Professional Documents
Culture Documents
David Naguib Pellow and Lisa SunHee Park
New York University Press, 2002
"Assembly line hysteria." Most of us can only conjure up
situations of boredom, fatigue and repetitive motion similar to typing
all day in a cubicle, maybe. If we’re well read in feminist
literature, we’d be aware of the historically gendered etymology of
the second part of the term. But the phrase has a specific meaning for
factory workers, especially those working in the high tech
manufacturing sector. This little figure of speech has been used by
companies and governments to dismiss claims of workrelated health
problems by, mostly female, workers for decades. A large semiconductor
producer named Signetics used it in 1978 to dismiss, literally and
figuratively, three women workers who became known as the "Signetics
Three" workers who had informed company management about strange
symptoms they had experienced that seemed to be related to chemical
fumes they were regularly exposed to on the job.
We do not ask for the influence or effect of technology on
the human individuals. For they are themselves an integral
part and factor of technology, not only as the men who
invent or attend to machinery but also as the social groups
which direct its application and utilization.
Herbert Marcuse [2]
The critique of economic rationality and technological
instrumentality is nothing new the Frankfurt School covered
that pretty well. But assertions like Marcuse’s can be seen as
indicative of a position that can afford to “not ask for the
influence or effect of technology on the human individuals.” The
Signetics Three could not. Nor can the numbers of contemporary
workers manufacturing microelectronics. This does not make such
critiques useless, of course, only partial. A more rigorous case
would have to involve those not part of the “social groups which
direct its application and utilization,” though are certainly
part of its production.
This involvement is what The Silicon Valley of Dreams, a
book by Lisa SunHee Park and David Naguib Pellow, sets out to
accomplish. The book functions on a few different levels. On one
hand, it represents a scholarly account of both the microchip
industry and its relationship with labor and issues of
environmental justice. But it is also a practical application of
what the authors call “participatory research,” through their
direct involvement with advocacy organizations like the Silicon
Valley Toxics Coalition and Santa Clara Center for Occupational
Health and Safety. Another, and important, facet of the book is
its attempts at making leaps of logic and theory to generate a
story that means more than the sum of its parts. Not unlike Mike
Davis, another polemical documentarian of California’s dystopia,
Park and Pellow weave a story that combines relatively disparate
historical narratives. Starting with the subjugation of the
Ohlone native peoples and the California landscape by the
Spanish, we’re led through the social history of the region,
including the gold rush and agricultural boom, into the present.
In this narrative, the working conditions experienced by the
current Silicon Valley workforce, 70 to 80 percent of which is
made up of Asian and Latino/a immigrants, are part of a
trajectory that was set in motion with the arrival of the Spanish
in “Alta California” during the mid 18th Century.
There is a virtual encyclopedic body of work, including
theory and art production, on the emerging uses, effects and
possibilities of the networked technologies made possible for
users by the evershrinking microchip. This makes perfect sense,
given the drastic changes that have occurred in almost every
sector of daily life because of computers. There has also been an
elevated amount of discussion regarding “embodied computing” and
physical interfaces recently. And certainly, open source,
copyleft, and other challenges to the neoliberal software order
have generated sensitivity to the modes of access for information
technologies. But, as Silicon Valley of Dreams makes clear, the
costs and benefits of connectivity are not shared equally.
Interestingly, the book steers clear, for the most part,
from the “digital divide” dilemma. The divide the authors are
interested in is not one that separates the technocracy from the
digitally marginal, but rather the one creating social and
environmental barriers that place immigrants and women in
unnecessarily toxic conditions. The digital can only be separated
from its ecological and biochemical effects if “we fail to look
behind the ‘Silicon Curtain,’” seeing only the “sheen, the sleek
outer shell – an image created for mass consumption by public
relations firms and the mainstream media.” As they document, the
costs of producing our digital lifestyles extends beyond the
monetary to include chronic and fatal illness from contaminated
working and living environments, disproportionately experienced
by women of color.
The two most regulated elements of the social world, are,
first, what can enter the body, and second, what a body may
be in proximity to and/or intermingle with.
Critical Art Ensemble [3]
Harmful working conditions are often seen as unintentional
byproducts of the pursuit of profit. This is how we can fault
deregulation of industry for labor and environmental abuses –
corporations will do what they can get away with. But, if, as
CAE remarks, the body is the most regulated sphere of social
life, then we could begin to view industry exploitation of the
body as an instance of hyperregulation rather than deregulation.
Epidemiological studies that reveal rates of occupational illness
in Silicon Valley production workers over three times that found
in other industries would be viewed as part of regulatory
procedure, rather than as a failure of it. Such an assertion may
sound absurd, but just consider the strictly controlled
production environment: the “clean room” and the “bunny suit.” As
Park and Pellow point out, both of these technologies are
designed to protect the product from the worker, who is
considered a “major source of contamination…a potentially 2
billion particle emitter,” not the worker from widelyused toxic
substances like xylene and glycol ethers. [4]
Obviously, this is not just an issue in Santa Clara County,
California. Throughout Silicon Valley of Dreams, mention of the
global economy is present, and the authors do not turn a blind
eye to the increasing manufacturing facilities being opened by
transnationals in the Global East and South. The last chapter, in
particular focuses on the paradigm that most of us relate to as
the “death of distance.” Despite the miniaturization of iPods,
laptops and cell phones, we in the North are using more resources
than ever, and much of them are still coming from subjugated
economies in the Southern Hemisphere. In contrast to the
“weightlessness” experienced while cruising the Internet on a
broadband wireless connection in an airport coffee shop, is the
materiality of the Tantalum powder found in most wireless
devices. The powder comes from a substance called Coltan, often
illegally mined in places like the Okapi Faunal Reserve in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Looking through archives of industrial stock photography,
the images used by the digital industry in creating their public
image, one sees no evidence of the industrial processes. No
immigrant workforce, no drums of unmarked petrochemicals, no
company directed medical tests that are kept from the workers and
the public. Only clean, precise, pure digital magic. It would
seem that we, as users of the technology are the ones suffering
from mass hysteria.
How else can we explain the hyperbolic rhetoric of ephemeral
instantaneousness surrounding the desire to be “connected”? What
is it we are connecting to, if not a delusion that negates the
bodies of those that make the connections possible? If we, as
artists, theorists, coders, writers and pranksters, can envision
creative methods for connecting the wired to new experiences of
pleasure, expression and knowledge, can we not envision the
connections with those bodies in clean rooms and garages as they
breath in xylene fumes?
1. from "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology," 1941
2. from "Recombinant Theater and Digital Resistance")
3. “Clean Room Clothing Performance,” Robin Howie
related resources:
http://elandar.com/toxics/stories/sv_toc.html
http://www.svtc.org
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/mythichybrid/index.html
http://www.cellularnews.com/coltan/