Abstract
As Elodie and 35,000 other Congolese children negotiate dangerous working conditions that impair their health, some Western consumers enjoy the fruits of their debilitating labor to fight for their own rights in the ableist infrastructure of the West. Americans and people around the world benefit from the cooling power of an aquifer in South Carolina, water that is in the ground traditionally stewarded by the Catawba, Pee Dee, Chicora, Edisto, Santee, Yamassee, and Chicora-Waccamaw who are all still present in South Carolina, as are many descendants of the Cherokee, despite also being devastated by European-born diseases like smallpox. What role should our studies of the digital play in addressing these problems in the global digital supply chain?
I am participating in this symposium from land traditionally stewarded by the Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Massachusetts. The Wampanoag were decimated by a bacteria called Leptospirosis in the early 17th century, which spread from rats that sailed to the “new world” on English colonial ships. 1 The bacteria jumped species, infecting the indigenous animals of what we now call Massachusetts and subsequently entered the food chain of the people living here. I raise this history as I raise the resilience of these indigenous groups who still exist today to remind us that the weaponization of germs against vulnerable populations, inadvertently or not, is not new and while COVID-19 is unprecedented in our lifetime, it is not unprecedented throughout the centuries of human existence. My hope is that when we acknowledge this past we can strive to create a different reality in this moment and beyond. Something so small can have ripple effects downstream and I see this reflected not only in our health care infrastructure, or rather lack thereof, but also in our digital infrastructure.
My previous work focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice as acts of self-affirmation and health promotion. In this new project, I investigate the ways that the digital divide occurs not only at the level of who has access to digital spaces but also the way the digital enables some people as it disables others. I’d like to think about the need for fostering an ethical digital culture that includes the digital humanities taking a more political approach to our research. I believe we can use the little bit of Western institutional privilege we have to try to imagine a way of engaging the digital that is more humane for all.
I have three case studies all three of which currently fall outside the current purview of the digital humanities. My hope is to show that these issues should matter to those of us who study digital culture and society and perhaps engender new ways of doing our research.
In an October 2018 article in The Guardian, Harvard lecturer Siddharth Kara describes the back breaking work of searching for coltan by 15-year-old Elodie, who is exposed to toxic dust in the process. Elodie sells her coltan to Chinese distributors who export and refine the mineral in China and then sell it to tech companies to power our digital devices such as smart phones, laptops, and tablets (Kara, 2018). Largely due to activism from local Congolese groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the United States passed the Dodd Frank Act which prohibits any commodity traded through the Security Exchange Comission (SEC) from having conflict minerals in its supply chain. In theory, this seemed like a helpful provision, a way to ensure that companies take the human rights abuses and conflict profiteering now embedded in the digital supply chain seriously. However, most of these workers are like Elodie involved in artisanal small-scale mining of which the Dodd Frank Act has little oversight.
In September 2019, China Labor Watch released a report revealing numerous labor rights violations at the Zhengzhou Foxconn factory, the largest iPhone factory in the world and known for its infamous suicide nets that surround its dormitories so that workers won’t kill themselves if they decide to jump, as many before them have. Just last month, China was accused of forcing Uyghur Muslims to work at factories that produce goods for well-known global companies including Apple, Nike, BMW, Samsung, Sony, and Volkswagen (Kelly, 2020). These human rights violations have been brought to the attention of these companies before but like the Dodd Frank Act, the kind of interventions designed to ameliorate these issues, never seem to reach those most in need.
In October 2019, South Carolina granted Google a 4-year contract to allow them to extract and use 549 million gallons of ground water a year to cool its latest data center in the state. Clay Duffie, manager of Mount Pleasant Waterworks, opposed transaction, explaining, “I don’t have a beef against Google itself, but I don’t think it is appropriate to use pristine groundwater for cooling computers, versus providing that water for people . . . We are obviously concerned about the long term, safe sustainable yield of that aquifer” (Humphries, 2019). The population of the state is growing. Additionally, one of the likely outcomes of COVID-19 is an increase in the need for personal water consumption. These data centers provide very little in the way of new jobs for the communities that host them, despite the promised increase used as a selling point. Google was wooed by tax breaks and a large amount of fresh water but the long-term effects on the water supply for South Carolinians has yet to unfold.
As Elodie and 35,000 other Congolese children negotiate dangerous working conditions that impair their health, some Western consumers enjoy the fruits of their debilitating labor to fight for their own rights in the ableist infrastructure of the West. Additionally, Americans and people around the world benefit from the cooling power of the aquifer in South Carolina, water that is in the ground traditionally stewarded by the Catawba, Pee Dee, Chicora, Edisto, Santee, Yamassee, and Chicora-Waccamaw who are all still present in South Carolina, as are many descendants of the Cherokee, despite also being devastated by European-born diseases like smallpox. What are the ethical implications of using stolen water on stolen land to cool the data centers that power the Internet? How might a new set of relations between consumers, laborers, and land create the kind of advocacy that would force corporate entities to change their policies? If they have to be accountable to all of these entities, what role should our studies of the digital play in addressing these problems in the global digital supply chain?
The language of “Supply Chain Due Diligence” has shaped the conversation of what needs to happen to ensure a more humane production process. Like the euphemistic “triangle trade” that obscures the buying and selling of enslaved Africans as commodities, “Supply Chain Due Diligence” masks the human rights concerns of the supply chain. Due diligence may allay consumer fears of using conflict minerals but does not actually change the material conditions of those working on the ground.
Many of the articles I’ve read articulate these issues as solvable with needed transparency in the supply chain and focus on commercial transactions. Rather than directly address the investment in cheap labor at the expense of the lives of Black Congolese or Uyghur Muslims living in the global south, despite the fact that it was the human rights violations and violence they faced that was instrumental in getting reforms off the ground, nations states have opted to let corporations try to regulate themselves through internal oversight mechanisms and practices.
I believe that the digital humanities as a field is primed for the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration that could be beneficial in shifting some of these harmful realities for the people who build or digital infrastructure and hardware.
Librarians, engineers, and faculty have already been collaborative architects of many of the digital humanities projects that are central to the field. Including community members, people in the digital infrastructure supply chain as part of this already collaborative team, means incorporating elements of participatory action research that allows for community and human rights interests to be served, not just the researchers’ interests. Participatory action research is a process-oriented research method that fundamentally shifts the top-down approach to research where scholars study a community as opposed to work with a community to co-create research that is mutually beneficent. When we include community collaborators from the beginning, our research is all the more impactful. As my work develops, I hope to be in collaboration with those organizing within the mineral mines of the Congo, the union seekers at Foxconn, as well as the peoples of South Carolina. As COVID-19 has made undeniably clear, we are all connected in this world whether we believe it or not. In Alice Walker’s (2006) classic text, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness, she writes, This is a time when consciousness really requires that we connect, that we don’t just say ‘oh, that’s them over there,’ because the other part of consciousness now is to understand there are no other people anywhere. They are all here on the planet, we are us, and that’s it. (Walker, 2006)
We are all just degrees from one another. Building solidarity across state, institutional, disciplinary, and professional lines is essential if humans are to survive on this planet.
I offer that what is necessary is a new ethic around pace that doesn’t allow capitalism to be the driving force of our decision making as a species. An ethics of pace in our scholarship means that the ends do not justify the means but rather the means are the ends. By remaining attentive to the people involved in our research, keeping the human at the center of digital humanities, we can create a process that does not cause harm or at least reduces it. The pace of life and the pace of our research is something humans can control. We can make decisions to push back on expectations of overwork through the way we design our research and when in positions of power, the kinds of scholarship we value in our institutions.
For those of us who are department chairs and part of national organizations in our respective fields, we can advocate for the importance of this type of multinational cross-institutional collaborative scholarship. In a 2015 collaboratively produced white paper called “New Ecologies of Scholarship: Evaluating Academic Production in the Digital Age,” I and my colleagues worked together to come up with new ways for the humanities to embrace digital collaborative scholarship. One of our suggestions was to look to the physical sciences where labs and research agendas are prioritized over individual paper output. We wrote, “The lab is an incubator for ideas that can focus on work in progress rather than ‘works’. Collab-orators can work together to mature ideas to the point of circulation” (Bailey et al., 2015). What would a lab that embraced the study of all aspects of digital culture look like? What kind of processes might develop that support those must impacted by the harm the current digital supply chain causes?
To be clear I am not asking us to abandon our individual research in pursuit of what would likely be a bureaucratic nightmare to create. States and institutions prove too proprietary for such an endeavor to be easy. But if we look for the hidden humans, the invisible labor in whatever we study, we can begin to make the changes we want to see in our own part of the world.
The ethic of pace I want moving forward in my life and in my academic work is a slow and sustainable pace, one that moves at the speed of trust and is not driven by capitalistic imperatives (Brown, 2017). COVID-19 and the excess speed with which we are expected to move are both clear and unambiguous signs that the way we are living is not sustainable. We must pivot and change the way that we relate to each other. We must slow down to survive. This statement applies to the specific realities of digital humanities which asks us to imagine a new pace in the field. We are in an unprecedented moment to do this future visioning and the digital humanities is uniquely positioned to accommodate this collaborative and speculative possibilities.