Holocaust by Design

Hamlet on the Holotaph

Central to my inquiry into the materiality of the digital image is the discovery of the human fact of this materiality, one aspect of which is the ongoing global tragedy of the so-called 'Conflict Minerals' Trade.

Last year, a bill was introduced to the US Congress which has the intention of mitigating, and hopefully ending this tragedy. Though the provisions in the bill for auditing companies doing the secondary processing of conflict minerals, transforming them into the alloys and other refined materials used in the electronics industry could easily be abused, the bill itself, especially Section 2, is valuable in that it officially acknowledges the scope of the problem in some painful detail.

One of the consultants on the bill was Danish documentary filmmaker Frank Poulsen who managed to personally visit and even film in one of the mines and come back to tell about it.

His film project still needs funding and support. The problem, however, is deeper and more intractable than one film will be able to solve.

There is something endemic to our globalist economic system built on ever increasing debt which necessitates permanent economic growth. We are blackmailing ourselves into the future. And the the over-hurried, harried material result of this is not only bad design, which is obsolete with in a couple of years, but a design philosophy which does not take into account where the materials that must be mined to create the design on a globalized scale will come from, and what potential disruptions this new sourcing paradigm may cause on the local level.

What we see in North Kivu province of the Congo was partially caused by an 2004 EU declaration that solder used in electronics should no longer contain lead. Though this was ostensibly a good idea, the legislators far away in Brussels did not consider that the sudden jump in value of the suggested replacement material, cassiterite, was mostly to be found in a desperately poor and unstable part of the world, and that the gold rush there might have terrible consequences. According to US Congress figures over 6,000,000 people have died as result of the conflict minerals trade. When we look at the materiality of the digital image, we have a holocaust at our fingertips.

Or, rather, to be precise, because, here, out of respect for the murdered, we should be as precise as possible, the term holocaust is not accurate. 'holo' means 'all', 'caust' means 'burnt' which also means that the word holocaust is not entirely accurate to describe the nazi institutional genocide. And the murdered of the Congo were not burned, but were, at least, one would expect, buried, so perhaps a construction such as holotaph be fitting. We have a holotaph at our fingertips.

When it comes to mass-production on the global scale, good, conscientious design is a moral imperative. Bruce Sterling put a damper on the techno-giddy audience at his talk at a Vodaphone MoMo Mobile Monday event in November 2008. In his trademark sneer he cut to the core of the matter, design matters, but waste is good for business.

I have treated the issue of conflict minerals periodically previously on this blog.

On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the opening of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, on the site of the former Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin, let us also remember the millions whose lives and bodies have been sacrificed for the imagineered idealisms of today's globalist social networks.

Murderous Mineral Trade

I will be presenting on the deep-material relations in consumer electronics tomorrow at the University of Arts in Berlin. Did you know that the #1 industrial consumer of electronics is the game industry? Playstations, Wiis, Iphones and all sorts of contemporary comforts and enjoyments all need cassiterite, coltan, copper. The cheapest source of these minerals is, of course, Africa. Why is it so cheap? Because that is the value of human life in institutionally impoverished countries. yet they should be among the richest countries in the world.

Jaromil at transmediale a great presentation



It is officially illegal to source conflict minerals. Congo is prohibited from building new airports near Kivu province where the trade is going on. So... the airplanes land on the highway.

What to do? Be aware, make others aware. I think Jaromil made a great point when he described the problem as endemic in the product R&D cycle. If manufacturers have a problem, say they need smaller, more heat-efficient processors, they will research only far enough to solve the problem for the time being (in this case, the solution was Coltan from Congo) instead of looking at what would come next in terms of the life cycle of the technology and in terms of the possible repercussions intensive exploitation of the newly necessary resource would have on the local people/ conditions...

What does illegal mean? It means there is a lot of money to be made on the black market. In Germany, they like to say "Kein Mensch ist illegal" I think it was Beuys who said it first "No person is illegal". This is a battle cry of the immigrants rights activists in Germany. My cynical rejoinder is here "Kein Euro ist illegal!"

UPDATE: a new article in TIME today, linking to some previous one few paid any attention to. The problem remains urgent and unsolved... there is human sacrifice inside the screen we are reading this on right now.

UPDATE: 050809 An article in the New York Times today gives a dire picture of what is still going, seemingly unabated, in Kivu provinces of Congo. We can see here how any so-called political solution only seems to exacerbate the problem, and the victims are thousands and thousands of innocents who just happen to be living in the path of mineral money juggernauts.
Last year, this situation had already been going on for a decade, but the root causes are not addressed, so it continues. typical of the complicity of our 99.9% pure sold out mass media.

UPDATE: 120809 Hillary Clinton reportedly announced today a $17 000 000 (17M$) relief fund for rape victims in the Congo.

"But a real change in the political climate is needed if things are going to change for the citizens of the eastern Congo. ... electronics manufacturers must work with governments to end the trade in illicit conflict minerals, the way the trade in Blood Diamonds from Sierra Leone was squashed through coordinate international efforts. The war in Congo, brutal though it is, is not fought for no reason. A complex array of actors with various goals and allegiances are vying for influence, control, and for power. But the fuel feeding the conflict is wealth, and much of it comes from the illicit trade in Congo's natural resources. " - Charles London

Is the "fuel feeding the conflict" wealth? meaning no wealth no conflict?...hmmm... I would imagine that the fuel feeding this conflict in pedestrian greed but the atmosphere which allows the fuel to burn brightly is a general disregard for human life, where mega-profits, and, especially the luxurious lifestyle they afford, trump local and inter-human concerns. And we can see on MTV (and all mass media is becoming MTV) that this is definitely the case. Otherwise the article hits all the right points. Hopefully more people will feel implicated and get engaged.