Greening from the Margins: the Geopolitics of Extractive, Operational, and Post-Consumer E-waste management

Research Question

1. Who/what is wasted in the process of “greening” the internet?
2. Greening for whom and at whose expense? Who benefits? To what impacts?
3. How can we conceptualize waste in a way that takes into account its many formations and stages throughout the (nonlinear) supply chain?
4. What kinds of assumptions are implicit in claims of greening the internet? How are these assumptions operationalized in policy? How can we complicate such assumptions in order to begin greening the internet in ways that take into account a broader – often marginalized – set of actors, locations, and interests?

Media and Publications

• The Making of Critical Data Center Studies This article demonstrates how the data center has become a key site, object, and metaphor for interdisciplinary scholarship of the internet
• Competing digital capacities: between state-led digital governance and local data center tradeoffs This paper introduces contested ‘digital capacities’ in public policy, to show how the aspiration for unlimited data processing strains local resources.
• Geographies of Digital Wasting An exhibit highlighting research on the toxic waste produced by semiconductor manufacturing in Taiwan and Silicon Valley’s history of pollution from tech industries.
• A multigraph about energy and media theory Book examining the energy consumption and environmental implications of data processing, linking it to broader geopolitical and technological discussions.