The Greening of the Computer Industry :: Computers Technology Cyberspace

The Greening of the Computer Industry Through the 1990s, I, like many young women interested in technologies and new media theory, read a lot of cyberfeminist manifestas. I digested their optimistic visions describing a world in which computer technology served as the bridge across the gender divide: the ride into cyberspace would be the ticket out of our gender-defined boxes. Our feminist foremothers certainly made the boxes roomier for us, but those old patriarchal forces still too often held the keys to them. Computers, and particularly the internet, were going to blast the tops off. I could see the dream being usurped as those same old power structures began to crowd cyberspace in the same ways that they dominate physical space. As long as the internet remained a free frontier, however, I figured that at least it provided more options for women. Therefore, no matter how many angry girlfriends I saw fighting with their boys over their addictions to reductive images of women trapped compliantly behind glass, no matter how many on-line corporate ads I saw trying to socialize us into neat and tidy target market groups with one set of superficial male-defined desires and needs†¦I still believed that computers had potential, overall, to serve as a further liberating force for women. My eyes were opened to a wider reality, however, at the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art. Over the summer of 2003, the Whitney hosted a show called American Effect. In this exhibition, artists from around the world expressed their opinions about the United States. I was particularly unsettled by the work of Chinese artist Danwen Xing. To this show she contributed a series of large photographs documenting electronic waste exported from the United States to Southern China. The towns were, in fact, nothing but landfills of e-waste. I was appalled at what I saw: the result of 225 tons of e-waste being exported from the U.S. each week. As a digital artist who is concerned about the environment, I started looking into the issue more deeply. I found that both the production of silicon chips for computers AND the casual and irresponsible e-waste disposal methods of America are serious international public health issues. These hazards primarily affect women and children because they comprise the majority of chip producers and waste pickers. The problem is growing rapidly in the Third World because of the "liberalization" of international trade treaties that benefit transnational capitalism.