Dead Media: Dirty Media
For our third and final Dead Media Archive dossier, Jason Lariviere, Daniel Cohen, and I stepped back from specific media technologies to consider the material life cycle of the hardware that embody them. Our critical overview begins with the mineral extraction necessary to manufacture electronics components, continues with a sobering examination of the politics of e-waste, and concludes at the site of the dump while suggesting conditions for an alternate outcome.
“Precisely this maximal connectivity, on the other, physical side, defines nonprogrammable systems, be they waves or beings. That is why these systems show polynomial growth in complexity and, consequently, why only computations done on nonprogrammable machines could keep up with them.”
—Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems
“Over the past two decades or more, rapid technological advances have doubled the computing capacity of semiconductor chips almost every eighteen months, bringing us faster computers, smaller cell phones, more efficient machinery and appliances, and an increasing demand for new products. Yet this rushing stream of amazing electronics leaves in its wake environmental degradation and a large volume of hazardous waste—waste created in the collection of the raw materials that go into these products, by the manufacturing process, and by the disposal of these products at the end of their remarkably short lives.”
—Elizabeth Grossman, High Tech Trash
“Very soon, the sheer volume of e-waste will compel America to adopt design strategies that include not just planned obsolescence but planned disassembly and reuse as part of the product life cycle.”
—Giles Slade, Made to Break