11.1: “Digital Costs - An Introduction to Study” | J. F. Lindsay

When’s the last time you thought about how the internet works? About where the bits and bobs inside your phone came from? About the energy required to charge all these things?

For me at least, more often than not, I kinda experience all these tools as a given: I’m not thinking about the minerals that power my iPhone when I’m searching for a song on Spotify, not thinking about the process of content moderation when I’m scrolling social media, not thinking about the workers who built my keyboard when my fingers are tapping away at the keys. When I get up in the morning, my iPhone is there, next to my bed, like it seemingly always has been; when I first boot up my laptop, the fact that I’m on a computer isn’t a marvel but a sign of my average day-to-day.

But, while a bit hard to glimpse at times, there is most certainly a “rootedness” to the digital. Our cyber-lives are powered not so much by the invisible forces of clouds or highways or satellites way up in the sky, but raw minerals mined from the earth and cables laid in the depths of continental oceans. The digital world is not an automatic, unconscious, and untoiled one, but a world built and maintained by many hands, all across the globe.

For example, two-thirds of the world’s supply of cobalt—a vital component of lithium-ion batteries—is sourced from a small, southern minefield in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where poor labor conditions and dangerous extractive practices have become the status quo. Of the roughly two hundred fifty-five thousand 255,000 miners in the DRC, a report found “at least thirty-five thousand 35,000 of whom are children, some as young as six,” earning little more than a dollar or two per day for hours of intensive, back-breaking labor. Bolivia’s Cerro Rico mountains are close to collapse, and could claim the city of Potosí along with it, endangering hundreds of thousands of people.

As tech journalist Brian Merchant reports, “to obtain the 100 or so grams of minerals found in a single iPhone, miners around the world have to dig, dynamite, chip and process their way through about 75 pounds of rock,” leading him to a rather biting assessment: “on just about every continent… miners are risking their lives to provide you with a device that lets you read this while you’re waiting in line for the bathroom.” This is to say nothing of the factories where these many materials will be assembled together and transformed from raw, humble commodity to great, grand shiny object. Moreover, and more painful still, these practices align with a much longer history of abuse, colonization, and extraction from the Global South: these are not so much new veins as they are brutally-established legacies of extraction. While perhaps a difficult point to address head-on, it is not an argument, but a fact: “the purchasing of digital devices funds worker and human rights atrocities” (Precarity Lab 26), atrocities often linked to a larger, longer history of abuse, exploitation, and marginalization.

The digital’s reach, of course, also extends far beyond the human, with the need for raw materials, electricity, and power placing the digital in a precarious relationship with life-worlds that extend far beyond those of laboring bodies alone. As scholar James Bridle’s research shows, data centers account for 3% of the world’s electricity use, and 2% of total global emissions; in-and-of-itself a huge carbon footprint, but hardly the total cost required to keep the digital up and running: “these figures reflect processing power, but do not account for the wider network of digital activities empowered by computation. These activities—dispersed, fragmented, and often virtual—also consume vast resources, and are, by the nature of contemporary networks, difficult to see and string together” (New Dark Age, 63). Mark P. Mills of the Digital Power Group found that charging a cell phone, for instance, requires a small and largely insignificant amount of electricity; using a tablet device to watch an hour of video each week, on the other hand, consumes more electricity annually than running two refrigerators (as cited by Bridle, 64). Day-long Netflix binges, late-night YouTube explorations, toilet TikTok scrollings—the attention economy is fueled not just by our incessant watching, but by outdated energy systems with serious carbon impact, as well.

These observations are only the tip of the iceberg. Check out this video on the very-material needs that fuel the internet itself, or this award-winning investigation on cobalt mining, if you’d like to go a bit further. But, no matter which case one turns to, it’s important we realize that the same process rings. Very rarely does the digital make any of these costs visible to the user; they lie hidden beneath the allure of cat videos and Twitter updates. They lie hidden beneath the gloss of the digital device itself. They lie hidden beneath the languages we use to ‘think’ them in the first place: cyberspace, the cloud, oceans, webs.

None of these frameworks allow us to conceive of the many complex entanglements between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’; these languages do not allow us to see the long chain of brutal operations that undergird our digital lives, do not allow us to make sense of the many atrocities our cyberspacial explorations enable. Part of the reason we fail to make sense of these many crises as crises—or even see them at all—is because we don’t have a linguistic and narrative framework that adequately speaks to them, one that is “checked and verified” by the very real processes required to keep the digital up and running.

But, of course, just because we don’t currently have the frameworks to see and think about the costs of the digital today doesn’t mean we can’t create them tomorrow. And that goes for all things we seek to change in our world, too—not just the digital realm.

Works Cited

Bridle, James. New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. Verso Books, 2018.

Channel 4 News. “Cobalt Mining: An Investigative Look.” YouTube, 12 Dec. 2021.

“DRC: Alarming Research Findings on Harm from Cobalt Mine Abuses.” Amnesty International, 13 May 2020.

Johnson, Kevin. “Why the Mountain That Eats Men Is on the Verge of Collapse in Bolivia.” Business Insider, 20 Oct. 2023.

McVeigh, Karen. “Is Your Phone Tainted by the Misery of the 35,000 Children in Congo’s Mines?” Bhekisisa, 29 Oct. 2018.

Merchant, Brian. “iPhones and the Human Cost of Technology.” Los Angeles Times, 23 July 2017.

Precarity Lab. Technoprecarious. Goldsmiths Press, goldsmithspress.pubpub.org/technoprecarious.

Vox. "How Does the Internet Work." YouTube, 2020.

Wilkinson, Alec. “The Worst Place on Earth.” BBC Future, 2 Apr. 2015.

 

© J. F. Lindsay, CC BY-NC-SA