KEY POINTS

A Recursive Process

Geographies of Digital Wasting threads together four sites spread across the globe, each sitting at distinct points in the digital supply chain, and illustrates how waste comes to be differentially defined, contested, operationalized, and resisted across these sites.

Extraction investigates the controversy surrounding the building of a rare earth mine in Narsaq, Greenland

Manufacturing explores the history, present, and future(s) of semiconductor manufacturing in Silicon Valley and Taiwan.

Operation interrogates the politics and processes of wasting in and around data centers and warehouses in Virginia and Southern California.

Discard documents the growing postconsumer e-waste problem in Zimbabwe, and the political efforts to contain it.

While it may look like it at first glance, this is not a supply chain story. Supply chains imply a sort of linearity, and systems of wasting are anything but. As a process, digital wasting does not begin with extraction, nor does it end with discard. It does not neatly conform to the imaginary of a chain. It is messy. It is recursive. It folds back into itself, and works through itself in dynamic, often unexpected ways. It travels and transforms across contexts in all directions. As such, we encourage visitors to traverse these geographies of digital wasting in any order they see fit. Perhaps, by radically broadening our imaginaries of e-waste, a new, more complete understanding of the internet’s material impacts can be gleaned.