Customer Reviews

Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Digital Rubbish presents a unique review of electronic waste. Both creative and scholarly, the book reminds readers of the many ways in which digital devices have environmental and material impacts. This is an engaging and highly recommended read!

Digital Rubbish is a book that represents a substantial contribution to the field of new media and to the geographies of materiality. Taking her lead from Walter Benjamin and Donna Haraway, Gabrys skilfully argues for a "naturecultures" approach to digital media that is at once material, virtual and imaginary. The choice of Benjamin and Haraway is instructive of Gabrys approach, which works through both the material-semiotic (in Haraway's term) and natural history (in Benjamin's) of digital waste to give a rich account of how the matter of digital waste is never simply the "thing", but always, already in the process of waste-making. That is, duration and temporalities are as important to the process of waste-making as the circulation and disassembly of matter itself. And linguistic and cultural environments are as important to understanding the digital as devices themselves. Focusing on the remainders of digital waste as a Benjaminian commodity fossil, Gabrys suggests that; `These remainders accumulate into a sort of sedimentary record, from which we can potentially piece together the evolution and extinction of past technologies. These fossils are then partial evidence of the materiality of electronics-a materiality that is often only apparent once electronics become waste. In fact, electronics involve an elaborate process of waste making, from the mining of metals and minerals, to the production of microchips through toxic solvents, to the eventual recycling or disposal of equipment. These processes of pollution, remainder, and decay reveal other orders of materiality that have yet to enter the sense of the digital'(p. vi). Gabrys' `more than empirical' (p. 4) methodology traverses five sites of the digital and through these sites the reader is introduced to five strata in the natural history of the digital that together uncover an extended materiality of waste that will be of interest to scholars of new media, geography, environment and cultural studies.

Readers would be advised to ignore the self-proclaimed "Trashers" review as it is obviously written by a competitor in the field (she identifies herself as such). Frankly, anyone that thinks Benjamin was an empiricist needs to re-examine her self-congratulating designation as a theorist. This kind of self-serving academic bullying gives academics a bad name, not to mention making the ethical claims for "others" working in the field of electronic waste seem suspect. What readers will find in Digital Rubbish is a profound attempt to uncover the residues of waste that congeal around electronic devices and the effect of these materials on both humans and environments, as well as detailed research that point readers in the direction of further reading and imagining in the life of electronics.

As someone who actually does research on e-waste and who takes her theory seriously, I found this book appallingly empty of even the slightest scrap of empirical knowledge about the subject. Gabrys desecrates the name of Walter Benjamin by comparing her vague dribble to his well-researched and brilliant work, and shows herself also to be hardly concerned enough about the important issues here (devastating pollution, huge economic inequalities, the struggles of marginalized communities for economic survival) to actually learn about them. For folks truly interested in the production and management of e-waste (and its deeper "theoretical" meanings as well) I suggest articles by Josh Lepawski, Ramzy Kahhat to start with.