Data Mining Requires Actual Mining

Above: Rare earth miner, Jiangxi Province, China, 2010

While I roll my eyes a bit at some of the jargon, the overall points of this review of a new book titled The Geology of Media, asking us to reflect on the real life impact of our disconnected media and information world, are good and the book itself seems quite valuable. We think we live in this disconnected world. But everything in our phones and computers are parts of an industrial process that includes the mining of minerals from the earth by miners who get diseases from their work, cheap labor to put it all together, cables at the bottom of the ocean to move data around the earth, chilled water cooling coils for large servers, and a disposal process that largely means Chinese women taking hammers to phones and burning them to recover the rare earths and heavy metals, a tremendously toxic and polluting process with huge impacts on both workers and ecosystems. These points are very important and that these industrial processes are so obscured from consumers helps to ensure the global exploitation of the land and the people who work it in order to provide consumer goods. Nothing is disconnected from the planet and nothing is disconnected from the people who work on that planet. We can talk about disruptive technologies, but a lot of that disruption is also going to be the people mining, constructing, processing, and then destroying those technologies.