Analyze

As of 13 February 2023, South Africa declared a national state of electricity disaster. In this paper we consider the impacts of global tech giants on the land, environment, people, heritage, and the technological landscape in Cape Town, South Africa. Our methods consist in long-term ethnographic fieldwork (Waltorp 2010, 2019, Waltorp et al 2022) and decolonial design anthropological approaches (Kambunga 2023) as we work with a group of local assistants and critical friends (www.digisatproject.com). We start from the controversy surrounding Amazon Web Services Headquarters: In 2021, the Observatory Civic Association and the Goringhaicona Khoi Khoi Indigenous Traditional Council filed an urgent notice with the High Court of South Africa to interject the construction of the Amazon River Park development on sacred land, where confrontations between the Peninsula Khoekhoe and the first Dutch settlers took place (genesis of colonialism in South Africa), and one of the only natural floodplains in Cape Town. Respondents argued that the site has no visible heritage significance, and the interjection will hinder economic development and job creation, an urgent concern, with Cape Town home to the most data centres on the continent. Data centres provide the computing and storage power that is essential to realising the smart digital futures furthered by corporate strategists and government policymakers. Yet, the data centres that underpin these futures are themselves energy-intensive enterprises (Howe et al. 2015) placing burdens on national energy supplier Eskom and energy shortages for the neighbouring communities (Pollio and Cirolia 2022). Data are entangled with water, wind, oil and other elements. Resource prospecting and extraction of energy were driving forces of colonial expansions. The material effects this has had on contemporary human and more-than-human life as well as geopolitical formations continue: How might we think together beyond techno-solutionism and -determinism to imagine technological futures otherwise.

Waltorp, Karen and Asnath Paula Kambunga. 2023. "Land, Legacies and Energy Futures in Cape Town, South Africa." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

Astrophysics is a discipline that has a lot to do with environmental justice, even if it doesn’t look like so. Astrophysics research nowadays involves both large cutting-edge infrastructures and a great number of people and institutions, usually at international level. Most of these projects require to be placed in very specific environments, which are not very common on our planet, to function in the best conditions. The territories chosen to host large facilities for astrophysics, as remote as they can be, are not empty. In most cases, they are inhabited (or regularly frequented) by people who are not always involved in the decision process and may see the construction as an invasion of lands they have owned or occupied for centuries. In this context, we believe that what pulls people away from environmental justice advocacy, especially those who do not live in or near these territories, is the lack of information and awareness about this topic, which may cause strongly polarized opinions and harshful discussions on the topic. To try to fill this gap, as science communicators we decided to develop a game-based activity which fosters the debate about this connection. Among our inspirations is the struggle of the protectors of Mauna a Wākea, on the Big Island of Hawai‘i. The mountaintop is a sacred place for Native Hawaiians, who have been fighting to protect their ancestral land from the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). There are many other examples of large astronomical infrastructures and their impact on territories, including in our own country (Italy), some more virtuous than others, that show how the Astrophysics research world is strongly connected to environmental justice. For this activity, we chose the Creative Commons PlayDecide format, which aims to facilitate simple, respectful and fact-based group discussions. The game consists of a different set of cards containing facts about the topic, issues for different interest groups and personal stories of fictional individuals who are involved or affected by the topic. By telling the stories of different characters involved in this kind of situation, we aim to enlarge the debate, fostering the change of perspective of players. We wish that many people around the world download and use the game, either during public outreach activities with schools and the general public or as a self-awareness exercise within the astronomical community. The game does not refer to a specific facility, but we researched study cases related to astronomical observatories in sites such as Mauna a Wākea (Hawaiʻi), Kitt Peak and Mount Graham (Arizona), the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy as well as ongoing projects such as the SKA Observatory in South Africa and Australia. In particular, for the story cards, we strived to provide a balance in terms of gender and affected communities, trying as much as we could to avoid stereotypes, in the awareness that we, as the authors of the activity, are a group of white, female astronomers from a G7 country.

Toniolo, Rachele and Claudia Mignone. 2023. "Some students play the PlayDecide activity at a Science Festival in Italy." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

Individualizing and psychologizing the suicides, ignoring the publicness of the action and the structural causes, took away from its extreme emotional potency. Although it did spawn a good deal of activism and research, the profit margins of Apple continue to grow and Foxconn’s are shrinking. 

Automation is ignored - this topic was raised in the Dialectical Anthropology article that responded to something else that Ngai wrote and cited this piece.

Apple ”released its Supplier Responsibility Progress Report in February 2011 to show the remedial measures taken by Foxconn, its largest supplier, in the aftermath of the suicides. However, none of the ‘remedial measures’ addressed such core issues as speed-up, illegal levels of compulsory overtime work, dangerous conditions in the Foxconn factories, the humiliation of workers, and illegal practices associated with the use of student interns as workers.” -p1263

I think the corporations had extremely little regard for the Chinese factory workers, including the higher-ups at Foxconn and the people of Apple and the other companies that contract their manufacturing with Foxconn. It seemed like pure damage control.

Really just denying responsibility hard: Foxconn’s “public responses to workers’ suicides were uniform: the workers who attempted suicides suffered from individual psychological problems such as depression, distress over heavy debts, or family and other personal problems (Li, 2010). Foxconn hired Western and Chinese psychologists and psychiatrists to defend it in the wake of the plague of worker suicides at the company.” p1260

As more specified in news articles, like Heffernan 2013, Foxconn increased wages but increased the quotas by even more. They started making workers sign anti-suicide pledges that said they wouldn’t blame the company or sue or ask for compensation. They retracted that because of outcry but then just put up nets. “Steve Jobs gamely insisted that the factory, with swimming pools and cinemas, was far better than required. The Foxconn communications director Liu Kun, argued that with more than a million employees in China alone, the rate of "self-killing" wasn't far from China's relatively high average. Everyone pledged to do better and the story went away.”

In this economist article I can’t access, but that is cited in the Wikipedia article on this topic, they also mentioned that Buddhist monks were brought in for prayer sessions.

The activists “condemned the ineffectiveness of the Chinese government and trade unions to enforce labor law and protection of the migrant workers and hence urged Apple and other brands to support genuine reform of Foxconn’s unions.” p1261 - so they are turning to the brands for labor conditions to improve.