Grounding the Internet: The medium of Net.Art _
Net art, from physical local installations to world-wide networked computer games, has become the
forum in which many of the emancipatory hopes of the historical avante-gardes are being rephrased. Web
art is a form of art to which the great political hopes are linked. The socio-revolutionary utopias of the
historical avante-gardes and educational movements such as freedom of contract, equal opportunities and
inter-cultural emancipation are now set to be redeemed by technology… The net has not only become a
new medium for artistic practices but comparable to the revolution of plein air peinture, which led to
Impressionism and modern art, artists for the first time operate with the net in a global medium beyond
geopolitical borders.
- Peter Weibel, “The Project”
Although the initial euphoric social and political emancipation associated with Internet art, or net.art, has
been significantly subdued in the last few years, Peter Weibel’s celebratory statement remains relevant to
a discussion of the Internet as a new technological medium for making art. From the introduction to
Net_Condition: Art and Global Media, Weibel aims at providing insight into the “initial conditions” of
net.art, some of the most influential of which is highlighted in the catalog’s corresponding “exhibition in
the media space project” that “took place over a period of approximately two years (October 1998 –
February 2000) in a number of cities (Barcelona, Graz, Karlsruhe, Tokyo), in various media, and in
collaboration with several partners” (Weibel, 8). “[From] physical installations to world-wide networked
computer games,” Weibel’s “media space project” indicates two distinct notions of space. The first
highlights the material space occupied by a specific computer in a specific location, the second exists
within a “networked” virtual space to be potentially accessed via any computer across the globe, from
Barcelona to Tokyo. The codependent relationship between these two spaces is often overlooked in
discussions and aesthetic representations of the social and political potentials of working on the web in
significant ways. With an emphasis on the significance of a globally accessible virtual space, much of
net.art references or problematizes the nature of using the Internet, overlooking the global social
implications of using the computer. In the space of this paper, I would like to ground the virtual space of
the Internet in the material through which we experience it, unpacking contradictory notions of the
potential global “emancipation” in using the Internet as a medium for making art and the adverse effects
of globalization linked to the production of computers. Using contemporary social theorists’ approaches
to technology, I would like to trace some of the tensions between material space and virtual “non-space,”
relating them to the global potentials of the Internet which (at this time) inevitably correspond to the
current material exploitation occurring through globalization.
In the early days of net art there were many artists echoing Weibel’s revolutionary tones for the new
medium of the Internet. Tilman Baumgartel interviewed several pioneers of the net art community
between 1996 and 1998, publishing statements such as Walter van der Cruijsen’s “enthusiasm” that he
“finally found a medium where [he] could give all these immaterial ideas a place” or Padeluun (Bionic)
feeling that “something” was “going to happen in this field…it [would] change our society, maybe even
better it” and artist Mark Napier talks of giving up painting permanently once he begins to make art on
the Internet (1999: 231-2). Yet Baumgartel writes in net_condition that “[the] euphoria of this early era
which may appear naïve today” dramatically changes by the end of the 1990’s. Mark Napier creates The
Digital Landfill in 1998, a site where his visitors can play at virtually “dumping” old information to be
stored indefinitely as a part of his work. Once information is submitted to Napier’s site, it becomes
fragmented or altogether unreadable. Again to quote Baumgartel, “Napier’s Website is not a celebration
of the possibility of publishing data directly in the net through a circumvention of mass media, but rather
– as the title already says – a dump, in which the long indigestible data are only disposed of, ‘stored.’”
(152). Napier’s Landfill reflects a number of issues plaguing life on the Internet by the end of the 1990’s.
The dot-com boom and the invasion of venture capitalists, corporate and institutional interest and
investment in the Web both as a site of commerce and as a medium for art, the proliferation of
pornography, and increased government control, surveillance and censorship are a few of the salient
realities connected to working in the digital medium, all pointing to a similar concept, the discovery of the
Internet as a major source for entertainment, communication and consumption and as a site for economic
and political investment. Napier’s piece implies corresponding feelings of excess and chaos, a glut of
virtual electronic waste for which the viewer of and participant in his work is implicated as partially
responsible as he or she plays at dumping useless virtual material. In discussing Napier’s work in relation
to its medium, I would like to discursively extend Digital Landfill away from commentary on the virtual
information overload resulting from the euphoric pioneering of digital space to a more material
assessment that notes some of the global social and economic changes as a result of the computers
produced to maintain the world-wide proliferation of Internet access. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s articulation
of the artist as “cultural producer” who can use his or her symbolic power to challenge the economic
hegemony in order to “put forward a critical definition of the social world, to mobilize potential strength
of the dominated classes and subvert the order prevailing in the field of power” (1993: 44), Napier’s work
can symbolically steer us beyond the “autonomous sector” (39) of net.art to look for what a non-virtual
“definition of the social world” might be, who constitutes the “dominated classes” and how the artist and
his or her viewer relate to the system being critiqued. In Frederic Jameson’s re-affirmation of the
pertinence of a “Marxian approach to ideology” he asserts: “abstract opinion is but a symptom or an index
of some vaster pensée sauvage about history itself, whether personal or collective” (1984: 240). One place
to begin unpacking the social symbolisms of a “digital landfill” is within the tension between the
virtuality implied in “digital” and the physicality implied in “landfill,” which simultaneously articulates
both abstract and material definitions of space. As David Harvey asserts, the “[symbolic] orderings of
space and time provide a framework for experience through which we learn who or what we are in
society” (1990: 214). Rather than privileging space over time as significant to the postmodern experience
as a result of late capitalism, as does Jameson through cartographic advancement (1991: 38), Harvey sees
the lineage of Western social theory placing precedence of time over space. This organization of time and
space results in the logic of “progress,” the “theoretical object” of social theory and the goal of capitalism.
The definition of progress “entails the conquest of space, the tearing down of all spatial barriers, and the
ultimate ‘annihilation of space through time’” (1990: 205). The new medium of the Internet can be seen
then as the perfect example of the goals of “progress” where a “digital landfill” can be created over time
in cyberspace, accessed instantaneously from anywhere and filled with information also existing as a
result of the time in which it was made, eventually symbolizing virtual trash that may have never existed
in the material world. All real notions of materiality have been erased. In addition, we are only simulating
the act of trashing as placing our virtual waste in Napier’s site does not in fact erase it from our
computer’s hard drive. “Progress” as dictated through the technology utilized in the computer allows for
the “no-space” of the virtual experience, the medium cherished by Weibel for its breakdown of
“geopolitical borders,” providing rapid communication and access to information. Yet Digital Landfill
simultaneously points to a circular process leading to redundancy and waste where we reap little reward
from progress’s collapsed spatiality. By discursively tracing the results of capitalist progress through
virtual space into the material space (from compressed space through time to an assessment of space in
our time) where the computer exists, we can see parallel physical consequences in geographic spaces
outside of the virtual world. Harvey later writes: “[but] the collapsing of spatial barriers does not mean
that the significance of space is decreasing. Not for the first time in capitalism’s history, we find the
evidence pointing to the converse thesis” (293). Harvey sees the collapsing of space through time as both
the result of capitalism’s progression and essential to its continued expansion through geographical space:
“diminishing spatial barriers give capitalists the power to exploit minute spatial differentiations to good
effect…As spatial barriers diminish so we become much more sensitized to what the world’s spaces
contain” (294). Global awareness resulting from technological advancements can then lead to the
exploitation of global spaces. Napier’s symbolic landfill and Harvey’s “[diminished] spatial barriers” are
significant in a move from contemporary art and theory to social and economic praxis. In Exporting
Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia, a paper prepared by BAN (The Basel Action Network) and
SVTC (Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition) we learn that “[electronic] waste or E-waste is the most rapidly
growing waste problem in the world” (1). Computers produced in the cycle of progress in which raw
material manipulated over time to create virtual space, or “no-space,” still remain material objects that
continue to occupy and affect physical space dramatically. The “minute spatial differentiations” created in
capitalist logic go beyond simply the tension between virtual non-space and the material space occupied
by computers: “the United States and other rich economies that use most of the world’s electronic
products and generate most of the E-waste, have made use of a convenient, and until now, hidden escape
valve – exporting the E-waste crisis to the developing countries in Asia” (1). Obsolete computers are
being “recycled” out of the space of the market economies of the OECD (Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development), with the United States at the forefront, into the “economically lessdeveloped countries” of India, Pakistan, the Philippines and China (Dodging Dilemma’s? ;
Schoenberger). The Guangdong province in China has received the most recent attention from grassroots
organizations as “recycling” programs in this region involve the physical and labor intensive dismantling
of computer hard-drives (entailing the de-soldering of circuit boards to remove the computer’s chip,
which is then either resold or dropped in an acid chemical bath to recover small amounts of gold), the
burning of un-recycleable wires, the “shredding” and melting of plastics from printers, keyboards and
other “peripherals,” while monitors are taken apart for their cathode ray tubes, which are then mined for
their copper yolk. Women, men and children all partake in this “recycling” process with little to no
protective clothing or respiratory equipment and are exposed to high doses of toxins such as silicosis,
cadmium, tin and lead (which are inhaled in the de-soldering process), mercury, chlorine and sulpher
dioxide gases, hydrocarbon, and brominated and chlorinated dioxins and furans, the latter two considered
to be “two of the most deadly organic pollutants” (Exporting Harm, 26). In addition to recycle-workers’
occupational hazards, the “minute spatial variations” leading to the logic of land-filling non-recyclable
waste in the less-developed areas leaves undrinkable groundwater, air pollution, and toxic soil where
individuals must then live and grow food.
Despite China’s ban on e-waste, United States recycling companies pay to export unwanted hazardous
materials through waste brokers rather than spend more money on costly domestic recycling requirements
or because domestic landfills have banned computer disposal due to the high levels of toxicity. These
brokers then ship the goods (estimated anywhere between 50-80% of the total number of “recycled”
machines, or about 10.2 million units in 2002 (Exporting Harm: 14)) via containers to China, where they
make an additional profit selling them to Chinese recycling companies who then employ local workers for
as little as 30 cents an hour (48; Schoenberger). Again, this process can be seen in relation to Harvey’s
theories on capital: “[regional] boundaries,” although symbolically reinforced in China’s ban on U.S.
importing of E-waste, “are invariably fuzzy and subject to perpetual modification because relative
distances alter with improvement in transportation and communication,” as seen in the containerization of
waste and the easily facilitated border-crossing by brokers utilizing rapid communication between U.S.
and Chinese companies. “But regional economies are never closed. The temptation for capitalists to
engage in interregional trade, to lever profits out of unequal exchange and to place surplus capitals
wherever the rate of profit is highest is in the long run irresistible” (1999: 417).
Despite oppositional movements against the OECD nations’ exportation of E-waste such as the Basel
Convention on Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Waste for Final Disposal, established in 1989,
the United States’ refusal to sign seems a clear indication that exportation will continue as a means to
dispose of unwanted waste (Zehle: 2000). By tracing e-waste we can see that the distopic excess within
the virtual world implied in Napier’s Digital Landfill equally extends to the material world of the
computer. Computers are indeed not a “clean” industry in which only virtual information becomes
exponentially proliferated, but in fact have highly toxic and devastating material repercussions that are
part and parcel of an international capitalist logic, resulting in practices that environmentalists and labor
activists have referred to as Silicon Valley’s “dirty little secret.” In their writings on technology, Harvey,
Jameson and Paul Smith all assert the inter-relationship between technology and the globalization of
capitalism. As in my brief analysis above, the “annihilation of space through time” resulting from and
through technological progress is the tool and the means to understand the process of the globalization of
capital, yet they are also clear that new technology can in no way be seen as an isolated means preceding
capitalist expansion; technology is in fact deeply integrated into the logic of capitalism. Jameson writes: I
want to avoid the implication that technology is in any way the ‘ultimately determining instance’ either of
our present-day social life or of our cultural production: such a thesis is of course ultimately at one with
the post-Marxist notion of a ‘post-industrialist’ society. Rather, I want to suggest that our faulty
representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted
figuration of something even deeper, namely the whole world system of present-day multinational
capitalism. (1991: 27)
Smith warns us that “the claim that the radical expansion of technological means is in part responsible for
globalization is both brazenly ahistorical and profoundly indialectical…Technology is, in short, not in
itself a cause of anything” (1997: 23, emphasis in original). Technology and its products prove
themselves deeply rooted and in fact created through the logic of capitalism; Napier’s symbolic
commentary on the present state of the Internet becomes part of a discursive argument on the nature and
“whole history” of capital (23). “Capital is not a physical product but a social relation” (Harvey, 1999:
411), a relation whose inherent contradictions lead to constant times of crisis, which can only be remedied
through a cyclical process of geographical expansion and technological innovation (411-17).
Thinking through Napier as a “cultural producer” his abstract critique of the virtual “social world” can be
extended from problems specific to global communication between those with access to the Web into a
critique of the social results of globalization and multinational capitalism that produces the Web and the
resulting proliferation of real computer trash. As in my discussion of E-waste, the effects of globalization
and multinational capitalism and their relationship to technology indeed create a distopic view. One does
not even need to begin abroad to see how problematic Weibel’s global “emancipation” for artists really is
or to understand the irony of “freedom of contract, equal opportunities and inter-cultural emancipation…
redeemed by technology.” Computers are not only highly destructive to people and their environments in
their disposal, but also in their production. Andrew Ross’s research on the development of cyberspace
uncovers the exploitation of laborers within the high-tech industry pervading multiple levels of
production, from engineers and programmers to those who assemble the computer’s myriad components.
As “we go further down the chain of high tech production, we find ourselves in the semiconductor
workplaces, where the operating machinery of computers is manufactured in the least unionized of all
goods-producing industries…only 2.7 percent of workers in electronics and computer equipment belong
to unions” (1999: 51). In addition to the complex issues surrounding organizing laborers, the ultimate
efficacy of union contracts may prove futile against the functioning of high-tech industries employing a
constant stream of immigrant workers of color (Zehle, 2000). Aside from low wages and job instability
heightened by more and more companies subcontracting computer semiconductor construction to “fabs”
(semiconductor manufacturing plants) abroad, domestic workers are also exposed to a multitude of toxic
metals such as the lead, and gases like arsine and phosphine (Dodging Dilemmas?, 16; Ross, 1999). In
fact, one source claims that 99,000 chemicals are used in the production of computers, only two percent
of which have been tested on animals and one percent on humans (Sancho, 2000). Workers in both
domestic and international fabs have had high incidences of brain cancer, miscarriage and children born
with birth defects (Dodging Dilemmas?, 16). Weibel’s declaration of “equal opportunities and intercultural emancipation” as a result of new technology is even more troubling when most workers in the
lowest paid sectors of high tech production in Silicon Valley are predominantly Mexican, Vietnamese,
Filipino, Korean, Ethiopian and South Asian (Dodging Dilemmas?; Zehle, 2000).
As Lisa Lowe cogently argues, enfranchisement for immigrants is often withheld since profit for
international capital does not derive from “equal opportunity” but rather from very specifically gendered
and “racialized labor within regional and national sites” and that “[the] global racialized feminization of
women’s labor is a new social formation characterized by the exploitation of women both in export
oriented production zones in Asia and Latin America and near the center of the market in the Silicon
Valley, California, electronics industry” as well as in other domestic locations and industries (160,
emphasis in original). Lowe also argues that gendered and ratialized exploitation is not only extracted in
economic terms but in additional specific “bodily exploitation” characterized elsewhere as the “nimble
fingers” (Mies, 117) of Asian and Mexican female laborers and extolled in the isolated bodily harm
caused by the above-mentioned toxic substances that are inevitably inhaled, inadvertently ingested, or
potentially absorbed into the body through direct physical contact due to little or no protective gear.
“Clean rooms” built for semiconductor assembly are designed to protect semiconductors, not employees
(Dodging Dilemmas?, 16).
The majority of high-tech companies (with the exception of a few such as Intel, which has moved its
production plant to New Mexico where environmental laws are less restrictive) subcontract the
manufacturing of computer semiconductors and other components to third-parties opening “fabs” at
astonishing rates in South Asia and increasingly in China, where there are fewer environmental
restrictions and labor conditions are difficult if not impossible to track due to rapidly changing
technology, short product cycles and non-existent or uninforced labor laws. Lowe’s notion of global labor
is in stark contrast to hopes of “emancipatory” labor by artists working in Weibel’s global space on the
Internet allowing for “equal opportunity.” Informed by her involvement with female maquiladora workers
in the high-tech industry in Mexico, Coco Fusco additionally counters “equal opportunity” through
technology as these women have “virtually no access to the internet” despite their role as “a crucial
component of the global information circuit” (2001, 195). This is not to say that Weibel’s statement does
not have situated aspects of truth. Indeed, grassroots organizations focused on E-waste and labor
exploitation within the computer industry publish their findings on their own Websites and disseminate
information about global injustices via email and online news sources hoping to reach wider audiences
who may potentially mobilize to aid their cause.
The Citizen’s Guide to Clean Production advocates using the Internet as “the strength of the local is
magnified by international networking and support” (8) and Zehle commends IHEAL (Interactive Health
Ecology Access Links), an online database providing pollution information to NGO’s, as “an amazing
example of the complex mutual articulation of locality and globality.” (2000). Yet The Citizen’s Guide
also point out that “American activists have been less well informed about international treaty
negotiations and the negotiating policies of the U.S. government” (8). Americans, the largest exporters of
“useless” computers, rendering them obsolete in four to five years due to the constant proliferation of new
software and hardware with faster processors and more memory, are still least informed, indicating that
access does not necessarily equate awareness. “I remember,” writes Donna Haraway, …that the
intensified misery of billions of men and women seems organically rooted in the freedoms of
transnational capitalism and technoscience. But I also remember the dreams and achievements of
contingent freedoms, situated knowledges, and relief of suffering that are inextricable from this
contaminated triple heritage [of the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment] (1997: 2)
Yet situated knowledge does not in itself compensate for the polarization of liberation and exploitation
nor does it ensure a temporary situation leading to the eventual greater good of those on the bottom tier.
In Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, Maria
Mies extends the hierarchization of labor beyond the effects of capitalism, pointing out that previous
cultural histories of patriarchal domination preclude the exploitations of female labor from simply being
the result of capital’s functions. In addition to the exploitation caused by transnational colonization in
countries outside of the major market economies, she notes that women are also targeted within these
economies as potential consumers of the products made through exploited female labor abroad (125). She
contests Engels’ logic that ‘what is good for the ruling class should be good for the whole of the society
with which the ruling class identifies itself” (Engels, 1976:333) as the ruling class’s privileges are based
on some form of exploitation. To give all exploited individuals the same “rights” would dictate the
exploitation of someone or something else, be it woman, nature or colony. Hence, a feminist strategy for
liberation cannot but aim at the total abolition of all these relationships of retrogressive progress. This
means it must aim at an end of all exploitation of women by men, of nature by man, of colonies by
colonizers, of one class by the other. As long as exploitation of one of these remains the precondition for
the advance (development, evolution, progress, humanization, etc.) of one section of people, feminists
cannot speak of liberation or ‘socialism’” (77, emphasis in original).
Along with her belief in absolute liberation, Mies acknowledges the need for transitions into change but
warns specifically against looking towards technology to bring these changes about (as would Harvey,
Jameson and Smith): “None of these so-called technological revolutions will be able to solve any of the
big social problems based on exploitation. They will rather contribute to the further destruction of nature
and the human essence” (211). Although Haraway would argue against Mies’s notion of “human
essence,” which I also find troubling in its vagueness and definitional impossibility, her warnings against
liberation through technology remain salient. Instead of the constant search for machine-aided labor as in
capitalism and socialism, she calls for a slowing down of consumption and looking at labor as the
“production of life itself” rather than as a means for any type of accumulation. Again, what problematizes
her foundation is that the definition of “life itself” remains contestable. What constitutes “life itself” and
how would this definition extend to heterogeneous cultures around the globe or even between individuals
remains unclear. Yet there is an undeniable salience within Mies’ suggestion that instead of rushing to
beat the system with its own tools, change may result from stepping out of it.
The first place to begin this change would be to address our roles in the processes of consumption.
Criticism of the net art community’s celebratory embrace of new technology has also come from within
the art community. Artist Richard Wright, skeptical of the Internet art craze as the new coming of the
avante-garde, writes that opposing hegemony through its own media ironically requires its most recent
inventions. Artists need only wait for the next wave of media to appear and then to seize that window of
critical intervention to undermine capitalist social relations before corporations know what’s hit them.
The only article of faith that this requires is that technological progress march inexorably onward,
generating the raw material that can be used to subvert its own previously recuperated incarnations.
Political innovation requires technical innovation. (1999: 257)
Yet as we have seen the “progress” associated with technology is intimately related to the reproduction of
the logic of capital, which is fraught with adverse social effects within both virtual and material spaces.
Artists then find themselves chasing a strange notion of the avante-garde, one whose concept of “sociorevolution” is indeed doubly challenged as “they leave a trail of unresolved experiments and restagings,
unable to develop an idea through before the next software upgrade is announced” (258). And who within
the audience can also maintain the equipment or software needed to view work exploiting the latest
media? Older computers are often not able to accommodate new software or the advanced programming
utilized in much of the more recent products of net.art. Artists then find themselves producing for other
producers, which may in some cases be the desired result, as they continue chasing the new. The debate
over the political efficacy of new technology however is not new to the Internet. Cinema, television and
video have all been addressed as both new media for the avante-gardes hopes to carve out spaces for
social awareness and as totalizing means for domination through either fascism or capitalism.
The question remains then, why is it that despite social and historical analysis of mass media and new
technologies, work within the context of the Internet continues to be predominantly detached from its
global social implications? As Fusco writes, she initially “could not understand why so many of [her]
colleagues had adopted an unrepentantly euphoric view of digital media, or why they were acting as if
there was something new about forging alliances between art and technology” in their neo-Futurist
approach to making art on the Internet. Fusco acknowledges that an escape into the virtual realm of the
Internet offers “a perfect antidote for an embattled non-profit sector of the artworld” where a new
computer and mass-mediated culture was quick to accept and fund Web art (2001, 187) but that resulting
conceptualizations of the Internet as “anti-authoritarian, decentralized, ‘rhizomatic,’ open-ended, flowing,
as if it followed some form of nature” ignored “the centralized economic formations that sustain it.”
Concurrently, the abstract space on the screen removes its participant from the physical space of the
computer and its production (191). Yet Fusco’s surprise can itself be countered within the context of what
Jean Baudrillard sees as the “the logical evolution of a science” where the objective is to “distance itself
even further from its object until it dispenses with it entirely: its autonomy ever more fantastical in
reaching its pure form” (1984, 257). Again, what seems to be hindering the awareness Fusco and
grassroots organizers are looking for is the capitalist progress infused in Western technological teleology.
Mirroring the relationship between technology, globalization and spatial hierarchy sketched above
Baudrillard continues the circular logic that “[it] is science which ostensibly masters the object, but it is
the latter that deeply invests the former.” (158). What results is the death of the object, rendering all
understanding to that of the simulation. Abstract and virtual space simulates real space. Although the deobjectified spatiality derives itself from physical space, physical space has been simultaneously erased.
Ross sees four reasons for continued inattention: the lack of a previous history within the high-tech
industry of organized labor; the “ideology of the clean machine,” or what coincides with Baudrillard’s despatialized space where in Ross’s words, “it is as if computers fall from the skies, and they work in ways
that are entirely beyond our understanding”; the importance of high-tech production to national
economies who see no reason to notice the problematic nature of an economy driven by new technology
and as we have seen refuse legislation that would facilitate corporate responsibility; and finally the very
rhetoric addressed in this paper, the euphoric leap by artists and industries into utopian cyberspace. Ross
sees potential for change in applying the same strategies to countering exploitation in the computer
industry as was used against the garment industry’s sweatshop practices. Brand-shaming companies who
refuse to disclose production information, such as manufacturing and assembly locations of their own or
those utilized by subcontractors, could significantly affect consumers’ product choices. (1999).
This is the approach taken up by grassroots organizations such as SCCOSH and SVTC. A recent article
by SCCOSH for example pointed a finger at the major firms using Romic Environmental Technologies,
which has been dumping the toxic by-products from Intel, Hewlett Packard, Linear Tech, National
Semiconductor, Seagate, NEC Electronics and Boeing in East Palo Alto. They simultaneously
acknowledge IBM, Apple, Cypress, Texas Instruments, and Unisys as companies not utilizing Romic
(SCCOSH, 2002). If used on a broader scale that not only reached the consumer consciousness of the
masses but addressed the myriad of issues in addition to toxic dumping, this type of consumer legislation
might prove hopeful. SCCOSH deems high-tech labor issues as the most affective place to rally for social
justice as they inherently address both environmental toxins and labor concerns simultaneously (Sancho,
2002). High tech brand shaming is still relatively non-existent in a mass-mediated sense or even in the
context of net.art and other communities of “netizens.”
While “cyborg citizenships” are being drafted, a very problematic foundation for this citizenship is
completely ignored. Recent online works and writings by Ricardo Dominguez and Fusco have addressed
the invisibility of the industry’s workplace. In an online piece entitled Dolores 10 to 10, Fusco re-enacts
the forced confinement of a Mexican maquiladora worker who told her story to Fusco in 1998. In an
online streaming video Webcast, Fusco undergoes 12 hours in a cell with no food, water or toilet, while
Dominguez occasionally enters the room as “Jorge” the maquiladora manager who in trying to get
“Dolores” to sign a letter of resignation from the maquiladora engages in “intimidation tactics ranging
from coercive to violent,” including denying her access to a bathroom and “a simulated rape” scene
(Dominguez and Fusco, 2002; Salgado, 2002).
In reframing the idea of “access” on the Internet, Dominguez and Fusco attempt, in Fusco’s words to
“[undermine]” the “telematic fantasy of net.culture; that is, the assumption that the very fact of
communicating across vast distances represents a radical gesture in and of itself.” (2002, n.p.) Yet the
effectiveness of Fusco’s and Dominguez’s performance is unclear as comments in the online chat room
during the performance seemed more concerned with potential escalations of violence or “’flip’
interventions” than in mentally integrating the simulation of a maquiladora worker’s plight into the
physical spaces where such a situation would occur. There is clearly much work to be done towards social
awareness of the labor intensity and environmental toxicity of the high-tech industry.
Chela Sandoval sees hopes in an “oppositional cyborg politics” utilizing Haraway’s belief in a cyborg
feminism deriving itself from a “doubled vision of a ‘cyborg world.’” The end results are “either the
culmination of Euro-American ‘white’ society in its drive-for-mastery, on the one hand or, on the other,
as the emergence of resistant ‘indigenous’ world views of mestizaje, US Third World feminism, or
cyborg feminism” (Sandoval, 379). Ross’s brand shaming, a tactic that could be realized via the Internet
through e-mail and grassroots Websites, Fusco’s and Dominguez’s online projects representing those who
do not themselves have access, and theorizing the Internet away from idealized cyberspace are all places
to begin utilizing Haraway’s “situated knowledges” to create what Sandoval terms “differential
consciousness,” each participant engaging in her or his own knowledge to bring about change.
The slope seems long and slick however. Engaging in a medium is also the means for its own
proliferation. As in Dolores, it is unclear how to depart from the spectacle of simulation towards an
incitement of awareness. As in The Digital Landfill we are all implicated in trashing our spaces. But, as
Ross sees it, public concern directed towards identifiable centralized sources (i.e. company names) is not
only possible but affective. Instead of surfing through cyberspace at the speed of our modems, perhaps we
should pay closer attention to the names beneath our screens.
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White, Michele. “The Aesthetics of Failure: net art gone wrong.” Angelaki journal of the theoretical
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See Timothy Druckery’s essay “[..] J8~g#(\;Net.Art{-^s1[…” in net_condition. art and global media
(Cambridge: MIT, 2001), for a brief history of net.art, including it accidental title.
For an extended discussion of net art’s aesthetic tendency toward Internet reflexivity, see “The Aesthetics
of Failure: net art gone wrong,” Michele White, Angelaki: Journal of the theoretical humanities, volume
7, number 1, April 2002.
See Matthew Fuller’s “Ten Reasons Why the Art World Loves Digital Art” in Read Me! ASCII Culture
& The Revenge of Knowledge Filtered by Nettime, pp. 253-5, 1999.
For discussions on government intervention on the Internet see T. Schilling’s “Raiding the net: Is there a
need for information highway patrol?” (Netnomics, 1999, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 37-52) and in Chris Hables
Gray’s Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age (New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 55-65)
According to Soenke Zoehle, “only 6% (compared to new computers sold) were recycled in 1998,” so in
fact the number of “obsolete” computers is even far greater than what gets sent abroad. With computer
viability currently at 4-5 years, the proliferation of future e-waste appears astronomical. Zehle notes that
expectancy is at “315 million used computers by the end of 2004.” See “Ecopolitics at the Site of
(Virtual) Production: Environmental Justice Organization in Silicon Valley,” in Hybrid Spaces: Theory,
Culture, Economy (New York: Transaction, 2000.)
See “Cheap products’ human cost,” Mercury News, _ HYPERLINK
"http://www.bayarea.com/mld/siliconvalley/" __http://www.bayarea.com/mld/siliconvalley/_; and
“Virtual Water: On the Hydropolitics of IT Development,” Soenke Zehle, 2001.
Examples of these would be the fore-mentioned svtc.org, ban.org, as well as toxiclinks.org, which
focuses predominantly on high-tech issues in India.
See Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the role of the autonomous sector within the field of cultural
production. The autonomous sector produces for its own members so as to invert the established orders of
artistic production within business, historical power or cultural institutions. The Field of Cultural
Production (New York: Columbia University, 1993).
See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations (New
York: Schocken, 1968); Jean Baudriallard, “The Precession of Simulacra” and Jonathan Crary, “Eclipse
of the Spectacle” in Art after Modernism (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984). _PAGE
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