The E-waste of the Tastemakers
This is a big chapter – Taylor goes in on marketing and the loss of public privacy, the ecological devastation that springs from the overconsumption of gadgetry, and the undermining of cultural value due to overproduction and planned obsolescene of the materials and tools the consumer engages with, and the emergence of the branded self as the marker of cultural capital. To get right to the point, I believe that what Taylor set’s up for the reader in chapter 6, is an understanding of what the web’s swirling economies and landscapes are actually made up of – much of the same stuff that is fueling the flesh world -hierarchical systems of inequality and waste. Referencing Marx’s “hidden abode of production,” which as many of us at this point would gather is typically revealed to be factory floor spaces or other places where the actual labor is taking place, Taylor spends the chapter bringing the “weightless rhetoric of digital technology” to a visible ground. By pointing to the “people and resources on which these systems depend” in order to de-romanticize the opaque openness of the cultural commons, Taylor breaks down what it is she means when she speaks of the “material reality [that] supports the digital commons… hardware, infrastructure, and content.”
Emphasizing the ecological impact of our consumption, Taylor argues that the hidden costs of our first world desires for the latest and greatest gadgetry position ourselves and the people who labor on these gadgets in places of victimization, although several tiers removed from one another. E-waste is not just that out of date smartphone that gets tossed in the trash – it’s the chemical components that go into its making (from minerals mined by enforced labor) and these chemicals eventually leach out into the earth and into the hands of poorer neighbors in the global south who scavenge these materials for scraps. E-waste is almost sounds like junk mail but that’s the allure of the web, this idea that even your trash will be airy and ephemeral. What is true is that here in the U.S. we do not really evaluate the long standing implications of where all that waste goes, until it shows up in our own backyards. I remember watching a documentary a few years ago that featured footage of mountainous piles of junked cellphones in a village in China, children climbing around it and playing all the while as a strange neon colored liquid seemed to stream out from the base of the pile. That’s the ecological and human impact of E-waste – mysterious neon ooze with zero regulation around it and devastating future health implications. This link highlights the impact:
http://usuncut.com/world/12-horrifying-photos-of-the-tech-industry-apple-never-wants-you-never-see/
On the other end of things, in our first world bubble, one of the primary ways that these corporations drive their products and the demand for such cultural capital to the dizzying height that it’s reached is through measuring the impact of the self as a commodity. “Combining the logics of engineering and capitalism, the self has become measurable and maximizable, tallied through metrics such as the number of contacts and Web hits, retweets and reblogs, five stars, ratings, likes, notes, and comments.” The logic follows that the more you participate in online platforms where your brand is cultivated, the more the agencies that calculate your value as someone who will be able to shill their products for them in the most un-shillable way. “The goal, always, is to get more – more friends, more fans, more followers…”
These people are the Tastemakers – “celebrities” propelled forward by their willingness (or in some cases ignorance of how their contribution will be manipulated) to create content that endorses products and brands that will continue to market to their targeted audiences. Their social capital is their branded self. As if there weren’t enough levels of social stratification to contend with – this is the definitely the most transparent reading of what effect these marketing strategies and tech innovations are enabling in our rapidly developing society – further inequality that alienates and separates people from doing the thing that Facebook was supposedly created for – connecting.
