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But the materiality of media is something harder than the usual hardware
layers we mistake to be the endpoint of media materiality. Our electronics are
like mini-mines of minerals and metals themselves: copper, gold, lead,
mercury, palladium and silver among other metals. Too often, the extraction
of Earth has simultaneously poisoned it, for example the coltan (columbite
tantalite) mines in Congo, which have fueled bloody wars there.
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For this reason, the long-lasting legacy of Silicon Valley will not amount to
corporations or branding or creativity or individualism, but its soil: the heavy
concentration of toxins that will last much longer than the businesses and
remind of the geological afterglow of the digital hype, the residue of the tech
companies use of chemicals in the manufacturing of our devices. Benzene,
trichloroethylene and Freon are not necessarily things we associate with
digital media cultural ephemerality, but they are some of the historical
examples of health hazards caused from production of disk drives.
Indeed, the dynamics of the Earth are increasingly the focus of our
technological culture: from technologies of measurement concerning climates
and geological resources, to maximizing the communication capacities of
satellite orbits and gauging wireless trac through the airthe Earth is now
an object dealt with on its own scale, a thing to be put to use as a whole,
though well still use it piecemeal as well.
There are various natural and ctional histories that imagine the Earth as a
bizarre, living organism. Arthur Conan Doyles When the World Screamed
(1928) features the prototype of the mad scientist, Professor Challenge, who
pierces through the various layers of the Earth, making it scream. Later, James
Lovelocks Gaia hypothesis argues for a massive dynamic interdependency
among the planets ecosystems, suggesting that we see the Earth as alive in
another, less familiar way.
By realizing the geological importance of the Earth for media culture, we
might also acknowledge that the Earth is a communicative object itself. Not
only that we keenly visualize, talk and imagine the Earth as an object through
media representationsbut that there would not be any media without the
resource base oered by its geology. Even that the Earth as living creature
communicates via the assembled resources it fashions and provides.