McKenzie Wark on Wed, 22 Aug 2001 17:53:16 +0200 (CEST) |
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[Nettime-bold] Index of an Unreal World |
Index to an Unreal World / 22nd August, 2001 R is for Resource There’s a little bit of the Congo in all of our lives. In this world, as everyone knows, everything is connected to everything else. Pop the cover off your cellphone or laptop and you are looking at stuff that has come from all over the world, processed and manufactured and assembled into a functioning machine. In the guts of your machine you may be able to spot some capacitors. These probably contain tantalum, a marvellous conductor of electricity, also very good with heat. These were probably made by Kemet or Cabot, the two largest tantalum capacitor companies. They were quite possibly made with tantalum dug out of the ground in the Congo, where there’s plenty of coltan, from which tantalum is refined. Your participation in the cyberhype age comes to you in part through the efforts of Congolese miners slopping mud into plastic tubs. In this world, where everything is connected to everything else, it is also quite possible for a New York Times journalist to travel to the Congo to find out what its like to mine coltan. Blaine Harden recounts epic adventures on the back of a Yamaha trail bike, jolting over potholes and dodging armed bandits, to get to an illegal mine camp in the Okapi Faunal Reserve. There Harden meets Mama Doudou, entrepreneur, who appears as a sort of Mother Courage of the Congo. She bakes bread for the miners and sells it at inflated prices. She has a perfect little business selling both prostitution and the drugs to cure the resultant venereal diseases. In this connected world, vectors of communication and transport link this obscure jungle clearing to us, and create this marvellous opportunity for Mama Doudou to participate in the commodity economy. But the Okapi Faunal Reserve is also home to monkeys, elephants and the okapi, a rare relative of the giraffe. Thousands of Mbuti, or pygmies, also live there. Their livelihood is compromised by the coltan miners, who, as Harden helpfully phrases it, dig "SUV-sized holes" in the mud, out of which they can extract about a kilo of coltan a day. A kilo of coltan was worth $80 during the technology boom. There was a world shortage, which delayed the release of the Sony Playstation and many other rollouts. Since the collapse of the tech boom, Coltan prices are down to $8 a kilo. The same vector which linked the Congo to the tech boom also links it to the crash. While the competition is tough, the Congo is arguably the region in which colonial exploitation has done the most harm and conferred the least benefits. As Conrad depicts it in Heart of Darkness, colonial Congo was a maladministered mess. When the United States took an interest in the place in the 60s, it cared only for three things: cobalt, copper and communism. The Congo’s first democratic leader Patrice Lumumba was ousted in a CIA sponsored coup that brought to power the notorious Mobutu Sese Seku. With the collapse of the Mobutu regime, there is civil war, and little else. One of the things keeping the civil war going is the coltan. Rival armies covet territories from which to extort money from the mining. This is one of the reasons the ‘overdeveloped world’ is getting a little queasy about buying Congolese coltan. Coltan both fuels the war, and accelerates the destruction of wildlife habitats. Everything is connected to everything else. And so corporations with precious brands to protect don’t want protest movements sullying their reputations by calling attention to all the gorillas coltan kills, or the guerrillas it feeds. The Belgian airline Sabena no longer flies coltan from the Congo. Nokia and Motorola require suppliers to use coltan from elsewhere. Which is good news for the Australian company Sons of Gwalia, which now provides half of world supply. The destruction of Australian habitats seems somehow less picturesque. No gorillas or giraffes are involved. Even at $8 a kilo, coltan is still one of the few sources of income for many Congolese. This is a country where people live on 20 cents a day. It’s possible that the only thing worse for the Congo than coltan mining is this de facto embargo on coltan mining. Either way, its not much of a choice. The vector that connects the Congo to your laptop is also the vector that connects information about the Congo to your laptop. One thing that goes unmentioned in Harden’s otherwise admirable reportage is that other export from parts of the world like the Congo – stories about the misery and suffering that journalists produce for our contemplation. Everything is connected to everything else. Everything is a resource for commodification. Suffering is also a resource, to journalists, as the raw material for our entertainment. This connectedness is what is distinctive to these vectoral times. Communication makes anything and everything into a potential resource. The world appears, in Heidegger’s phrase, as a ‘standing reserve’, as if it existed for us to plunder or picture. The problem for a place like the Congo is that only two kinds of resource really have enough value to be worth the world’s interest. One is minerals, the other is wildlife. The Congolese themselves are 20 cents a day. What the vector of communication makes possible is the attachment of resources any and everywhere to a global pattern of calculation of their price. What it blocks is the possibility of any other kind of value. Unless the Congolese finds the political will defy the partnership of local and global expropriators, and rebuilt a society in which to benefit collectively from their resources, they will continue to suffer the most brutal forms of low-rent exploitation and expropriation. The alternative is to see business go elsewhere as corporations protect their brands from any association with dirty business. While that may satisfy the moral needs of activist-consumers in the overdeveloped world, it doesn’t do anything for people like Mama Doudou. It doesn’t rebuild Congolese society, and it doesn’t necessarily do anything to protect gorillas. In merely makes the Congo a resource of another kind, for moral consumption. In this vectoral world, where everything is connected to everything else, its not a question of just saying ‘no’ to the use of this or that resource. One then merely chooses another resource. It’s a question of questioning the appropriation of the world as a whole in the form of a resource, including its use as a resource for entertainment or moral improvement. It’s not enough to say no to ‘globalisation’, for that is merely another kind of globalisation, with a moral, rather than a commerical self interest at its heart. A HACKER MANIFESTO 2.0 http://www.feelergauge.net/projects/hackermanifesto/version_2.0/ REFERENCE Blaine Harden, ‘The Dirt in the New Machine’, New York Times Magazine, 12th August, 2001, pp34-39 ________________________________________________________________ http://www.feelergauge.net/projects/hackermanifesto/version_2.0/ mckenziewark@hotmail.com is a temporary address. 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