de  combinações  possíveis  nos  processos
culturais  são  responsáveis  pelas  apropriações  tanto
dos  „restos  obsoletos‖  do  mercado  quanto  dos

resíduos imateriais que o contato entre sistemas
distantes oferece. Este processo cria possibilidades

de vida emergentes com resultados estéticos que
sobrepassam o âmbito artístico, combinando o uso

do espaço com meios tecnológicos, comunidades
residuais com grupos de mídia tática, a gambiarra
de luz

com os

warchalkers

. Estas apropriações são

exemplos flagrantes do uso da tecnologia de um

modo subversivo, não associadas a um elemento
elitista e invariavelmente conectado ao mercado que

lança os „melhores e mais potentes‖ com cada vez
maior rapidez.

A apropriação dos dejetos por parte dos migrantes,
imigrantes ou outros grupos sociais que não

encontram seu espaço na cidade racional encobre
questões que vão muito além das fragilidades

econômicas e legais que enfrentam. Resíduos
geográficos, materiais, possuem um valor simbólico
que tem a ver com uma resistência à lógica de

consumo e ordenação. A miséria, a falta de apoio,
tornam mesmo os indivíduos que estão à margem

do sistema tradicional de consumo produtores em
potencial, que têm de apreender o espaço e seu
entorno para daí tirar o que necessitam. Seu deslo-

camento constante torna essa capacidade de adap-
tação a contextos distintos ainda mais urgente e

aguçada. Por não possuírem „direito à cidade‖
estão, como apontado anteriormente, à margem do

tempo compartimentado, estruturado. Recolhem e
recuperam pouco a pouco o lixo que vêem espalha-
dos pelas ruas, nos depósitos de lixo ou mesmo nos

sacos de lixo, que são abertos e separados por eles.

Sobre Reciclagem

Nas últimas décadas, o conceito de reciclagem tem

se tornado uma preocupação, ainda que as ações
efetivas nesse sentido sejam menos efetivas do que

se propõe. Por um lado, a cidade „oficial‖ continua

Grupos que se organizam para detectar e informar locais

onde há conexão de Internet sem senha para acesso que

esteja disponível à apropriação

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Raquel Rennó:
Dejetos Materiais e Informacionais como Elementos Culturaise

gerando mais lixo, seja entre os habitantes ou nas
indústrias, os maiores produtores de dejetos tóxicos.

Enquanto países como Estados Unidos relutam em
se comprometer ativamente em reduzir a poluição e
o lixo (ainda que seja um dos maiores produtores

mundiais nessa área), países da Europa central
transferem suas indústrias consideradas de alto

risco  e  muito  poluidoras  para  países  economica-
mente  de  Terceiro  Mundo,  que  não  somente  as
recebe  como  ainda  disputam  entre  si  o  direito  a
possuí-las em seu território.

Em São Paulo o lixo que se coleta de modo seletivo

e que pode ser reciclado não passa de 4% do total.
Ainda  assim,  o  trabalho  de  reciclagem  (principal-
mente de alumínio) no Brasil é alto, devido à forma-
ção  de  cooperativas  com  boa  gestão,  ao  alto  valor
do  material  como  sucata,  ao  trabalho  de  catadores

de lixo e ao comércio informal de reciclagem já que
sua subsistência provém em grande parte da me-

sma  fonte:  o  lixo.  Um  levantamento  realizado  pelo
setor mostra que  entre 2000 e 2005 a participação
de  condomínios  e  clubes  na  coleta  de  latas  usadas

passou de 10% para 24%. As latas de alumínio se
tornaram o carro-chefe da reciclagem no país. O

Brasil é há 5 anos o líder mundial em reciclagem de
alumínio (96,2%, segundo a ABAL - Associação

Brasileira do Alumínio).

No momento em que a reciclagem de alguns mate-

riais começa a adquirir valor comercial, representa
uma possibilidade de renda para os moradores de

favelas e espaços residuais na América Latina e
África. Este processo, no entanto, não possui o

status

glorificado que se observa em documentários

educativos sobre a importância de se diminuir e
reaproveitar o lixo. Constitui um trabalho quase

ilegal, sem nenhum tipo de direito trabalhista e de
alto risco.

Uma das disputas atuais mais comentadas é a que se

estabeleceu entre Argentina e Uruguai, que envolveu desde
manifestações populares até conflitos diplomáticos, para de-

cidir que país acolheria uma fábrica de celulose de capital
espanhol em áreas próximas ao rio de La Plata, que divide os

dois países.

www.cpcmercosur.gov.ar/cpcprensa/2006/2006-

12/20061215.htm

www.elcorreo.eu.org/esp/article.php3?id_article=6669

Folha de S. Paulo, 22/9/2005: „Catadores de lixo serão

expulsos de Pinheiros‖:

A Coopamare (Cooperativa de Cata-

dores Autônomos de Papel, Aparas e Materiais Re-
aproveitáveis) será despejada da parte de baixo do viaduto

Paulo 6º, em Pinheiros (zona oeste), local que ocupa desde

1989. Os catadores foram notificados neste mês, mas disse-
ram que não irão sair. O despejo gerou polêmica e mobilizou

Podemos encontrar por todo o Brasil casos de

discriminação contra os catadores de lixo. Mesmo

quando há um plano de reciclagem de materiais, ele
é muitas vezes imposto sem a inclusão das pessoas
que já trabalhavam com o lixo. Em Goiânia

foi

denunciado que catadores de lixo estavam sendo
espancados pela polícia como modo de impedir seu
trabalho e, principalmente, sua organização como

cooperativa. A pressão sobre a importância
ecológica da reciclagem e o „crescimento

sustentável‖ faz com que haja preocupação com o
lixo material, mas se exclua os que o vêm utilizando
como modo de subsistência. Esta rede social passa

a ser o resíduo do resíduo.

Por detrás de todas as implicações econômicas que

envolvem a recuperação e coleta informal de lixo há
um processo cultural importante. Trata-se de um

processo de tradução constante que se intensifica
com a necessidade de realizar combinações inusita-

das com o que está disponível. Por um lado, o lixo é
abundante, por outro, como fazer para que possa
ser reinserido no sistema e em que sistema(s)? As

possibilidades são inúmeras, já que não há lei que
defina o uso destes materiais nem o modo de inte-

ração destas pessoas. Estar esquecido pela cidade
oficial passa a ser vivenciado a partir de maiores

possibilidades  de  escolha.  As  garrafas  PET  podem
ser  recicladas,  usadas  para  a  construção  de  mora-
dias,  levar  água  ou  guardar  moedas  e  objetos

pequenos que se encontram pela rua. Uma caixa de
papelão pode ser cobertor, casa ou armário. Mistu-

rar-se ao mercado de rua semanal pode ser a possi-
bilidade de revender peças recuperadas do lixo, ou a
manta por sobre onde se vende a mercadoria pirata

pode transformar-se em trouxa de roupas quando a
fiscalização policial se aproxima.

Os movimentos na sociedade que buscam excluir os
economicamente menos favorecidos, os imigrantes

ou quaisquer grupos que não sejam considerados
parte da sociedade chamada „oficial‖, criam não

somente um problema a estas pessoas que se vêem
incapazes de se integrarem, mas implicam também

na alienação do grupo que exclui. Não se trata de
evitar a construção do lixo, o que seria impossível.

alunos e professores da FAU (Faculdade de Arquitetura e Ur-

banismo da USP), que realizam aulas no local e têm o trabal-
ho da cooperativa como alvo de pesquisa. Para o professor da

FAU e urbanista João Whitaker, o prefeito José Serra (PSDB)
retomou uma política de „expulsão da população pobre das

áreas mais ricas, do centro expandido―. A cooperativa reúne
56 cooperados e beneficia uma média de 130 toneladas de

material para reciclagem por mês.

www.midiaindependente.org/pt/blue/2006/12/369276.shtml,

3 de dezembro de 2006. Acessado em agosto de 2007

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Raquel Rennó:
Dejetos Materiais e Informacionais como Elementos Culturaise

Trata-se de tomar consciência do processo de
criação do lixo para que ele possa ser recuperado de

modo criativo e não seja somente fruto de um ciclo
de consumo, mas da cultura. Flusser (2006:60-61)
diz que a história humana não é uma linha linear

que vai da natureza em direção à cultura, „mas um
círculo que gira da natureza à cultura, da cultura ao

lixo, do lixo à natureza e assim por diante‖. Por isso
falar do resíduo é retomar na análise um elemento
que sempre foi parte dos processos culturais.

A negação da importância do lixo implica em

questões éticas, estéticas e é de busca utópica, que
só  pode  ser  colocada  em  prática  a  partir  de
ideologias totalitárias. Essa cegueira, embora não se
trate  de  um  fato  recente,  acaba  sendo  apropriada
pela filosofia de mercado  atual, onde a competição

compreendida como algo natural gera uma
hierarquia que justifica ações continuamente

excludentes tanto em termos sociais quanto
materiais.

Pirataria e Economia

É evidente que o excesso de produção só pode ser

sustentado a partir do estímulo do consumo, onde a
publicidade é o braço mais forte das estratégias de

mercado. No entanto, o contingente de pessoas que
não podem participar desta dinâmica é enorme. De

aí  vem  por  um  lado  as  falsificações,  os  produtos
piratas.  Mas  o  mais  significativo  neste  panorama  é
como  a  pirataria  representa  para  muitos  um  modo

de sobrevivência. O Brasil é considerado o quarto
pais no ranking da pirataria, só ficando atrás da

China, Rússia e Índia. Não por coincidência estes
são os países que compõem o grupo dos principais

países  emergentes  economicamente  no  mundo  (o
chamado  BRICs).  A  pirataria  é  um  braço  forte  da
economia  informal  e  seus  modos  de  produção  e

distribuição operam pela fragmentação, ocorrem nos
interstícios da cidade ou de modo efêmero para

poderem sobreviver à fiscalização.

Desta forma, há a coexistência da aceleração do

capital, como mencionada por autores como Santos
(2002a),  mas  que  ao  mesmo  tempo  encontra  no
espaço local tanto seu modo de concretude quanto
sua  resistência.  O  espaço  torna-se  um  objeto  de
consumo  descartável,  mas  ao  mesmo  tempo  ele  é

apropriado e reconfigurado por aqueles que não
podem participar de seu consumo. Os modos como

os sem-teto, favelados, imigrantes ilegais, ciganos
transitam pelo espaço são também possuidores de
uma fragmentação e possibilidade de adaptação que

põem em xeque as estratégias velozes de ocupação

do capital. Se há o resíduo artificialmente criado
pelo „ciclo de vida do produto‖ em Marketing, e os

discursos lineares e „eficientes‖ da publicidade, há
os resíduos culturais produzidos por sociedades
onde o excesso e a grande quantidade de combina-

ções possíveis nos processos culturais são respon-
sáveis pelas apropriações tanto dos „restos obsole-

tos‖ do mercado quanto dos resíduos imateriais que
o contato entre sistemas distantes oferece. Este
processo cria possibilidades de vida emergentes com

resultados estéticos que sobrepassam o âmbito
artístico, combinando o uso do espaço com meios

tecnológicos, comunidades residuais com grupos de
mídia tática, a gambiarra de luz com os

warchalk-

ers

. É importante propor estas possibilidades, que

podem  ser  desenvolvidas  em  um  próximo  estudo,
para  que  as  tecnologias  não  sejam  compreendidas
logo  de  saída  como  um  elemento  elitista  e  invaria-

velmente conectado ao mercado que lança os
„melhores e mais potentes‖ com cada vez maior

rapidez.

Conclusões

gambiarra

, as estratégias de fuga e fluidez do

mercado pirata, as apropriações efêmeras do espaço
pelos camelôs, pelos catadores de lixo e pelos

moradores  dos  espaços  residuais  oferecerem  uma
visão  mais  ampla  das  apropriações  informacionais
dinâmicas  que  não  estão  restritas  aos  grupos  de

mídia tática ou coletivos de ativistas políticos nem
aos meios digitais como a Internet e a telefonia

celular.  É  importante  mostrar  que  estas  formas  de
organização  residuais  possuem  uma  mobilidade
constante  que  encontra  nos  sem-teto  e  nos  imi-

grantes ilegais agentes de fundamental importância.

Não  se  trata  de  um  otimismo  em  que  não  se  per-
cebe  que  nos  produtos  piratas  e  nas  práticas  de
mercado  informal  se  encontra  um  braço  de  um

capitalismo voraz e não necessariamente sua alter-
nativa. É exatamente por saber que nos discursos

pró-identidade e anti-pirataria se ocultam interesses
de contínua exploração dos grupos „excluídos‖ que

é necessário compreender como estes discursos
estão impregnados de incongruências e promessas
de falsa estabilidade. Somente desconstruindo estes

discursos é possível ver o que se esconde por de-
trás, perceber que o processo de exclusão vai se

alimentando do sistema paralelo dos excluídos,

Grupos que se organizam para detectar e informar locais

onde há conexão de Internet sem senha para acesso que
esteja disponível à apropriação.

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Raquel Rennó:
Dejetos Materiais e Informacionais como Elementos Culturaise

gerando lixo continuamente sem aproveitá-lo de
modo consciente, crítico e reestruturador.

Referencias Bibliográficas

Ferarra, Lucrécia D´Alessio.

Design em espaços

. Sao

Paulo: Rosari, 2002.

Flusser, Vilém.

O mundo codificado

. Trad. Raquel

Abi-Samara. Sao Paulo: Cosac e Naify, 2007.

Lynch, Kevin e Southworth, Michael.

Echar a perder,

una análisis del deterioro.

Trad. Joaquin Rodri-

guez Feo. Barcelona: Gustavo Gilli, 2005.

Lotman, Iuri.

La semiosferea II - Semiótica de la

cultura, del texto, de la conducta y del espacio.

Trad

. Desiderio Navarro. Madrid: Cátedra Un-

iversidad de Valencia, 1998.

Maturana, Humberto R.; Varela, Francisco J.

árvore do conhecimento.

Campinas: Psy, 1987.

Maturana, Humberto R.; Varela, Francisco J.

máquinas e seres vivos: autopoiese: a organi-

zação do vivo

. Porto Alegre, Editora Artes Médi-

cas, 1997.

Santos, Milton.

A natureza do espaço

. Sao Paulo,

EDUSP, 2002.

Wiener, Norbert.

Cibernética e Sociedade - O Uso

Humano de Sêres Humanos

. Trad. Gita

K.Ghinzberg. Sao Paulo: Cultrix, 1958.

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Tobi Miller:
The Oldest New Network: The Division Of Cultural Labor And Its Ecological Impact

The Division of Labor

In the 14th and 15th centuries, a mercantile system
arose from calculations, appropriations, and ex-

changes of climate, geography, flora, and fauna.
Exchanges of goods turned into exchanges of labor.

As food commodities made their way around the
globe, so did people, often as slaves. When machin-
ery was developed, work split into an industrial

mode. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, cities
grew into manufacturing sites, populations urban-

ized, and wages displaced farming as the basis of
subsistence (Lang and Hines 1993: 15). These new
forms of labor were institutionalized in empire. In
the 18th and 19th centuries, manufacturing went on
at the centre, with food and raw materials imported

from the periphery. In the 20th century, assembly-
line control, with its quid pro quo of sufficient wages

to  buy  the  products  being  assembled,  became  a
Fordist  paradigm.  The  labor  force  was  divided
between  blue-collar  workers,  who  undertook  tasks

on the line, and white-collar workers, who observed
them (Scott 1998: 18).

Differences of opinion emerged about the signifi-
cance of the balance of trade to a country‘s wellbe-

ing. Mercantilists thought it should be controlled, but
free traders wanted market forces to rule in accor-

dance with factor endowments and an international
division of labor. Keynesian responses to the De-
pression made protectionism a more legitimate

position in economic theory, until stagflation
emerged from the transnational phase that com-

menced after the war. By the mid-1980s, offshore
production by multinationals exceeded trade be-

tween  states.  Since  that  time,  the  global  capitalist
economy  has  depended  on  the  integration  of  pro-
duction  processes;  even  when  geographically  dis-

persed, they remain governed by states and para-
statal institutions in the service of capital accumula-

tion. Products are first made and consumed in the
centre, in a major industrial economy; then exported
to the periphery; and finally produced and con-

sumed „out there,‖ once technology is standardized
and savings can be made on the labor front. Goods
and services owned and vended by the periphery
rarely make their way into the centre as imports.

Hence the idea of a New International Division of
Labor (NIDL). This model reveals that developing

markets for labor and sales, and the shift from the
spatial sensitivities of electrics to the spatial insensi-
tivities of electronics, have pushed businesses

beyond treating Third World countries as suppliers

of raw materials, to look on them as shadow-setters
of the price of work, competing among themselves

and with the First World for employment. As produc-
tion split across continents, the prior division of the
globe into a small number of empires and satellites

and a majority of underdeveloped countries has
been compromised. Folker Fröbel and his collabora-

tors (1980) christened this trend the NIDL. Whereas
the old IDL had kept labor costs down through the
formal and informal slavery of colonialism (the trade

in people and indentureship) and importation of
cheap raw materials with value added in the metro-

pole, successful action by the working class at the
centre redistributed income. The response from

capital was to export production to the Third World,
focusing increasingly on young women workers.
China is the contemporary epitome of the NIDL at

work.

Culture

So how does the division of labor fit with culture?

Artists, musicians, poets, and scholars traveled
across royal courts, salons, and universities for

many centuries prior to capitalism.  But  that revolu-
tion  in  social  relations  in  Europe  and  the  US  was
accompanied  by  a  new  method  and  history  to  the

exchange of bodies, ideologies, images, and money.
Culture, which had previously referred to tending

land, came to personify instrumentalism at the same
time as negating it; on the one hand, there was the

industrialization  of  agriculture;  on  the  other,  the
tutoring  of  individual  taste.  German,  French,  and
Spanish  dictionaries  of  the  18th  century  indicate  a

shift in the meaning of culture towards spiritual
cultivation and away from animal husbandry. With

the spread of literacy and publishing, and the ad-
vent of customs and laws that were shared, admin-
istered, and understood through the printed word,

cultural texts supplemented and supplanted physical
force as sources of authority. As the Industrial

Revolution moved populations to cities, food was
imported and new textual forms were exchanged,

for  both  practical  and  entertainment  purposes.
Along  came  a  society  of  consumers  and  an  art
world.  There  was  an  obvious  corollary  in  labor

terms: the emergence of

poligrafi

in 15th century

Venice, and hacks in 18th century London. They

wrote popular books about correct forms of con-
duct—instructions on daily life (Briggs and Burke,
2003). Thus began a division of cultural labor in the

modern sense.

With the First World losing manufacturing jobs
because of the NIDL from the 1970s, culture be-

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Tobi Miller:
The Oldest New Network: The Division Of Cultural Labor And Its Ecological Impact

came a core employment site in the Global North.
Most new jobs within the First World now come

from the culture and media sector. Their connection
is knowledge, information, emotions, and communi-
cation (Hardt and Negri 2000: 285). Daniel Bell

discerns four changes in the Global North‘s economy
from production to services:



the preeminence of professionalism and tech-
nique



the importance of theory to innovate and
generate public policies



the formation of a discourse of the future;
and



new intellectual technologies that help make
decisions (Mattelart 2003: 77-78)

This is a technocratic vision dominated by experts, a
world of modernity, of rationality, of the ability to

apply reason to problems, and seek salvation in the
secular. It favors ecological metaphors to describe

workspaces, emptying out the core environmental
impact on nature of industry at the same time as it

denies the solidarity and security of ongoing em-
ployment. Manuel Castells suggests we inhabit an
epoch of networks of knowledge workers, effectively

a ruling class operating through technique and
technology. This is not the daily society of humanity,

but a society, after Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
of control (Mattelart 2003: 143). Castells discerns
two economic models at work here. In the first

system, the Anglo-Saxon one, services substitute for
manufactures, with finance displacing physical labor.

The second model, from Japan and Germany, com-
bines the two, rather than substituting one for the
other (Hardt and Negri 2000: 286). For their part,

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri develop the idea of
immaterial labor to describe the tendency to ex-

change information, knowledge, and emotion,
filtered through the computer and its methods of

invigilation,  and  abstracted  from  physical  work
(2000:  290-92).  While  this  notion  of  immaterial
labor  captures  the  realities  of  work  in  the  post-

industrial sector, it is awkwardly close to forgetting
the fundamental ecology of the division of labor—

that this is not a network of equality, but domina-
tion, and one that imperils the Earth.

Using typologies from Fritz Machlup and Armand
Mattelart, I propose the following types of paid

cultural and media workers:



creators, who make new art and ideas



transmitters, who communicate the art and
ideas of others



transformers, who change art and ideas via
form



processors, who change art and ideas via
formats



interpreters, who change art and ideas via
idiom; and



analysts, who create new interpretations
(Mattelart 2003: 63)

Within the culture industries we find the following

groups of workers, albeit with much overlap:



creators, such as musicians, directors, writers,
journalists, and technical workers



artisans, including sound engineers, editors,
cinematographers, and web designers



impresarios, who connect proprietors and ex-
ecutives to creators



proprietors and executives, who control em-
ployment and investment and negotiate with

states; and



audiences, whose labor as workers pays for
content, whose labor as interpreters gives it
meaning, and whose labor as imaginary peo-

ple is its alibi

These groups operate within institutional contexts,

specifically:



private bureaucracies, controlling investment
and distribution



public bureaucracies, offering what capitalism
cannot



small businesses, run by charismatic individu-
als; and



networks, fluid associations formed to under-
take specific projects

Private bureaucracies continue to control most of

the cultural/copyright industries, but very frequently

in collaboration with less formal networks, while
public bureaucracies experience pressure to comport
themselves in an ever-more commercial manner.

Since the demise of the production-line, car-
assembly-like Hollywood studio-system of produc-
tion that applied between about 1920 and 1970, but
was eroding by the late 1950s, the US film industry

has been a pioneer in the loose model of employ-
ment beloved of contemporary management. Jobs

are constantly ending, starting, and moving. Holly-
wood exemplifies ‗flexible specialization,‘ a shift from

life-long employment to casual labor. It has an
economic commitment to ‗permanent innovation,‘

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The Oldest New Network: The Division Of Cultural Labor And Its Ecological Impact

and a political commitment to control its environ-
ment (Piore and Sabel 1984: 17).

Workers and bosses strike complex, transitory
arrangements on a project basis via temporary

organisations, with small numbers of divers hands
involved at each stage other than production, when

sizeable crews function both together and semi-
autonomously. Places and networks matter in terms
of textual cues, policy incentives, educational sup-

port, financing, and skills. Time matters because of
cost and marketing. Work may be subject to local,

national,  regional,  and  international  fetishization  of
each  component,  matching  the  way  that  the  labor
undertaken is largely fetishized away from the final
text.  Conventional  organizational  charts  are  inade-
quate  to  the  task,  especially  if  one  seeks  to  elude

the conventions of hierarchy through capital whilst
recognizing the eternal presence of managerial

surveillance. Business leeches want flexibility in the
numbers they employ, the technology they use, the
place where they produce, and the amount that

they pay—and inflexibility of ownership and control
(Eisenmann and Bower, 2000).

There were 3,500 film and television companies in
Southern California in 2002. Perhaps 0.1% of them

hired over a thousand people, while about 75% had
no more than four employees (Miller et al., 2005).

This makes the industry seem dispersed, and has
led to theorizations of it as an open ecological
system. But the power and logic of domination by a

small number of vast entities is achieved via a huge
globalizing network of subcontracted firms and

individuals, in turn mediated through unions, em-
ployer associations, education, and the state. Movie

capital is footloose in its networking, and destructive
in its ecology, as the case studies below will illus-
trate.

Networks Alive, Exploiting and
Polluting

Mexico became a key site for offshore Hollywood

production following the success of

Titanic

(James

Cameron, 1997). During the film‘s production, the
national film studio Churubusco was renovated and
a National Film Commission established, with satel-

lites across the country‘s 31 states, offering Holly-
wood moguls everything from trips in governors‘

helicopters to many other, less exotic, services.
Mexico‘s new film „union‖ set up shop in Los Ange-

les to reassure industry mavens of its cooperative-
ness and to remain up-to-date on US pay rates—in

order to undercut them. Not surprisingly, Rupert
Murdoch cites approvingly the number of European

workers invisibly employed in the making of

Titanic

‗this cross-border cultural co-operation is not the
result of regulation, but market forces. It‘s the

freedom to move capital, technology and talent
around the world that adds value, invigorates ailing

markets,  creates  new  ones.‘  National  Public  Radio
reported  that  Rupert‘s  very  own  Fox  company  was
asking  the  Mexican  Government  to  offer  further

financial incentives for runaways even as the privati-
zation of the film industry during the 1990s had

decimated local production. Overall, the present
conjuncture is a screen testimony to the North

American  Free  Trade  Agreement,  which  has  seen
the  average  number  of  offshore  productions  in
Mexico  per  year  increase  from  seven  to  seventeen

as the shipment of film stock and special-effects
equipment is facilitated, especially for low-budget

productions  while  local  production  spiraled  down-
wards,  from  747  films  in  the  decade  prior  to  the
Treaty,  to  212  in  the  decade  since  (Maxwell  and

Miller, 2006).

Restoring Mexico to the Hollywood map gained
James Cameron the Order of the Aztec Eagle from a
grateful government, which offers docile labor,

minimal bureaucracy, a weak peso, many US-trained
technicians and liaison services. The National Film

Commission‘s web site states that almost 3,000
foreign productions were shot there between 1995

and 2002, from airline commercials to feature films
(Maxwell and Miller, 2006).

But there is a cruel irony to the globalization of
cultural labor through loose networks: people sub-

merged at the end of the credits (or not listed at all)
„owed‖ their livelihoods to a boat sunk by invisible
ice and business hubris. The village was cut off from

the sea and local fisheries by a walled ‗movie maqui-
ladora‘ built to keep them away from production.

Fox‘s  chlorination  of  surrounding  seawater  deci-
mated  the ranks of  sea urchins, which Popotla had
long  fished,  and  reduced  overall  fish  levels  by  a

third. Meanwhile, it was revealed that the overall
cost of the film could have provided safe drinking

water to 600,000 people for a year. (Miller et al.
2005: 165). The Popotlanos demonstrated their
environmental consciousness by decorating the wall

with rubbish to ridicule the filmmakers and call for

mariscos libre

(freedom for shellfish) (for photos,

see

rtmark.com/popotlaimages.html

Fox again ran into difficulties while making

The

Beach

(2000) in Thailand‘s Maya Bay, part of Phi Phi

Islands National Park, where a (textually) modern-

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International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (09/2009)

Tobi Miller:
The Oldest New Network: The Division Of Cultural Labor And Its Ecological Impact

day Eden suddenly turns nasty for jaded tourists.
Thai environmental and pro-democracy activists

publicized the arrogant despoliation they expe-
rienced. Natural scenery was bulldozed because it
did not fit the company‘s fantasy of a tropical idyll:

sand dunes were relocated, flora rearranged, and a
„new‖ strip of coconut palms planted. The producers

paid off the government with a donation to the
Royal Forestry Department, and campaigned with
the Tourism Authority of Thailand to twin the film as

a promotion for the country. Meanwhile, the next
monsoon saw the damaged sand dunes of the

region collapse, its natural defenses against erosion
destroyed by Hollywood bulldozers. All the while,

director Danny Boyle claimed the film was „raising
environmental consciousness‖ among a local popula-
tion that was allegedly „behind‖ US levels of

„awareness‖ (Miller

et al

. 2005).

Conclusion

We inhabit a world where flexibility is the mega-sign

of affluence, and precariousness its flipside. One
person‘s calculated risk is another‘s burden of labor,

inequality is represented as the outcome of a moral
test, and the young are supposed to regard insecu-
rity as an opportunity rather than a constraint.

Antonio Negri (2007) refers to people mired in

contingent media work as the cognitariat, because
they have high levels of educational attainment, and
great facility with cultural technologies and genres.

The cognitariat plays key roles in the production and
circulation of goods and services, through both

creation and coordination. Today‘s ‗culturalisation of
production‘ may enable these intellectuals, by plac-

ing them at the center of world economies, but it
also disables them, because it does so under condi-
tions of flexible production and ideologies of „free-

dom.‖ This new proletariat is not defined in terms of
factories, manufacturing, or opposition to ruling-

class power and ideology. Indeed, it is formed from
those whose immediate forebears, with similar or
less cultural capital, were the salariat, and confident

of guaranteed health care and retirement income. It
lacks both the organization of the traditional work-

ing class and the political entrée of the old middle
class.

What used to be the fate of artists and musicians—
where „making cool stuff‖ and working with relative

autonomy was meant to outweigh ongoing employ-
ment—has become a norm across virtually every
sector of the economy. The outcome is contingent

labor as a way of life—the triumph of a New Inter-

national Division of Cultural Labor. The results are
even worse for the unskilled labor of those who are

outside the cognitariat, like many Popotlanos and
Thais. It is a timely reminder for those who fetishize
the supposedly new „creative‖ industries or the

information society and economy that it repeats
many of the humanly exploitative and environmen-

tally disastrous escapades of smoky industrialism.

There would be no culture, no media, without labor.

It is the beating heart of creativity and social justice.
When it is reduced to the contingency of network

metaphors,  it  becomes  precarious.  And  when  eco-
logical  ideas are removed  from their  explanation of
the  environment,  that  precariousness  produces  an
eternal pollution.

References

Briggs, Asa and Peter Burke. (2002).

A Social His-

tory of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Inter-

net

. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Organization

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The New International Division of Labor

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Empire

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The New Protec-

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The ¡nformation Society:

An Introduction.

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Maxwell, and Ting Wang. (2005).

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IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

www.i-r-i-e.net

ISSN 1614-1687

Ned Rossiter:

Translating the Indifference of Communication: Electronic Waste, Migrant
Labour and the Informational Sovereignty of Logistics in China

Abstract

This essay is interested in the relationship between electronic waste and emergent regimes of labour control

operative within the global logistics industry, the task of which is to manage the movement of people and
things in the interests of communication, transport and economic efficiencies. It considers the production of

non-governable subjects and (regional) spaces as they figure in the relation between electronic waste, global
logistics industries and biopolitical technologies of labour control.

Agenda

Author

Associate Professor Ned Rossiter



[1.] Division of International Communications, University of Nottingham, Ningbo China, 199, Taikang

East Road, University Park, Ningbo, 315100, Zhejiang Province, P.R. China.



[2.] Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, Parramatta Campus, EBa

Locked Bag

1797, Penrith South DC 1797, Australia.





ned.rossiter@nottingham.edu.cn



www.nedrossiter.org



Relevant publications:

Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions. Rotterdam: NAi 2006.

MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries. Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, (Ed.). Am-
sterdam: Institute of Network Cultures 2007.

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Ned Rossiter:
Electronic Waste, Migrant Labour and the Informational Sovereignty of Logistics in China

„

As long as there are people on this planet, the

waste industries will never die. So we're not worried

about the future of the industry.‖

– Owner of a small e-waste processing business in

Ningbo, China.

This essay is interested in the relationship between

electronic waste and emergent regimes of labour
control operative within the global logistics industry,

the task of which is to manage the movement of
people and things in the interests of communication,

transport  and  economic  efficiencies.  Central  to
logistics is the question and scope of governance  –
both  of  labouring  subjects  and  the  treatment  of
objects  or  things.  The  relation  between  labour  and
electronic  waste  constitutes  a  milieu  (environment)

and  population  (of  human  and  technological  life)
whose  communication  comprises  a  unique  multi-
scalar  space  that  severely  tests  techno-systems  of

governance. In registering the contingency of go-
vernance – its capacity for failure or oversight – this

essay signals the uncertainty that underpins the
technics of control special to logistics.

At stake is

the connection between the milieu and the labour of
human life.

Paradoxically perhaps, conflicting governance re-
gimes make possible the production of non-

governable subjects and spaces. Electronic waste
and many of those working in its informal secondary

economies can be considered as occupants that
reside off the grid. Such positioning in itself does not

constitute a political program or articulated agency.
Non-governance should not, in other words, be
assumed to be synonymous with some kind of

counter-political force. This would be the error of
translation understood as a system of equivalence in

which an

a priori

relation exists between, for in-

stance, non-state actors and political agency. In-
deed, it may even be desirable for biopolitical pow-

ers to ensure a non-governable dimension in order

1 Thanks to Soenke Zehle and Brett Neilson for comments and

critique of earlier drafts of this essay. The text also benefitted

from questions and discussion at the Inter-Asia Cultural Ty-
phoon Conference, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 3-5

July, 2009. A parallel can be found here with Schumpeter‘s
logic of „creative destruction,― where failure becomes the

source of renewal in the reproduction of capital. The pros-
pects for a politics of refusal within such a system become

extremely depressing in so far as it is unlikely to do much
more than reinforce the power of the hegemon. Such a sce-

nario returns us, yet again, to the core question: what

is poli-

tics?

2 See Canguilhem 2008, also Foucault 2003, 2008.

to manage the political, economic and environmen-
tal problem of electronic waste – the maintenance of

unregulated informality serves as one of the struc-
tural resources that sustains the current economy of
waste. Since there is no globally implemented

consensus or treaty and quite frequently an absence
of national legislation on how to address the eco-

nomic and social life of electronic waste, it helps to
reflect on the question of ewaste by taking this
„indifferent‖ status of e-waste as a point of depar-

ture – both technically within logistics software and
politically within the institutional limits of the state

apparatus. As I argue below, such indifference
comes at a potential political and social cost, one

that sees a further expansion and penetration of
biopolitical technologies of control over the relatively
autonomous aspects of labour and life.

To complement the various hypotheses above, this

essay  also  addresses  the  relation  between  regions
and  the  composition  of  labour  in  electronic  waste
industries  in  China.  The  multiplication  of  regions

through practices of translation coextensive with the
movement of people, language, technological proto-

cols and things presents a serious challenge to
regions as they are defined by hegemonic orders
and interests. A region such as the European Union,

for example, is translated as a legitimate political,
economic and social entity through an ensemble of

institutions (state governments, international institu-
tions, universities, cultural organizations, labour

unions, etc.). While there may be numerous in-
stances of dispute and conflict between such actors,
ultimately the fact of their relation serves to mutual-

ly reaffirm the legitimacy of the EU as a region. But
to reduce the configuration of a region to such

translation devices alone is to overlook the diverse
practices and technics through which spaces and
populations are comprised. The battle of hegemony,

in this sense, is a contest over idioms of translation.

Similarly, the social practice of translation brings

into question the analytical modalities that assume
the existence of the region as a set of stable coordi-

nates and coherent institutional practices that
facilitate economies of depletion.

In the case of the

global  logistics  industries,  the  rise  of  secondary
resource  flows accompanying  the economy  of elec-
tronic  waste  is  coextensive  with  the  production  of

non-governable subjects and spaces. I suggest that
the relation between these entities constitutes new
regional formations that hold a range of implications

for biopolitical technologies of control.

3 On translation as social practice, see Solomon 2008.

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International Review of Information Ethics

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Ned Rossiter:
Electronic Waste, Migrant Labour and the Informational Sovereignty of Logistics in China

Multiplication and Division

With their capacity to adapt flexibly to a range of
circumstances and skill requirements, the rural

migrant worker in China is arguably the exemplary
post-Fordist subject rather than, as often assumed,

the specialist work of the designer, architect, film-
maker or ad-man attributed to the figure of cogni-
tive, creative or immaterial labour. Such a distinction

in the body of labour-power points also to the
residual class dimension of post-Fordist labour,

which in this case is frequently underscored by the
spatial division between rural provinces and metro-

politan centres. Ethnic divisions also prevail, with
the rural migrant worker often enough not belong-
ing to the Han Chinese majority population.

Fieldwork undertaken earlier this year with my MA

students in Ningbo – a 2nd tier and major port city a

few  hours  south  of  Shanghai  –  began  to  make
visible (at least for us)  the  „division and  multiplica-
tion  of  labour‖  within  the  electronic  waste  indus-
tries.

Mezzadra and Neilson:

„

By speaking of the multiplication of labor

we want to point to the fact that division

works in a fundamentally different way than

it does in the world as constructed within

the frame of the international division of la-

bor. It tends itself to function through a

continuous multiplication of control devices

that correspond to the multiplication of la-

bor regimes and the subjectivities implied by

them within each single space constructed

as separate within models of the interna-

tional division of labor. Corollary to this is

the presence of particular kinds of labor re-

gimes across different global and local

spaces. This leads to a situation where the

division of labor must be considered within a

multiplicity of overlapping sites that are
themselves internally heterogeneous.

―

And as Neilson elaborates elsewhere:

„

It is crucial to note that the multiplication

4 See Hess 2009. See also China Labor Watch 2009.
5 Students were enrolled in a module entitled Urban-Media

Networks in the MA International Communications, University
of

Nottingham,

Ningbo,

China.

Module

blog:

http://orgnets.cn

. For an analysis that offers more specific

detail of e-waste in Ningbo, see Meng 2009.

6 Mezzadra and Neilson 2008.

of labour does not exclude its division ....

Indeed, multiplication implies division, or,

even more strongly, we can say multiplica-
tion is a form of division

.‖

Hierarchies of labour separate the first stage of

waste processing and storage from the initial collec-
tion of unwanted trash in the cities of China. The

looped tape recording of

diannao

(comput-

er/electronic brain) and

kongtiao

(air conditioner)

rhythmically alerts locals to the arrival of the junk
men and women as they move about neighbour-
hoods on a bicycle equipped with a flat tray for the

transport  of  waste.  Situated  among  those  at  the
bottom  of  the  supply  chain  of  electronic  waste
industries (others working in particularly toxic condi-
tions  include  children  who  dissemble  electronic
products, stripping copper from plastic casings while

inhaling poisonous fumes from incineration), the
junkmen are among the most transient in the econ-

omy of e-waste. The working life of junkmen is one
of low income and frequently changing low-skill jobs
determined by the fluctuation of market economies

and the informal social networks and family de-
mands that shape the movement of populations

from country to city, job to job. Here, we see the
multiplying effect of labour: while hierarchically

distinct  from  other  modalities  of  work  in  the  eco-
nomic  life  of  electronic  waste,  the  job  of  the  junk
men  and  women  is  underscored  by  mobility  and

uncertain transformation. It is unlikely, in other
words, that waste collection is a job for life.

A different story prevails, however, in the case of
many of the small businesses that deal with the

sorting of electronic waste. Like many Chinese cities,
the waste collection centres dispersed across the

neighborhoods  and  districts  of  Ningbo  are  pivotal
sites  in  the  social  and  economic  life  of  electronic
waste.  Often  run  as  small  family  businesses,  these

recycling centres can be divided along formal and
informal lines, both with differing degrees of toxicity

in terms of the type of waste materials collected. Of
the thousand or so businesses with official licenses

to  operate  in  Ningbo  (a  legal  requirement  in  Zhe-
jiang  province),  there  are  many  more  that  exist
illegally.  At  6000  RMB  (approx.  600  Euros),  the
annual license fee is a costly obstacle for many, yet
it offers a level of economic and political security not

afforded by the illegal collection centres. The official
sites tend to have a regular network of waste sup-
pliers based on

guanxi

(social relations or networks)

and, unlike the illegal sites, do not negotiate prices.

7 Neilson (forthcoming).

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Ned Rossiter:
Electronic Waste, Migrant Labour and the Informational Sovereignty of Logistics in China

This in turn affords the junkmen a level of guaran-
teed income, albeit with wildly fluctuating and

typically declining prices over the past year. Trading
prices for metals are set each morning according to
futures markets, which are usually accessed as daily

updates by mobile phone more often than through
computers.

External and internal forces have placed enormous
pressure on the recycling industry and labour condi-

tions across China. The owner of one small licensed
recycling company we spoke to, who had been in

business  for  15  years,  made  note  of  the  Chinese
Labor  Contract  Law,  which  came  into  effect  in
January  2008,  making  it  harder  for  companies  to
sack  employees.

He offered this reference as an

indication of the more stable and secure working
conditions for the migrants he employs from Jiangxi

and Húnán provinces to the west of coastal Zhe-
jiang.

By contrast, reports produced by various human
rights NGOs and environmental monitoring organiza-

tions document numerous instances where workers'
rights are violated in the electronics factories and

recycling industries, with excessive and often unpaid
working hours, hiring of child labour, gender divi-
sions, dangerous working conditions, suppression of

efforts to organize labour and strike actions, fines
and punishments for violation of highly punitive

rules (correct haircuts, smoking in designated areas,
improper attire, wastage of water, making noise,
posting or distributing unauthorized articles, etc.).

More  broadly,  in  her  assessment  of  the  legislative
reform  of  labour  conditions,  Jenny  Chan  notes
„severe  rights  violations  in  at  least  three  major

areas: job security; the use of contingent labor; and
fair, fixed-term labor contracts.‖

Worker layoffs

from factories have also been on the rise since the

end of the Chinese new year – the social effects of
this became rapidly clear, if relatively short-lived, on

the streets of Shanghai and Ningbo, with increased
numbers of homeless migrants and visible instances
of untreated mental illnesses.

Improved labour conditions are often perceived by

businesses  and  investors  to  come  at  a  cost  rather
than  a  benefit  in  terms  of  higher  productivity
through  workplace  stability.  Other  economic  forces

8  See Chan 2009.
9  See Chan and Ho 2008.
10  Chan 2009, p. 46.

impact in more immediate ways. Since 1st of Janu-
ary 2009, recycling companies have had to absorb

the cost of a 17% value added tax  – a burden not
suffered  by  other  industries.  This  comes  on  top  of
an  enormous  drop  in  prices  of  around  50-60%  for

recyclable metals due to the global economic reces-
sion. With successive months of depressed prices,

the global recycling economy is now dire. In China,
this manifests in the form of massive stockpiling of
waste that cannot be sold. There are additional

storage costs and increased health risks associated
with prolonged exposure to inventory accumulation

of toxic metals, to say nothing of increased pres-
sures on labour.

Another owner of a Ningbo recycling business, Mr
Yu, assessed the situation in the following way

earlier this year:

„

Metals and papers are online transactions.

Copper and aluminum are sold and bought

in the futures markets. For China, marketing

Chinese products is fine, however, in the

global market it is hard to do good business.

I have to purchase and sell the waste at

cheap prices. I suppose the economy will

improve. Copper makes more profits, how-

ever it makes me lose more money. Now

the price of copper is 17 yuan/500 grams

compared with the previous price (27/28

yuan / 500g) – we lose 10 yuan per 500g.

We are a small business. Foreign waste

such as plastic, copper and aluminum are

packaged and put into containers that are

transported to Beilun dock

.‖

The Battle of Standards

The connection made here between electronic waste

and the maritime industries is worth noting. Despite
the fact that importation of electronic waste in China

has been illegal since 1996, much of the movement
of waste from North America, Europe, East Asia and
Australia is channeled through the ports of China.

There's a story to be told here about the global

logistics industry. In short, logistics is concerned
with the management of global supply chains and

labour regimes. The electronic waste industries
obviously fit into that schematic. Aided by software

applications and database technologies, logistics

11 For maps and a short overview of e-waste flows in the East

and South Asian regions, see UNEP, also Maxwell and Miller
2008.

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Electronic Waste, Migrant Labour and the Informational Sovereignty of Logistics in China

aims to maximize efficiencies at all levels. In terms
of labour management, the optimum state of gover-

nance arises at the moment in which the execution
of a task, or Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), is
registered in the real-time computation of Key

Performance Indicators (or KPIs). In other words,
the labour control regime is programmed into the

logistics chain at the level of code. Similarly, the
governance of labour is informatized in such a way
that the border between undertaking a task and

reporting its completion has become closed or
indistinct. As such, there is no longer a temporal

delay between the execution of duties and their
statistical measure.

The potential for escape, invention and refusal
become severely compromised within such a biopo-

litical regime of control, one that is already domi-
nant for millions working across the world in differ-

ent industries articulated with global logistics sys-
tems. Moreover, and most oddly, it would seem that
the capacity for capital to renew itself is substantial-

ly challenged within such a system: logistics aims to
diminish the force of contingency, which plays a key

role in the emergence of innovation upon which the
reproduction of capital depends. Do we find here,
then, an instance whereby capital programs its own

obsolescence?

An important control device in the maritime indus-

tries is radio-frequency identification (RFID) tech-
nology, which registers the geographic position of

ships and goods and assists in the management of
inventories and the efficiency of supply chains.

While RFID technologies are indifferent to the
matter of things, and thus do not discern between,

say, automotive parts or textiles on the one hand,
and electronic waste on the other, their database
logic nonetheless identifies the content of motion. In

other words, the database provides a record of that
which migrates from one place to another. And in

the case of electronic waste, there are strict national
and international regulations governing its transport
and treatment. But since, as noted earlier, electronic

waste is deemed an illegal import in China, it is
questionable whether it falls into the purview of the

database and its informatized sovereign power. Like
many countries, electronic waste holds a contradic-
tory status within the rule of law in China, with

waste businesses requiring a license to operate, as
mentioned previously.

In another respect, the connection between elec-
tronic waste, logistics and software systems consti-

tutes the battle of standards across idioms of trans-
lation. The governance of labour associated with

electronic waste varies enormously depending upon
whether or not the movement, economy and treat-

ment of e-waste is made visible by logistics software
used in maritime logistics, to take one example. In
such a case, there are industry, state and union

standards that shape the conditions of labour and
management of waste. Logistics software facilitates

such relations by tracking cargo movement, register-
ing times of passage in global supply chains and
accounting for inventory accumulation. The stan-

dards established in such an economy run into
conflict, or are just modulated differently, when the

circuits of labour and resource flows associated with
electronic waste are translated through less formal

standards found in economies not officiated by the
state. The case of electronic waste in China is one of
these economies. The sex-trade in and across many

countries and regions would be another.

Translation can be understood in one sense as the

process of establishing standards expressed through
a community of practice. In Naoki Sakai‘s terms, this
is the „homolingual‖ operation of translation.

Yet

such an occasion should not be seen as the end-
point of translation, but rather in terms of the

instantiation of a particular border that promulgates
new modes of practice and relation. Indeed, it is

precisely the scene of conflict that attends the drive
toward standardization that raises the problem of
translation.

The example of standardization in the

shipping and transport industries helps clarify this

process.

The standardization of shipping containers from the

1950s was accompanied by disputes between engi-
neers, corporations and governments over compet-

ing economic and geopolitical interests in the trans-
port industries.

By the 1970s a global standard in

containerization had been established, around the

same time economic globalization came into full
swing following the end of the Bretton Woods

Accord  in  1971  and  the  oil  crisis  of  1973.  Such
cursory  contextualization  indicates  that  standard
containers  did  not  alone  determine  or  create  eco-

nomic accumulation (the same might be said for
logistics software). Marc Levinson notes that by the

late 1960s,

„

The economic benefit of standardization …

12  See Sakai 2006, 1997.
13  Thanks to Brett Neilson for highlighting this formulation.
14  See Levinson 2006, pp. 127-149.

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was still not clear. Containers of 10, 20, 30

and 40 feet had become American and in-

ternational standards, but the neat arith-

metic relationship among the ‗standard‘ siz-

es did not translate into demand by shippers

or ship lines. Not a single ship was using 30-

foot containers. Only a handful of 10-foot

containers had been purchased, and the

main carrier using them soon concluded

that it would not buy any more. As for 20-
foot containers, land carriers hated them

.‖

Conflicts over standards in logistics and software

systems  define  the  terrain  of  translation  in  more
recent  years.  Logistics,  as  defined  earlier,  is  con-
cerned with maximizing efficiencies in global supply
chains  and  labour  regimes.  Once  the  logistical
problem  of  container  standardization  had  been

resolved, the work and political economy of transla-
tion shifted to data standards. While present in a

primitive form in the 1960s, the computerization of
transport industries did not really take off until the
1980s following the standardization of shipping

containers and the advent of just-in-time produc-
tion. Effectively integrating and simulating the logic

of containerization in order to produce enhanced
efficiencies, the information architecture of code can

also be understood as a container or silo forma-
tion.

Again, the drive toward interoperability

across different software systems is an example of
translation as homolingual address or equivalence.

Software technologies are key devices in the transla-
tion of labour and the mobility of things as actiona-
ble, visible and subject to control and instrumental

consolidation. Once registered within the database
logic of informatized sovereignty, electronic waste

and  its  modalities  of  labour  and  social  life  become
governable  within  the  economy  of  real-time.  Such
an  idiom  of  translation  is  one  of  co-figuration  and

equivalence, to draw on the formulation of Sakai.
Yet logistics software consists of multiple standards

whose disparities in code produce conflict and
competition in the effort to determine systems

commensurate with the demand for intermodal
freight transportation, pervasive labour manage-

15 Levinson, p. 144.
16 Thanks to Julian Kücklich for bringing this point to my

attention.

17 There is a strong case to be made here for understanding the

network structure which defines contemporary relations of

communication and economy in terms of the principle of

„notworking.― For an elaboration of this concept and condi-
tion, see Lovink 2005.

ment and economic hegemony. Such tensions over
standardization give rise to the heterolingual dimen-

sion of translation – its social practices of „differen-
tial inclusion,‖ struggle and multiplication – that
confers a non-governable potential to electronic
waste.

While I am in no way idealizing such practices – as

noted earlier, there is enormous social, environmen-
tal and individual damage that attends the toxic life

of electronic waste – I want to stress that once
captured within the instrumental world of logistics
that economizes labour, life and space according to

efficiencies in time, the work of translation becomes
automated  and  effectively  annulled.  And  it  is  pre-
cisely  at  this  moment  of  informatization  coupled
with  logistics  that  the  region  becomes  constituted
within  the  sovereign  space  of  the  database.  Once

code is king the variable capacity of labour, life and
things finds itself subject to an intensive form of

territorial  and  proprietary  control  that  formal  set-
tings  such  as  ASEAN,  APEC  and  NAFTA  can  only
gesture  towards.

But no matter how much com-

munication  regimes  may  be  indifferent  to  noise,
contingency,  feedback  and  indeed  life  itself,  the
difference  necessary  for  the  work  of  translation  is

never entirely eradicated by techno-scientific sys-
tems.

More likely certain modes of labour and life

simply migrate off the radar and subsist instead in a

world of non-governance, by which I mean idioms
of expression, practice and economy external to the

state-corporate nexus that defines contemporary
sovereign power.

18 On the concept of „differential inclusion,― see Neilson (forth-

coming).

19 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Indonesia, Malaysia,

Philippines,

Singapore

and

Thailand),

http://www.aseansec.org

; Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation

(21 members),

http://www.apec.org/

; North American Free

Trade Agreement (Canada, Mexico, United States),

http://www.nafta-sec-alena.org/

20 The indifference of communication is equivalent to self-

referentiality, which is another way of saying that such sys-

tems are high on redundancy. This said, it would be a strate-
gic mistake to think that such operations are without material

effects.

21 I understand this relation not in terms of some kind of

absolute exteriority – a position increasingly untenable in a
capitalist and techno-social system of immanence – but

rather in terms of a „constitutive outside.― For an elaboration

of this concept as it operates within network societies and
information economies, see Rossiter 2006.

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Electronic Waste, Migrant Labour and the Informational Sovereignty of Logistics in China

The Limits of Translation

With its indifference to matter, substance or quali-
ties and concern instead with the management of

mobilities and efficiencies of action, logistics dis-
penses with borders that distinguish labour, life and
milieu.

In doing so, the constitutive differences

that make possible the translation of relations
between labour, discourses, social-technical practic-

es, economies and geocultural formations is surren-
dered to the world of ubiquitous homologies.

What I am calling „ubiquitous homologies― stems
from the political economy of globalizing design

industries (where architecture begins to resemble a
sports shoe, toothbrush, motorbike, office chair,
computer monitor, etc.), and shares something with
what Sakai terms „co-figuration,‖ „linguistic equiva-

lence‖ and „homolingual address‖ – all of which are
homogenizing operations of translation that com-
prise the sovereign power of the nation-state.

This is the limit of translation, and hence the scene

of the political. With borders (limits) comes struggle.

It may seem a contradiction is at work in this formu-
lation: the subtraction within logistics of constitutive
differences does not immediately lend itself to the

idea of the political as the struggle with borders. Nor
does such a formulation of logistics as a system of

techno-social and economic practices of indifference
to borders correspond with the concept of transla-
tion, which both assumes and requires difference as

a condition of operation. How, then, to address the
political and conceptual challenges that attend the

rise of new indifferent forms of communication and
governance? The erasure of constitutive differences

through the biopolitical power of logistics defines
the limits of translation. But the occlusion of differ-
ence should not be taken as some kind of finitude

since the coding of indifference in itself multiplies

22 While some of the key voices of Italian political philosophy –

notably Virno, Lazzarato and Negri – maintain that the bor-
ders of language, political action, labour and life have be-

come indistinct with the advent of post-Fordism, my interest
in this essay is to maintain a conceptual separation between

categories of this sort in order to suggest how the control
society instantiated by the global system of logistics and its

use of software to manage labour practices amplifies even
further the increasing indistinctions between labour, life and

the possibility of a politics of refusal. This argument is devel-
oped further in Rossiter 2009.

23 See Sakai 2006, 1997. See also Ivekovic 2005.
24 The work of „heterolingual address,‖ by contrast, engages the

antagonism of incommensurability within cultural difference,

thus providing a basis from which to critique – among other
things – the geopolitics of sovereign power.

the fields of distinction through the force of rela-
tions.

There are and always will be relations. In

this process new border struggles are comprised

and the work of translation is remodulated in ways
coextensive with the production of subjectivity.

The analysis of electronic waste flows serves to
cleave the inter-relations of software, labour and

logistics in order to identify how the indifference of
communication special to logistics technology points

to the limits of translation, which holds implications
for biopolitical regimes of governance. The hetero-
lingual address of translation is the analytical me-

thod  that  makes  visible  the  possibility  of  escape
from  biopolitical  technologies  of  control  at  work  in
the  global  logistics  industry.  Or,  rather,  the  non-
governable  dimension  of  social  and  economic  life
within  the  electronic  waste  industries  asserts  a

singular indifference to the regulatory control of
logistics. This is the practice of refusal. The extent

to which labour and life can withstand the encroach-
ing predisposition of logistics as a control system

par

excellence

is – in part – a matter of time, capital

and the sovereign demand that populations comply
with technologies of governance.

A study of the economies and socialities of electron-
ic waste in China helps illuminate the political status

and potential of non-governable subjects and spac-
es. The earlier discussion of labour and the circuits

of exchange in Ningbo‘s electronic waste industries
are a case in point. As forms of social relation, the

labour and economy in Ningbo‘s e-waste industries
operate outside the scope of state-corporate re-
gimes of governance supported by logistics technol-

ogies of control. Of relevance here is the constitu-
tion of regions and the politics of translation in order

25 The indifference of logistics to borders is only internal to its

technics of operation – a kind of generic predisposition – and
does not hold a determining force in any totalising sense or

„last instance.― With reference to Randy Martin‘s

An Empire of

Indifference, Brett Neilson suggests that at work here is per-

haps not „an indifference to borders so much as a process of
commensuration across borders.― Certainly such an under-

standing corresponds with the much-vaunted ambition on the
part of computer engineers and their policy advocates (to say

nothing of academic devotees such as Henry Jenkins and ad-
vertising gurus) to arrive at a state of „convergence culture―

(or, more simply, economic globalization in its social-technical
form). While this may indeed be the case, in the passage be-

low I‘m also wishing to invoke this dynamic of communicative
– and thus spatial – indifference in terms of the social and

economic dimensions of electronic waste as an assertion of
refusal, irrespective of whether or not such a practice is fused

with political content. The key question here is: What expres-

sive capacity might non-governable subjects and spaces con-
sist of? Neilson 2009. See also Martin 2007.

IRIE

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Ned Rossiter:
Electronic Waste, Migrant Labour and the Informational Sovereignty of Logistics in China

to address an emerging tension of scale that ex-
tends more broadly to the global management of

labour and life at play in the logistics industry. Such
an analytical strategy indicates how the problematic
of non-governable spaces and subjects – for better

and worse – reside beyond the „informational sove-
reignty‖ that imbues the biopolitical power of logis-

tics. The social practice of translation (re)constitutes
regions as they figure around the economy of elec-
tronic waste. Translation here is not so much a

conscious act on the part of workers in electronic
waste industries – at least not in any way that I am

capable of discerning – as a social-technical relation
of exteriority that arises through structural condi-

tions and the techno-social operations of logistics
software managing the movement of labour, com-
modities, resources and finance. What I am calling a

social-technical relation of exteriority extends to the
challenge of method and analysis: there is always

the subject that resides beyond comprehension, that
refuses to be known as such – something Gayatri
Spivak carefully analyzed as the politics of the
subaltern condition.

In so far as that which is perceived or manifests as

non-governable – the labour and economy of elec-
tronic waste, in the case of this essay – some final

points can be proffered. The spatialities of non-
governable subjects constitute regions in ways that
do not readily correspond with more hegemonic

regional formations. Translation thus becomes a
form of inventing new circuits of movement. Within

such a context, regions become contested geocul-
tural and political spaces, bringing into question the
dominant understanding of regions as defined within

the political-economic discourses of trade agree-
ments, innovation and knowledge transfer and

statist formations of geopolitical equivalence such as
ASEAN and its expansion into ASEAN+3 (China,

Japan,  South  Korea)  and  ASEAN+6  (Australia,  New
Zealand,  India).  Regions,  when  understood  as
conflictual  constitutions  underscored  by  the  move-

ments and frequently informal practices of lan-
guage, culture and labour, comprise geocultural

formations  that  seriously  question  the  power  of
border  technologies  such  as  trade  formations,
migration  and  labour  regimes,  state  alliances  and
global  logistics.  Moreover,  the  analytical  method  of
translation  as  social  practice  and  heterolingual

address initiates a critique of sovereign power by
elaborating the tensions embedded within the

26 Spivak 1988.

informal and formal dynamics of geocultural confi-
gurations. Sovereign border regimes, in other

words, are brought into question with the rise of
non-governable subjects and spaces associated with
the social-economic life of electronic waste.

Informal circuits of exchange comprise the multipli-

cation of economies that attend the movement of
electronic waste. Such configurations may be terri-
torial in terms of the distribution of waste, as seen

for example in the intra-national or trans-regional
economies of electronic waste. Within this complex

of  relations  there  is  a  sense  in  which  the  non-
governable  aspects  of  labour,  waste  and  economy
reside  outside  the  biopolitical  power  of  logistics
technologies.

While this essay has concentrated on the very

localized case of electronic waste in Ningbo, there
are always multi-scalar dimensions and circuits that

both manifest in the local and connect the local to
the trans-territorial whose specificities reconfigure

how the regional comes to be understood. As long
as the movement and treatment of electronic waste

evades the sovereign power of informatized logis-
tics, then the connection of waste with regions
remains open to the possibility of multiple configura-

tions.

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York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

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IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

www.i-r-i-e.net

ISSN 1614-1687

Paul Carter:

Polyhedral: Recycling Boundary Ecologies

Abstract

Foregrounding the extent to which 'place' remains resistant to the politics and poetics of 'network culture',

this essay approaches place as a boundary ecology rather than as an instance of cultural invariance. It calls
on readers to think about attempts to actively recycle cultural 'debris' or 'waste' through an ethics of passage

instead of the kind of instrumentalist statics that prevents the development of an ontology of mobility. Con-
tending that such a capacity to inhabit passage is compromised by the eschatological language used to
communicate the implications of environmental disaster, as well as by languages of consultation that (con-

ceptually) empty place of any creative power to incubate alternatives – events, modes of relation –, the essay
stresses the mythopoetic techniques that produce places as knots or nodal points within a network of pas-

sage. The designer's task is to create the hinge mechanisms that render such boundary ecologies inhabitable
imaginatively, and by materialising the nexus between creativity and change to alter our position vis-a-vis our

ethical responsibilities as citizens of a shared biosphere.

Author

Paul Carter



Paul Carter is Creative Director of Material Thinking design studio (Melbourne). As artist and designer,
prominent commissions include Nearamnew (with Lab architecture studio, public artwork, Federation
Square, Melbourne, 2003), Golden Grove (with Taylor, Cullity & Lethlean, public artwork, University of
Sydney, 2006-8), Pearl (with Dyskors, cultural facility and environment, Darwin Waterfront, 2009).



paul.carter@materialthinking.com.au



www.materialthinking.com.au

Relevant Publications:



Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008.



Parrot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.



Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University
Publishing, 2004.



Repressed Spaces: The Poetics of Agoraphobia. London: Reaktion Books, 2002.



The Lie of the Land. London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996.

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Paul Carter:
Polyhedral: Recycling Boundary Ecologies

A concept resistant to the politics and poetics of

'network culture' is

place

. In these remarks the

counter-intuitive idea of place

as network

is ex-

plored. A network identified as a distinct location
has to meet certain qualitative criteria. The vol-

ume of information flowing through it is unimpor-
tant. What counts is the quality of the information,

its  poetic  potential  to  generate  new  meanings  at
that  place.  Information  that  communicates  poeti-
cally  makes  use  of  signs  that  are  polysemous.

Figurative language, visual symbols and other
media of aesthetic expression exhibit fields or

inter-communicating regions tied together by an
associative logic that instrumental reason dis-
counts as subjective or tied to interests. However,

the recognition that mythopoetic processes have a
distinct architecture, topography and topology has

heuristic consequences. It enables data that claim
to be monosemous (without ambiguity) to be

identified as 'nutrient deficient' in terms of sustain-
ing the information community. Filtering can also
operate positively. Qualitatively defined regions or

networked places may provide a creative matrix in
which abandoned cultural material reattaches itself

to  living  traditions.  Cultural  'debris'  or  'waste'  is
recycled  and  acquires  new  meanings,  collection
and  recollection  contributing  to  the  humid  condi-

tions in which invention flourishes.

Place is used here in the context of urban and

landscape design. Even a short history of place is
impossible here. The salient point is that an an-

thropological notion of place dominates place-
making design discourse. In establishing the

criteria and nominating the signifiers that will
constitute the definition of place, whether in

restoration,  adaptive  reuse  or  new  place-making
projects,  a  cultural  reductionism  operates.  Our
centralist  bureaucracies  colonise  place-making

opportunities as onerously as professional anthro-
pologists used to reify other cultures. It has been

difficult to recognise that 'different cultural forma-
tions ... were not an invariant structure, that they
might have circulated with other alternatives, their

application depending on the interpretive authority
of particular actors.'

Yet at least a post-

ethnographic perspective is now making this
possible. By contrast, democratic societies remain
bound by an idea of culture that is inflexible,

monosemous and powerful in proportion to its
susceptibility to representation. Academics be-

moan the perpetuation of colonialist mentalities

Myers 7.

abroad but, in the arena of public space design,

the prescriptive impositions of planners, designers
and architects embody a will to subjugation quite

as repressive as anything practised in colonial
times.

Community consultations ahead of major urban

design initiatives replicate the situation in which

ethnographers, missionaries and  colonial adminis-
trators  used  to  interrogate  compliant  'native
informants'  about  the  local  cultural  conditions.

Anyone who has been involved in these sessions
knows that participants may have 'widely different

perceptions  of  what  [is]  said,  what  things  mean,'
and  that  any  occasion  for  place-making  may  be
'not  so  much  an  occasion  for  conformity  as  for

temporary consensus building.'

But this opportu-

nity to improvise new social ties, to negotiate

intercultural reconciliations and other provisional
accommodations goes undocumented. The goal of

these ritualised consultations is to establish the
themes that will represent the heritage of the site.
Authentic place-associations are sought, even

when the destruction of the inherited structures,
their physical and ecological relationship, is

planned. In this ghoulish context, the public finds
itself invited to provide copy that will furnish the
tombstone for what has disappeared. In this

sense, all government-auspiced public art is col-
laborationist, and tends to accelerate the very

amnesia it purports to resist.

I write these notes in a hotel room at the recently-

opened Darwin Waterfront. I look down at a site
where I have been invited to design a 'cultural

facility' that will secure the development's 'sense
of place'.

The site is a rectangular, and therefore

artificial, peninsula extending into a shallow water
lagoon protected on all sides by crocodile-proof
wharfs and pontoons. The mildly sloping peninsula

lawn is indistinguishable from any suburban park
in northern Europe. The spur-winged plovers have

noisily  colonised  it,  carrying  on  their  vernacular
courtship  rituals.  Later,  sunbakers  spilling  over
from  the  Wave  Pool  will  transpose  flirtation  into

the  human  domain.  But  what,  apart  from  these
thinly  inscribed  tracks  of  migrants  and  tourists,
constitutes  the  identity  of  this  recent  extension

Myers, op.cit., 8, with reference to a meeting of Pintupi
elders which the anthropologist attended.

My design studio Material Thinking has been commissioned
by the Darwin Waterfront Corporation to develop a 'vision'

for the site that will incorporate a cultural facility, an open-

air performance space and associated designed environ-
ment.

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Paul Carter:
Polyhedral: Recycling Boundary Ecologies

into the tideless salt water? The colonisers set up

camp in a shallow bay at the foot of the escarp-
ment.

They chose a site flanked by two low

coastal  outcrops.  In  the  century  and  a  half  since
these  rough  beginnings,  the  bay  has  been  modi-
fied  beyond  recognition.  The  mangrove  swamp

has been eradicated; the two hills removed for
industrial and security purposes respectively; and

land fill has inexorably extended the old water line
seawards. A handsome curving jetty dominates
the sea view. And now a residential-commercial

complex of no great architectural merit has been
erected. What is 'sense of place' here?

In western thinking

place

and

sense of place

occupy different but related discursive regimes.

The genealogy of place is traced back to terms
such as

topos

and

chora

. In this conception places

are conceptual spatial containers or operative
voids. They are the raw material of planning.

Sense  of  place  theories  have  their  origins  in  the
modern  invention  of  landscape,  and  its  pictur-
esque  theorisation.  In  one  derivation  sense  is

associated with French

sentier

: mobile, where

place is static, sense of place emphasises qualities

of orientation and, path-making. In the latter case
‗A social-experiential orientation emphasizes
meanings that are created as people interact with

a place and with each other in a place, developing
connections to the place.‘

However, these respec-

tively quantitive and qualitative conceptions of
place are also related. 'Sense' may accrue to

place through its human usage but the place
remains logically prior to its interpretation. Inter-
pretation may be imaginative - Thomashow argues

that developing a ‗place-based perceptual ecology‘
is the basis of learning ‗how to move beyond that

place  and  explore  the  relationship  between  plac-
es‘,  explaining  that  ‗you  practice  biospheric  per-
ception  by  virtue  of  three  interconnected  path-

ways – natural history and local ecology, the life of
the imagination, and spiritual deliberation.‘

How-

ever,  even  in  this  formulation  of  place  as  a  net-
work  of  relationships  potentially  global  in  its
outreach,  the  idea  that  place  may  be  a  verb

The early colonial history of the site is conveniently

available at www.cdu.edu.au/newsroom/origins/edition1-
2007/origins1-2007-waterfront.pdf where historian Kathy

de la Rue's article 'On the Waterfront' can be accessed.

The delivery of a 'sense of place' was a repeated demand

of community consultations held in 2004 and 2005.

Farnum, Hall & Kruger 1.

Thomashow 14.

twinned with displacing, in which other alterna-

tives are embedded, is not entertained.

The site below my window - and the window view

- are enduring forms of acts of placement predi-
cated on displacement. They are works of passage

that disguise their environmental presumption,
illustrating the privileged position of the imaginal

in the western construction of reality. What is seen
is less significant than the construction of a view
point and a view. To understand what had to be

left out to achieve this identification of place with
its model is not to recover archaeologically an

older, more authentic habitat. It is not another act
of virtual recontruction or projection. It is to begin
the work of remarking passage. A critical sense of

place is one that develops tools for calibrating the

sentiers

said to lend places their experiential drag.

The pathways may be physical grooves, repre-
sentable in plans, but they signify because they

bear  poetic  associations,  rhythmic,  kinaesthetic,
metrical  and  ultimately  poetic  dimensions.  They
are  discursive  in  the  etymological  sense.  In  this

case, what is called place emerges where

sentiers

meet, intersect, interfere with one another or

cancel each other out. Place is not a meeting place
of stories - themes that the heritage lobby can
restore and reinterpret - but an arrest, or filtering,

of passage.

A sense of place that did not suppress the act of

placing (and its cognates - displacing and replac-
ing), that did not subjugate acts of becoming at

that place in the name of an ideology of cultural
invariance, would not explore 'the relationship

between places', but the phenomenon (the ethics
and aesthetics) of relating - the mythopoetic

techniques that produce places as knots or nodal
points within the network of passage. This propo-
sition is not merely theoretical. It is put forward in

the context of figures like Bruno Latour advocating

passage

as a conceptual cure for the kind of

instrumentalist statics that prevents the develop-
ment of an ontology of mobility.

In general, the

study of relationality - and all that goes with the

logical physics of the in-between - is predicated on
end places, stable destinations between which the
psychological and historical dramas of becoming
are played out. The new rhetoric of passage
dispenses with these end points - with the conse-

quence that all is flux and any model for stable
change is lacking. The possibility of a mythopoetic

orientation to the flux, one that calibrates passage

See discussion in Carter 2008, 266-267.

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Paul Carter:
Polyhedral: Recycling Boundary Ecologies

through the identification of polysemous events

(and/or places), is a corrective to an anarchic
vision that, strictly speaking, defies marking,

remarking and therefore communication.

In poetry metre stabilises flux: metre is a design

on rhythm. In any case certain patterns are fil-
tered from the field of change so that there

emerges a thick boundary, and the reconfiguration
of passage as a hinge place where change is
institutional and exhibits stable forms. These

reflections begin to elicit what 'sense of place'
might mean outside my window. Community

consultations held five years ago found that
people wanted certain stories told. They also
wanted a meeting place. The inference was that a

new public space should be designed that incorpo-
rated such themes as Indigenous Dreaming narra-

tives, colonial accounts of first contact and settle-
ment, evocations of the pearl shell and pearl

economy, together with symbolic representations
of various non-human attributes (biodiversity) and
human characteristics (multiculturalism) of Dar-

win and the 'Top End' generally. A parody of this
wishlist would be a functional 'meeting place'

(incorporating  informal  performance  facilities)
staked  out  with  symbolic  representations  of  the
grand  narratives  said  to  define  Darwin's  identity.

Such a theatral mix would successfully preserve
the ideology of cultural invariance, and empty the

site of any creative power to incubate 'alternatives'
- that is, to incubate the possibility of anything

taking place or happening.

Sentiers

give passage sense, just as passage

scores places. Here, the first clue to the arrange-
ment of things is the successive walls normally

relegated  to  the  status  of  scenography:  the  win-
dow,  the  jigsaw  of  divisions  across  the  hotel
grounds,  the  breakwater,  the  handsome  curving

wharf, the horizonal coastline of the Cox Peninsula
with its refineries, and the horizon itself - I say

'itself' but the horizon is also seven-shelled with
mother-of-pearl cloud laminations climbing into
the dusky evening. If you Google Earth the region,

passing  from  one  scale  to  another,  you  discern
that the geographical forms exhibit a Mandelbrot-
like tendency to reproduce essential characteristics
at  different  scales.  The  generalisation  of  this  is  a
coastline  that  is  not  a  line  at  all  but  an  arrange-

ment of permeable passages - promontories
sinking to form necklaces of islands, the emer-

gence of straits, alternative passages and new
permeable barriers - spits, banks and shoals -

created and uncreated by tidal fluctuations. At
progressively smaller scales, the archipelago effect

is reproduced in the constitution of coastal flora -

the aerial root system of the mangrove swamp is a
field of stakes that supports a colloidal medium

(mud)  able  to  stabilise  land-sea  relations.  The
oyster  that  finds  a  home  in  this  humid  environ-
ment  carries  out  its  own  filtering  operations.  The

branchiae

or gills leach the salt water for nutrients

and occasionally by a kind of fertile oversight

admit grit that a process of nacreous inhumation
transforms into pearl.

These stories of passage that makes a difference

could be multiplied. They are essentially sites

where the flux is inscribed with significance, where
media incubate embryonic forms. The structure of
these forms is hingelike, jointed, constitutionally

doubled and asymmetrical. Their philosophical
counterpart is Parmenides' figure of a gate filled

with gates. Their historical counterparts are the
mimetic performances improvised wherever Euro-

peans encountered non-Western peoples: an
archetypal instance occurs a few kilometres north-
east of where I write. The

Beagle

, in which

Charles Darwin circumnavigated the globe, was
subsequently deployed as a coastal survey vessel.

The great theorist of hybridisation was not part of
the survey that encountered Larrakia people near
here. He was not witness to the spectacle of

English officers 'dancing for their lives' at the foot
of a cliff on which, at least in the melodramatic

lithograph prepared for the publication of Stokes's
journal, Indigenous warriors furiously brandished

their spears. This absence did not prevent the
naturalist's name being appended to our section of
coast (and subsequently to a town). But the point

is that the antics of the officers and the naming
practices of their captain are related acts of place-

making.

In both cases, a mere coincidence is

exploited. Wickham's reasons for commemorating
a former

Beagle

passenger

here

remain inscruta-

ble: perhaps he perceived in the potential harbour
an analogue with the collecting places that Darwin

favoured.  Here  was  a  geographical  hollow  where
debris, or overlooked  data, accrued, a bay where
passage  had  slowed  down  and  sedimented,  pro-

viding the evidence (for those who could interpret
it) of change.

The illustration referred to here is reproduced in my

Dark

Writing on page 64. The 'third voyage' (1837-1843) of the

Beagle, to survey the coasts of Australia was under the

command of John Clements Wickham. Wickham named

Beagle Bay and Port Darwin with the

Beagle's previous

(second) 1831-1836 voyage in mind in which the naturalist
Charles Darwin circumnavigated the world.

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Paul Carter:
Polyhedral: Recycling Boundary Ecologies

In any case, a discourse of passages is one that

continually renews itself, in the absence of a fixed
grammar (or invariant culture) continuously filter-

ing the environment for indications of intention.
The site of the Larrakia encounter became known
on the map as Adam Bay, a mythopoetic acknowl-

edgement of the fact that coastal communication
was

adamic

, representing a vernacular re-

enactment of Logos as Creator. What signified in
these tense exchanges was not any content - the
trading of agreed signifiers - but the tidal momen-

tum of the desire to communicate. In these situa-
tions the traditional, anthropologically-sanctioned

relationship  between  place  and  place  name  is
inverted.  Place  names  are  compacted  stories  or
myths  of  place-making:  the  deplorable  effect  of
colonisation,  we  are  told,  is  to  uncouple  names
from  their  places  -  'What  people  thus  lose  is  the

relationship between the stories and the particular
portion of the ground.'

In this case,

names/place-names like Darwin and Adam Bay,
obey a different, future-oriented associative logic,
one in which the attachment of a signified to the

signifier lies in the future, and the value of the
name resides not in the place it conjures up but in

the opportunity it creates to imagine settlement.

The phases of this proleptic toponymy might be

compared to the first stages of the oyster's life in
which motile larvae begin to develop a foot,

seeking out places where they can moor them-
selves (initially with hairlike fibres) and eventually

attach themselves. Similarly, the over-determined
cultural signifiers

Darwin

and

Adam

, articulated in

a new context, throw off acquired associations and

circulate freely; however, the fertility of their
cultural associations is soon captured by the

colonial  imaginary,  whose  mythic  techniques  of
self-legitimation  rapidly  endow  them  with  a  dis-
tinct  location  and  originary  authority.  Perhaps  it

follows, to take the analogy a step further, that a
critical place-making (in a postcolonial context)

seeks not to reproduce the mythological narratives
of founding but would attend instead to the noise
that accompanied these efforts at translation - or,

in  oyster  talk,  it  would  ponder  the  grit  that  goes
unattended  and  triggers  off  the  reactive  (and
creative)  formation  of  pearl.  Translated  into  dis-
cursive  terms,  a  recognition  of  the  mythopoetic

Weiner 2001, but no further reference given in Thomas F.

Thornton 31.

techniques

that add value to passage is the basis

of any incursion into the discursive domain likely
to be sustainable, fertile in suggesting new

topoi

and topics.

There emerges from these Waterfront reflections

an idea of place as a boundary ecology, as a
filtration system in which flux is endowed with a

network character, as if it could be imagined as a
double figure integrating wall and way, fence and
flow. The architecture of passage is characterised

by knots where different story lines do not simply
meet but entangle, hybridise or otherwise activate

a principle of mere coincidence to improvise a
chiasmatic or riddling formation. To riddle is to
speak enigmatically, to veil senses: it is also to sift

coarse material. The act of sifting works here to
preserve data that do not conform, which for this

reason hold the potential to attract new associa-
tions or revive old, neglected ones. In design

terms  data  of  this  kind  are  forms  that  may  look
strangely  familiar  but  which  resist  identification.
Such  forms  serve  as  hinge  works,  mediating

between different physical states, diverse story
lines and cultures of settling. In the context of

designating  a  boundary  ecology  poles  have  this
function:  stylised  islands,  mooring  posts,  pali-
sades,  sticklike  figures,  gills,  nets  ...  they  are

twinned in this typology with hollows, bays, ears,
shells and other sail-like receptacles materialising

the history of passage. It is evident that these
signatures of passage localise, materialise and

connect,  but  the  sense  of  place  they  might  incu-
bate  does  not  replicate  the  ‗place-based  percep-
tual ecology‘ Thomashow advocates.

Instead of practising 'biospheric perception by

virtue of three interconnected pathways', the
wanderer in this networked place experiences the
suspension of settlement, the creative and recrea-

tive potential of passage to produce out of chias-
matic events ambiguous settings. These offer

creative templates not for the restoration of inva-
riant cultural stereotypes but for things to take
place. Staged here is the setting of exchange rates

and the shadows cast by the processes of filtering,
selecting, classifying and quarantining essential to
the  constitution  of  stable  forms  and  identities.
These  are  clearly  choreographies  with  a  global
application,  but  they  educate  not  by  leading  out

from the neighbourhood but by marking and

Mythopoesis: a critical re-evaluation of mythic narratives,

usually associated with periods of semiotic crisis or degra-
dation. See the discussion in Carter 2004, 170-176.

IRIE

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Paul Carter:
Polyhedral: Recycling Boundary Ecologies

remarking exploratory

sentiers

amid it. These

sentiers are not paths yet. In fact, they may never
evolve into signposted ways through the laby-

rinth: passage here will have the same oscillatory
nature as breathing, always timed and placed,
always expressive, relational, dependent and

poised between inspiration and expiration.

The capacity to inhabit passage, to recover the act

of place-making - to make these interstitial activi-
ties constitutive in an environmental as well as

creative sense - demarcates one function of art in
the context of the eschatological language used to

communicate  the  implications  of  climate  change.
It  is  not  sufficient  to  use  art  instrumentally  to
show  forth  what  environmental  scientists  seek  to

prove with numbers. The challenge is to articulate
the common place these warnings are designed to

defend. But the common place cannot be the flat
plane of instrumental reason and its institutions. It

must  be  composed  differently  -  in  the  way
sketched  here  as  a  region  of  gathered  creative
potential,  analogous  to  a  high  pressure  region  in

meteorology. The designer's task is to createthe
hinge mechanisms that render this boundary

ecology inhabitable imaginatively, and by materia-
lising the nexus between creativity and change to
alter our position vis-a-vis our ethical responsibili-

ties as citizens of a shared biosphere.

If terms like

place

sense of place

can survive in

this coastally-imagined arrangement of passage or
hinge forms - of gates within gates - it may be in

the transfigured guise of the

hedra

. This term, the

third in the

chora, topos, hedra

triad, dropped out

of use, it is speculated, because of its vulgar
associations with the human rump or backside.

The term

hedra

is associated with ideas of settle-

ment. It is a thing properly placed or the proper
place of things. In other words, it is a hinge term

that expresses the doubleness of place when it is
conceived as an act of placing. In contrast with

Implicitly contrasted with design practices that produce

Ersatz senses of place or, worse the anomie of placeless-

ness, these emotionally-engaging networks of sentiers
might aspire to be aesthetic counterparts of what Hokari

refers to in Gurindji philosophy as the 'Right Way' - 'a geo-
graphical landscape as ell as human behaviour. Morally is

spatial as well as behavioural.' The design is ethical not
because it successfully cites traditions associated with the

place but because it rightly orients people, teaching them
'how to look after this created world.' (Hokari 216-217).

On the concept of 'boundary ecologies' in ecological

discourse, see Forman 82ff.

See Algra 95. Hence kata + hedra (cathedral): to sit down.

the planning orthodoxy (and its heritage counter-

part), which imagines sense scored into blank
surfaces, the location of the

hedra

is simulta-

neously a medium disposed to receive an impres-
sion and the impression made. Evidently, this act
of placing cannot be thought in the abstract. Nor

can it be thought in isolation: just as a track is
always a multiplicity or field of impressions, indi-

cating a double moment of arrival and departure,
so the

hedra

is always

polyhedral

. The Platonic

appropriation of this term is intriguing. It suggests

a disposition to aggregate. But the thinking that
sees connections is humid not dry. The figure that

might  be  imagined  forming  between  the  pulsed
artificial surf of the Wave Pool and the imperturb-
able  band  of  sea  beyond  the  wharf  will  not  be  a
closed  faceted  geometrical  figure  but  a  thick
boundary,  a  filter  work  encrusted,  eroded,  oddly

recollecting, imagining and inventing the unset-
tling act of settlement.

Works Cited

Algra, Keimpe.

Concepts of Space in Greek

Thought.

Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995.

Carter, Paul.

Dark Writing: Geography, Perfor-

mance, Design

. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i

Press, 2008.

Carter, Paul.

Material Thinking: The Theory and

Practice of Creative Research

. Carlton, Vic:

Melbourne University Publishing, 2004.

Farnum, Jennifer, Troy Hall & Linda E. Kruger.

„Sense of Place in Natural Resource

Recreation  and  Tourism:  An  Evaluation  and
Assessment  of  Research  Findings.―  General
Technical  Report,  PNW-GTR-660,  November

2005.

Forman, Richard T.T.

Land Mosaics: The Ecology

of Landscapes and Regions

. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1995.

Hokari, Minoru. „Gurindji mode of historical prac-

tice.―

The Power of Knowledge

, eds. L. Taylor,

G.K. Ward, G. Henderson, R. Dais, L.A. Wallis.

Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2005.

Myers, Fred. „Unsettled business: Acrylic painting,

tradition and Indigenous being.―

The Power of

Knowledge,

eds. L. Taylor, G.K. Ward, G.

Henderson, R. Dais, L.A. Wallis. Aboriginal

Studies Press, Canberra, 2005.

Thomashow, Mitchell.

Bringing the Biosphere

Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environ-

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

www.i-r-i-e.net

ISSN 1614-1687

Roberto Verzola:

21st-Century Political Economies: Beyond Information Abundance

Abstract

As a result of the relatively low cost of digital reproduction, a global transformation is occurring in the nature

of products and processes and in types of goods and services. Arising from information abundance, this
global transformation is making the phenomenon of abundance a major field of study, not only for econo-
mists but also for other social scientists and physical scientists as well. This essay proposes an economic

definition of abundance and a typology of sources of abundance. It argues that real economic abundance can
come about only when the demand for a good is finite and the plentiful supply makes the abundant good

affordable enough to all members of society. It lists an abundance-nurturing ethic as a major goal of abun-
dance management, and encourages economists to make abundance together with scarcity their conceptual
point of departure. Finally it links the phenomenon of abundance to the concept of the commons.

Agenda

Author

Roberto Verzola



Roberto Verzola is an engineer who is also a social activist. His current involvements include the
Philippine Greens, Halalang Marangal (Network of Citizens for Honest Elections and Truthful

Statistics), SRI-Pilipinas, and the Bulletin Board. He is also a part-time consultant with the Philippine
Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM).





rverzola@gn.apc.org



http://rverzola.wordpress.com

Relevant Publications:



„Undermining Abundance.― In Gaelle Kirkorian and Amy Kapcinsky (Eds.).

From Intellectual Property

Rights to Global Knowledge Sharing

. New York: Zone Books. (in press).



„Studying Abundance‖. 2008.



Toward a Political Economy of Information: Studies on the Information Economy. Quezon City: Cons-
tantino Foundation, 2004.

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

Vol. 11 (10/2009)

Roberto Verzola:
21st-Century Political Economies: Beyond Information Abundance

The key technologies that mark best the transition

from  the  twentieth  to  the  twenty-first  century  are
the new information and  communications technolo-
gies (ICTs). These  new ICTs are at the core of the

global information infrastructure and emerging
information economies. These ICTs, the Internet

and information economies have spawned services
such as electronic mail and mailing lists; online sites
for sharing text, audio, photos, video, databases,

software, DNA sequences, and whatever else could
be turned into bits, bytes and files; search engines

for locating specific tools, services and content; and
portals that collect, organize, improve and recom-
bine existing material as well as attract new mate-

rial. They are transforming business, education,
mass media, culture and other information-intensive

sectors of society. Their impacts are also spilling
over to housing, transportation, agriculture, and

other human activities not usually associated with
high information content.

Because of their distinctive features, these ICTs, the

Internet and the emerging information economies

are bound  to shape in significant ways the political
economy of the 21st century.  and modes of produc-
tion,  another  in  the  world  of  biological  processes,

their complexity and organicity.

Outstanding Feature of
Information Economies:
Abundance

To those who are part of it, the most outstanding
feature of the 21

century economies emerging out

of the new ICTs is the abundance of both old and
new information content, tools and services – some

of which were not necessarily generated by com-
puters but, having been digitally converted from
their original format, are now available online.

This outstanding feature can be attributed mainly to
a new-found ability made possible by the new ICTs

–  the  unlimited  reproduction  of  exact  copies  of
originals over any number of generations, for distri-
bution  over  electronic  networks  or  more  traditional
outlets  through  various  transportable  physical
media.

This ability, in turn, has turned information goods

into a unique commodity, whose cost of producing

1 Anderson.

an extra unit is approaching zero. This diminishing
marginal cost can be seen clearly whenever one

makes a copy of a digital file, either by downloading
it from a network to one's hard disk or by saving a
copy to a compact disc or a DVD. The social, eco-

nomic and technological consequences of the near-
zero marginal cost of reproducing information goods

gives the information economy its distinctive fea-
tures.

Information Abundance: Sharing,
Cooperation and Altruism

The  near-zero marginal cost of copying information
goods  makes  them  nonrival  goods,  i.e.,  one  can
enjoy  the  good  without  diminishing  other  people's

enjoyment of the same goods, just as taking a
photograph of a beautiful scenery does not prevent

others from taking their own photographs. It is a
perfect situation for sharing, because one can copy
and share the good without losing it, resurrecting

what has been variouly called the gift economy or
the economy of altruism.

Consider a situation where one has a piece of infor-
mation, and another has a second piece. Sharing

enables both to have the two pieces. Together, the
two pieces may, in turn, lead to a third piece, de-

duced from the first two. The third and the original
two, pieced together, may further lead to a new
deduction. This synergism, where the result is more

than the sum of its parts, can result in explosive
information growth. A piece of bread must be di-

vided to be shared; in contrast, knowledge shared
multiplies. This near-magical property of information

has been compared to the Biblical miracle of the
loaves.

Economic Substitution

Economics is, among other things, cost-driven. In

general, producers tend to shift from higher cost
materials and processes to lower cost substitutes

that make their operation more profitable, and
consumers from higher priced goods and services to

lower priced substitutes that enable them to buy
more goods. Economists call this the „substitution
rule‖.

2 Samuelson and Nordhaus p. 127.

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Roberto Verzola:
21st-Century Political Economies: Beyond Information Abundance

As the prices of information goods go down, they

will tend to be substituted for other types of goods.

This can be seen in the increasing variety and
volume of information commodities, such as soft-
ware, e-books, e-games, databases, online journals,

online music, online video, and other ICT goods,
services and activities. This can also be seen in the

increasing  information  content  of  material  goods  –
as  costly  manual,  electro-mechanical,  or  chemical
processes  and  parts  are  implemented  in  low  mar-

ginal cost software running in mass-produced mi-
croprocessors.

This substitution of the electronic for the electrome-
chanical, digital for the analog, software for hard-
ware, information-intensive „intelligent‖ methods for
energy-intensive „brute force‖ methods, and infor-

mation goods for physical goods will, according to
economic theory, continue until a new maximum is

reached  in  terms  of  profits  for  every  producer  and
utility for every  consumer.  This will also draw addi-
tional  investments  into  more  profitable  ICT  busi-

nesses, further altering the mix between agriculture,
industry and the information sector within econo-

mies. We are witnessing today a global process of
substitution in products and processes and in types
of goods and services. This process began in the

1980s and the 1990s with the widespread use of
digital electronics, microprocessors and electronic

networks. The end of this momentous global substi-
tution process is not yet in sight, especially since the

marginal  costs  of  information  goods  continue  to
diminish,  and  the  cascades  of  old  and  new  abun-
dance  triggered  by  this  process  have  not  fully  run

their course.

Thus pressure continues to build upon every pro-

vider of goods and services in every sector of the
economy to turn to ICTs, with new technologies and

businesses emerging to facilitate and speed up this
process. To give a few examples:



The knowledge, publishing, media and enter-
tainment industries are now all converging on
the Internet.



Whenever  possible,  the  movement  of  people
and  material  goods  is  being  replaced  by  the
movement  of  ideas  and  information  goods,
over the Internet.



The face of health, education, and other per-
sonal services is changing through automation
and networked operations, also over the

Internet.



With the pace of gene sequencing speeding
up and with genetic engineering on the verge
of breakthroughs in converting stored digital

information about DNA sequences back to live
DNA, the whole biological sector may soon

become part of the same convergence, unless
safety considerations intervene.



Manufacturing will be revolutionized by soft-
ware-driven desktop fabricators, which can do

3-D printing using various media, including
electronic media.



When Moore's Law eventually takes hold over
thin-film photovoltaic cells and their prices

reach a tipping point, the public will finally be
enabled to start tapping for electricity genera-

tion the greatest abundance of all – the sun's
energy.



Financial transactions are initiated, negotiated
and consumated on the same information in-

frastructure and are often executed by com-
puters programmed to respond automatically
to changes in prices and trends.



Technologically  lagging  countries  are  becom-
ing  hosts  to  encoding  facilities,  call  centers
and  other  left-over  industries  that  serve

mostly customers in technologically leading
countries.

Multiplicative Abundance

We will call the archetype of abundance that is

created when the cost of reproducing the resource
approaches zero, multiplicative abundance. Goods

belonging to this archetype are abundant because
the means for making multiple identical copies have

become so accessible and the cost of doing so has
become so low, that they are easily reproduced

essentially for free. This dynamic is fast becoming
the driving force of 21

century economies.

To even acknowledge at all the existence of abun-

dance is a huge conceptual leap for many econo-
mists, whose fundamental assumptions are based

on scarcity. Some economists even say that abun-
dant goods cease to be interesting because the

problem  of  scarcity  has  been  solved.  But  if  abun-
dance  solves  the  problem  of  scarcity,  shouldn't
economists devote as much time to the solution as
to  the  problem  itself?  The  answer  should  be  ob-
vious. Indeed, the study of abundance should be a

major field of study, not only for economists but

3 Gershenfeld p.72-75.
4 See, for instance, Hunt, Rich.

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Roberto Verzola:
21st-Century Political Economies: Beyond Information Abundance

also for other social scientists and for physical
scientists as well.

Having identified one archetype of abundance,
which we called multiplicative abundance, we should

at once be curious if there are other archetypes. It
turns out that there are a few more archetypes of

abundance. One archetype is brought about by self-
reproduction.

Biological, Ecological Abundance:
A Living Gift of Nature

While the abundance of ideas and knowledge in the
information sector comes from the intrinsic human
urge to communicate and to share, in agriculture

and nature it comes from the intrinsic ability –
instinctive urge, in fact – of living organisms to

reproduce  themselves.  All  living  organisms  repro-
duce  their  own  kind  and  are  therefore  a  source  of
biological  abundance.  Their  biological  design  en-

ables most of these organisms to tap solar energy
directly through photosynthesis, or indirectly by

feeding on organisms that have stored this energy in
their bodies. As living organisms increase their
numbers, they also organize themselves into a food

web of producers and consumers – vegetarians,
omnivores, carnivores, predators, decomposers, and

various other ecological players, creating a self-
maintaining ecological system that from a human
perspective can last essentially indefinitely. A society

that learns how to tap these ecological systems as
natural capital can generate with minimal effort

unending flows of natural income for meeting the
needs of that society's members. This abundance

archetype may be called the reproductive archetype.

Reproductive abundance is essentially a gift of

nature for

Homo sapiens

. We simply need to learn

how this abundance has come about, to preserve

and enhance the biological and ecological processes
that lead to this abundance, and to protect these
processes from threats that can lead to disruption or

failure.

Left to their own, forests, grasslands, soils of all

kinds, ponds, rivers, lakes, bays, seas, oceans, and
waters of all kinds will teem with life, almost every

ecological niche occupied by one or more species.
By their very nature, as long as the right conditions

exist  for  the  reproductive  processes  to  occur,  eco-
logical  systems  of  interacting  biological  webs  of
organisms  will  provide  us  a  timeless  source  of

abundance.

Properly tapped, this abundance of life can further

lead to cascades of abundance, promising a cornu-

copia of agricultural, biological, natural and ecologi-
cal goods and services for human societies.

The basic management approach to this archetype

is to recognize the many natural incomes possible

from one source, to withdraw these as needed while
ensuring that the natural capital is preserved and
enhanced, so that the resource can provide human

societies perpetual income streams. This requires
intimate knowledge and deep understanding of

biological, ecological and other natural processes.

We have now identified two abundance archetypes,
the multiplicative abundance of information goods
and the reproductive abundance of living organisms.

Information is a non-material good. Organisms are
made of living matter.

Non-living matter is the basis of two more arche-

types.

Massive Abundance: A Bulky Gift
of Nature

The two additional archetypes are based on the

massive bulk of certain elements and compounds in
nature. Air is available to all. Water too, with excep-

tions. The abundance of sand promises a practically
inexhaustible source of silicon, which provides the

elemental basis for the hardware infrastructure of
the information economy as well as future solar

energy economies. The hydrogen in the sun pro-
vides the Earth with abundant renewable solar
energy that creates its own cascades of abundance.

It is solar energy that drives all living systems, the
water cycle, the global circulation of air. Properly

tapped, it will provide humanity with inexhaustible
sources of solar, wind, water and ocean energy that
can make dirtier non-renewable sources like fossil

and radioactive fuels unnecessary. The third and
fourth archetypes are both archetypes of massive

abundance of natural elements and compounds
found on Earth and elsewhere, another gift of
nature, by their sheer bulk, to

Homo sapiens

We use the substances belonging to the massive-

persistent abundance archetype for their material
content – air, water, sand, minerals, etc., as raw

material for the finished products we make. We use
the other substances belonging to the massive-
dissipative archetype for their energy content – coal,

oil, natural gas, and so on.

IRIE

International Review of Information Ethics

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Roberto Verzola:
21st-Century Political Economies: Beyond Information Abundance

Because abundance based on persistent mass

consists of matter, and matter is never really de-

stroyed, such abundance persists, once it is made
available. All the metals dug out of the earth since

Homo sapiens

started using iron, copper, bronze,

tin, aluminum, etc. are still above ground, some-
where – in dumps, basements and cellars, and

various nooks and corner of human dwellings,
whether in use and abandoned. The persistent type
undergo very little chemical transformation during

their use. Most of the different metals dug up as
ore, processed, and subsequently incorporated into

a finished product, possibly ending up as waste, still
exist as metal today, slowly oxidizing somewhere.

Their persistence allows them to be reused or
recycled over and over again, with little additional
chemical processing.

The key towards appropriate management of this

archetype  is  a  better  system  of  recovering  and
recycling  the  resource,  to  enhance  the  persistence
of these abundant goods for their human users.

Some of the other raw materials are so transformed

after use that these are essentially one-time use
materials. (Other uses, of course, may be found for
the transformed by-products, like using waste heat

from cooling condensers for space heating.) These
include all those we use for their energy content.

We can call them massive-dissipative resources
because they are dissipated after use. They are the
depletable, exhaustible resources. While we may

start with an abundance by virtue of their bulk, the
use of the resource transforms and depletes it. Once

used, that's it. Given the known reserves and cur-
rent rates of consumption, for instance, the world's

oil reserves are at best good only for a few more
human generations. Then they will be gone. Other
non-renewable energy resources also fall under this
archetype.

The principal management approach for this arche-

type  should  be  conservation,  to  leave  as  much  of
the  resource  to  future  generations,  who  may  dis-
cover  much  better  and  more  efficient  ways  of  put-
ting these non-renewable resources to good use.

5 Some may quibble that solar energy is also depletable

because it will run out of hydrogen in a few billion years.

6 For some discussion on possible abundance management

approaches, see Verzola 2008, also Verzola (in press).

In addition to the above four, still other archetypes
of abundance also exist, such as:

Psychic Abundance

. Human needs exist which

cannot be met by material, information, or energy
goods or services. Beyond the minimum biological

requirements of food, water and protection from the
elements, for instance, health is as much a matter

of happiness, contentment and a sense of communi-
ty and belonging. It is as much a mental as a physi-

cal state. Those who live in voluntary simplicity or
even in obvious material lack may still enjoy a sense
of abundance that comes from states of emotion

and thought that may be variously called psycholog-
ical, emotional or spiritual.

Derivative Abundance

. These types of abundance

are derived from the other archetypes. Thus they

may take on some of the features of their source,
but they may also pose unique features of their

own.  Wind  power,  for  instance,  is  a  derivative  of
solar  power,  with  solar  heat  turning  the  earth's
atmosphere  into  a  heat  engine  that  generates  air

movements which can then be tapped for energy
generation. Part of this heat engine drives the

hydrological cycle, from which comes another deriv-
ative source of abundance, the power of flow-
ing/falling water. When we learn to build on the

foundations of existing abundant resources to create
cascades of new abundant phenomena, we will see

more new types of derivative abundance.

Pseudo-Abundance: Bads Posing
as Goods

A phenomenon sometimes presents itself as a case

of abundance. We may later  find  out  that it comes
attached  with  a  darker  side  of  ills  and  bads.  Even
worse,  the  „abundance‖  may  in  reality  be  a  poi-

soned pill of ills and bads that are actually meant to
undermine real abundance and create artificial

scarcity, but are sold as a good or service that
claims to benefit an unsuspecting public.

It may take discernment and time to determine
which is which. Who would have thought that far-
mers will accept – not to mention pay for – powerful

poisons into their soils? That mothers would deny
their babies the nourishing breast milk nature has

7 For other possible classifications of abundance, see Verzola

(in press).

8 For additional discussion, see Verzola (in press).

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freely provided for them, and prefer instead to buy
troublesome antibiotic- and hormone-laden formula

milk? Have we taken into account the environmental
and health costs involved in creating the new ICT
infrastructure? Few people today look at the bads

associated with ICTs, their production, use, and
disposal. The study of abundance must make these

costs visible, so that they can be taken into account
whenever the cost of digital reproduction is consi-
dered, and so that the bads associated with ICTs

can also eliminated over time.

We need to be vigilant about these types of „abun-

dance‖, so we can reject and eliminate them. Unfor-
tunately, our production methods often generate
them as a by-product of production. Responding to
this negative „abundance‖ involves avoiding being

locked into production methods that rely for raw
materials on toxic and non-biodegradable sub-

stances or which create them as by-products or as
the main product itself, and shifting to technologies
of

clean production

. The model of clean production

is the ecological model of food webs, which finds
use for every by-product and creates closed produc-

tion loops.

The Demand Side of Abundance

Abundance archetypes represent the supply side; let

us now look at the demand side. It is almost by
definition that economists predominantly focus on
scarcity, when they define economics as the study of

„the most efficient ways to allocate scarce resources
to meet unlimited human wants‖. If, indeed, people

had infinite wants, then not even all the resources of
this finite world will be enough for a single person.

It can be argued, however, that consumer wants are
not infinite. There exist physical, physiological,

psychological and cultural limits – both actual and
potential – to consumption which can keep individ-

ual as well as collective needs and wants within
finite bounds.

If these needs and wants are finite, then satisfying

them becomes a real possibility, and relative abun-
dance is within reach.

Finite Wants

The following concepts will help show that needs

and wants can remain within finite bounds:

Satiation

. Economists define satiation as the con-

sumption level which the consumer most prefers.

The closer the consumer is to this level, writes
economist Hal Varian, „the better off he is in terms
of his own preferences‖.

This satiation level for a

bundle of goods is also called the bliss point. Be-
yond it, the consumer prefers to have

less

of the

goods. Many economists still cling to the hedonist
principle that „more is always preferred to less.‖ But
some acknowledge, at least in theory, that a satia-

tion level exists for some, if not most, goods. Varian,
in particular, says that most goods have a satiation

point and that „you can have too much of nearly
anything,‖ which contradicts the „unlimited wants‖

assertion in most definitions of economics.

Saturation

. While satiation may apply more to the

psychological attitude of a consumer not

wanting

more, saturation is more about the physiological or

physical  incapacity  of  a  person  to  consume  more.
Beyond  the  saturation  point,  one's  body  either  will
become  incapable  or  will  involuntarily  reject  addi-

tional servings of food and drinks. One can only
wear so many clothes, or shoes. One can listen to

only so many CDs or watch only so many videos.
There are only twenty-four hours a day after all.

To reach the brain, a sense stimulus takes around

10-20 milliseconds. To respond in a conscious way,

neuro-scientists have found out, the brain takes
longer – around 500 milliseconds (half a second).

This suggests that our brain can only enjoy at most

two distinct events every second or about 170,000
every twenty-four hours. For a world with some six

billion people, that adds up to an upper limit of one
quad (i.e., quadrillion) consumption events per day.

That is a huge number, it is true, but finite neverthe-
less. Most of us will probably exceed our saturation
levels long before that point.

The argument for saturation is further strengthened

by the findings of experimental psychologists that
people – and animals too – get less pleasure from
any stimulation, the more often it happens. Not only

does the pleasure diminish, but the stimulation soon
becomes undesirable.

So, the finite time to con-

sciously respond to sensory stimulation sets a limit
to the variety of stimulation one can respond to, and
a single type of stimulation will also soon become
undesirable, likewise setting a limit on the desirable

9  Varian p. 43-44.
10  Matthews.
11  Scitovsky p. 35-40.

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amount for that type. Economist Tibor Scitovsky has
further argued that not all sources of stimulation can

be exchanged in the market and therefore add to
economic demand.

All these support the argument

for a finite bound to consumer needs and wants.

Satisficing

. Even before we reach our satiation or

saturation levels, we may already reach our „satis-

ficed‖ level, in which the quantity we have of a
particular good or bundle of goods already

suffices

to satisfy

, and beyond which we would only weakly

prefer more.

In contrast to satiation, which results

in a strictly lower preference beyond the bliss point

or satiation level, points beyond the satisficing level
are  either  equally  preferred  or  only  so  slightly  or
weakly preferred that it does not make a difference.
The  idea  that  consumers  satisfice  rather  than  opti-
mize  when  fitting  their  wants  to  their  budget  was

first raised by psychologist Herbert Simon, who
subsequently won the Economics Nobel Prize in
1978.

„Inferior” Goods.

Still another economic concept supports the

idea  of  limited  human  wants.  This  is  the  concept  of  „inferior‖
good,  which  are  goods  which  we  buy  less  of  as  our  income
increases. These tend to be goods which are considered „necessi-
ties‖,  and  whose  consumption  tends  to  plateau  and  even  de-
crease, as consumers increase their income. The levelling off of
consumption is a mark of self-limiting demand.

While any of these „sat‖ concepts – certainly all of

them, together – are enough to argue that individ-
ual and likewise needs and wants have finite

bounds, this paper is inclined to base its definition of
abundance on the satisficing concept. On such

basis, the following is asserted:

some consumers

12 ibid., p. 81-83.
13 Economists often represent the quantity of good desired

relative to another good (or other goods) using indifference
curves, which include on the same curve equally preferred

ratios of one good over another. Through the same graphical
tool, „satisficed‖ levels may then be described using thick in-

difference curves. Such thick curves mean that small in-
creases in quantity of a consumer's bundle of goods do not

increase a consumer's preference for that bundle, suggesting
that they have reached their satisficed level. Standard indif-

ference curve analysis can then be used to determine the
economic implications when consumers reach this level. One

implication, for instance, is that the demand curve turns con-
cave as the satisficing level is approached. This upsets the

First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics, which as-
sumes strictly convex indifference curves and non-satiation.

This is the theorem which asserts that a free market leads to

an optimally efficient allocation of resources.

14 See Simon.

have a satisficing level for some goods.

As the

price of a good goes down, consumers will then be
able to afford enough to reach their satisficing

levels. The following stronger assertion is further
proposed:

all consumers have a satisficing level for

some goods

The above assertions lead directly to a formal defini-
tion of abundance:

when a person can afford

enough quantity of a good or bundle of goods to

reach his/her satisficed level, then the person enjoys

a state of abundance for that good/bundle of goods.

The concept is not new. Gandhi must have been
referring to abundance when he said „the Earth has

enough for everyone's need‖. This definition also
allows a good's state of abundance with respect to

one person to be quantified: it is the ratio of that
person's affordable quantity (economists call this

demand

, which varies according to price) to his/her

satisficing level, which is the point where any further
reduction in price does not anymore increase that

person's demanded quantity. For instance, if a
person's satisficing level is five pairs of shoes, but

s/he can only afford two pairs (i.e., s/he is only
willing to buy two pairs at current prices), then s/he
enjoys a state of abundance of 40% (two out of

five) with respect to shoes. This makes it simple to
relate abundance to its inverse, scarcity: the person

needs three pairs more to reach the five-pair satis-
ficed level. Thus s/he faces a scarcity level of 60%.

For a group of consumers, the level of abundance

can be determined by aggregating the quantities

each individual can afford (the demand), divided by
the aggregate of their individual satisficing levels.
This makes it possible, in theory, to determine the

relative level of abundance (and scarcity) of a good
for an entire society.

15 „Satisficing‖ seems to have no noun form. Instead of

„satisfaction‖ - which many economists use to mean „reach-
ing the highest level desired‖ rather than „meeting a level

that suffices‖ - this paper uses „satisficing level‖ if the level
has not been reached yet, and „satisficed level‖ if it has been

reached.

16 The satisficing principle is widely used in logical/mathematical

proofs and, by extension, in all physical, natural and social
sciences that use such proofs in their fields. Consider the fol-

lowing assertions: (1) A, B and C imply X; 2) D and E imply X,
and 3) F implies X. As soon as the truth of (1) is proven, the

sufficient conditions for X will have been satisfied, a very

common exercise in many fields. Subsequent work may show

that (2) and (3) are also true, with (3) possibly established as
the

optimal sufficient condition for X. But (1), (2) and (3) are

all

equally sufficient to satisfy the conditions for X. Anyone

who has ever established, used or accepted such proofs is, in
effect, using the satisficing principle.

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Economists usually assume that business firms

maximize their profits by producing until their mar-

ginal cost (the cost of the next additional unit)
equals their marginal revenue (unit price of the
good). If, in addition to this behavioral assumption,

diminishing returns or decreasing returns to scale –
or equivalently -- increasing marginal costs are also

assumed,  then  the  increasing  marginal  costs  will
eventually  equal  the  good's  market  price.  In  eco-
nomic  theory,  this  is  the  point  of  maximum  profit.

Thus business firms will, in theory, reach their
satiation point when they reach their maximum

profits.

This  also  means,  however,  that  profitable  firms
employing  technologies  with  constant  or  increasing
returns  to  scale  will  face  constant  or  decreasing

marginal costs. They will therefore have no profit
maximum and likewise no satiation level. These

firms will conform to the theoretical hedonist idea
that „more is always preferred to less.‖ They will try
to keep increasing their scale of operations, in an

unending chase for profits – making them an engine
of globalization.

It is the profit-motive, it seems, that keeps us away
from abundance, not „infinite― human wants.

Aggregate Abundance

Based on the stronger assertion made above, the
level of abundance for a group of consumers can be

determined by aggregating the quantities each
individual can afford, divided by the aggregate of

their individual satisfaction levels. This makes it
possible, in theory, to determine the relative level of
abundance (and scarcity) of a good for an entire
society.

Cooperation among consumers raises the possibility

of further improving the aggregate level abundance,
given the same supply and individual demands.

Sharing resources and cooperative consumption can
make it possible for a group of consumers to buy
more goods or services and get nearer their satis-

faction levels, improving their aggregate level of
abundance. A car, for instance, may meet the daily

commuting needs of one or multiple persons. Com-
pared to books in someone's shelf, books in a com-
munity library can be enjoyed by many more people.

17 Abundance levels that exceed 100% may be called a state of

absolute abundance.

Beyond the pooling of resources, cultural mecha-

nisms can also bring satisfaction levels and demand

down, further improving a society's level of abun-
dance. Extolling simple living, highlighting voluntary
simplicity, focusing on the spiritual aspects of life, or

idealizing asceticism are various ways by which
material accumulation is deemphasized and a soci-

ety's level of abundance enhanced from the demand
side. As Gandhi put it when describing his own
experiments in voluntary simplicity, „the real seat of
taste was not the tongue but the mind.‖

Abundance Studies: A New Field

Clearly, abundance and its identified archetypes are

a  common  feature  of  our  world.  To  harness  such
abundance  and  build  cascades  of  more  abundance
for  the  benefit  of  human  welfare  is,  as  clearly,  a

desirable goal. Abundance, therefore, deserves our
attention as a major field of study and research. If

abundance has not gotten the full attention that it
deserves, it is for the following reasons:



Economics has generally focused its

attention almost exclusively on scarcity,
creating a blind spot among economists.



It is easy to take for granted an abundant
resource like air or soil.



Powerful economic agents try to either

undermine abundance or to subject it to
private control, to create artifical scarcity

and generate further possibilities for profit-
making.

However, with the emergence of information

economies and the growth of information abun-

dance,  this  phenomenom  cannot  be  denied  or
ignored  anymore.  In  fact,  the  economics  of  abun-
dance is becoming an extremely  interesting  field  of

study. This field can draw lessons from the informa-
tion sciences, life sciences, agriculture, material

sciences, physical sciences and of course not only
economics but the rest of the social sciences as well.

Elsewhere, I have proposed basic goals for abun-
dance management:

18 Gandhi p. 52.
19 Verzola (in press).

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

Make the source of abundance accessible to

more citizens. This is essentially the goal of
social justice, for distributing the benefits of

abundance to a larger portion of, if not the
whole, population.



Make the source last longer, preferably

indefinitely. This is the goal of sustainability.
Ideally a source of abundance should be

managed so that it will provide the present
and future generations with a perpetual
stream of benefits.



Develop an abundance-nurturing ethic that
creates

among

the

community

beneficiaries a mindset that is strongly
protective of the source of abundance. Aldo
Leopold well-known „land ethic‖

and

Sandra Postel's parallel „water ethic‖

are

examples of such abundance-nurturing

ethic.



Attain dynamic economic and ecological

balance. Unlimited growth is abundance is
not possible in a finite world. Abundance in
nature can occur indefinitely only when a

dynamic balance is attained among
abundant elements through closed material

cycles. Today, we must learn to cope with
four major sources of imbalance: a) our

reliance  on  a  non-renewable  energy  base;
b)  the  linear  production  processes  of
industry  which  deplete  our  raw  material

sources and create toxic or non-
biodegradable wates; c) the unchecked

growth of human populations; and d) the
unlimited corporate drive for profit



Build cascades of new abundance. By

learning to recognize the conditions that
lead to abundance, we may soon learn how

to create new abundance patterned after
the cascades of abundance found in nature.

20 „A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity,

stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when

it tends otherwise.‖ See Leopold 1966.

21 „Make the protection of water ecosystems a central goal in all

that we do.‖ See Postel 1997.

Abundance Creates Commons

It is clear from these goals that abundance studies
feed into another area of current huge interest, the

study of the commons. After all, abundance natu-
rally creates the need to manage a common re-

source. Approaches to commons management have
relied on appeals to the common good, and the
values of sharing, cooperation, altruism and com-

munity spirit, as well as explicit regulatory meas-
ures, economic incentive and disincentive systems,

cultural norms and practices such as restrictions,
prohibitions and taboos, and other institutional

mechanisms.  Complex  social  behavior  and  hierar-
chies  of  communal  use  and  access  rights  have
evolved  among  ancient  tribes  and  other  traditional

societies, for managing abundance and the com-
mons, and these have served them well for many

generations  and  perhaps  for  the  future  as  well.
Successful  modern  commons  such  as  free/open
source  software  and  the  Wikipedia  have  also

evolved their own rules and patterns of behavior for
managing the abundance that characterizes the

emerging information economy. A rich theoretical
and practical heritage in commons management,
which has learned to cope with and to manage both

abundance and scarcity, may be found in the litera-
ture of the commons.

These should serve us well

in subsequent abundance studies.

Conclusion

The new technologies in information and communi-

cations have created a new type of good whose
outstanding feature is its abundance. The abun-

dance of information goods has made them cheaper
relative to other goods, leading to a massive process
of substitution, as consumers and producers shift to

information goods away from physical goods. Aside
from the abundance inherent in information goods,

which this paper calls multiplicative abundance,
biological abundance may also be found in nature,
given the inherent urge and ability of all living things

to reproduce their own kind, thus the term repro-
ductive abundance. A third type of abundance is the
massive abundance of such materials as sand,
water and air. The creation of other abundance out

of these archetypes can lead to a cascade of deriva-
tive abundance, which if properly tapped promises a
life of plenty for human societies. However, one

22 Ostrom, Dietz, et al.

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must also beware of pseudo-abundance, which
consists of bads and ills posing as goods.

The promise of abundance can turn into reality not
only due to huge increases in the supply of goods,

but also when the demand for goods itself is limited,
as can happen when satiation, saturation or satis-

ficing occurs. With finite wants, the attainment of
true abundance becomes a real possibility. The
literature of the commons provides a rich source of

material for studying the management of abun-
dance.

These considerations justify the emergence of a new
field of abundance studies, that will look at the
economics of production and consumption of goods
not only from the perspective of scarcity but also of

abundance. After all, a major goal of any economy -
and by extension any economist - should be to
realize abundance for all.

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