clean rooms

March 10, 2011 at 9:09 am · Filed under Base 6: Information Management

A quick follow-up to last night’s discussion:

Elizabeth Grossman in High Tech Trash (2006) on clean rooms, the hub of sub of semiconductor fabrication

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(99) Getting Wasted 2.0

March 9, 2011 at 8:57 pm · Filed under Base 6: Information Management

RE: contemporary LSD – my guess would be that conscious expanding, extension, nowadays might be those who invest (divest?) their lives, time, energy, feelings, etc into an avatar inhabiting a virtual world(s).  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9t89fZ0RqEw

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March 9, 2011 at 8:32 pm · Filed under Base 6: Information Management

When thinking about information security, the first thing that comes to mind is Wikileaks. Many articles, namely Cukier’s piece “Data, Data Everywhere”, brought up the problem of security that comes along with storing information in cyberspace and the hardware that we use to organize this information. In April of 2010, WikiLeaks released a video of a US helicopter in Baghdad firing down and killing 12 people, which led to the US army intelligent Bradley Manning, who allegedly provided the footage to Wikileaks. Apparently, the blame directed towards a  flashdrive that got into the wrong hands. How easily storage devices with important information on them can be forgotten or lost or stolen. Also brought up the idea of how we think of trash as gone forever, out of our sight, after we dispose of it. In fact, we don’t think of it at all. But what we hardly ever think about is the high possibility of people in Guiyu or other places where our old computers and cell phones are shipped to who go through our devices and have access to our personal information such as old text messages, photos, etc. It brought me back to the film Wasteland where garbage pickers go through our waste and can see what kind of person we are by analyzing the items we throw out.

Vicky

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electronics recycling

March 9, 2011 at 4:27 pm · Filed under Base 6: Information Management

You do have to wonder whether some of the companies claiming to be “green” are really that green?  (But I guess ‘greenwashing is really an other topic)  Elizabeth Royte writes in Garbage Land that while following her trash streams and despite wanting to do the right thing and making the extra effort to properly recycle,  she couldn’t be sure that some items still didn’t just end up in landfill or that toxic e-waste wasn’t bundled and sold overseas to countries with lax environmental regulations and a population desperate for jobs.

I came across this place on Sunday for electronic recycling—Mr. Rubbish – on 9^th St and Smith in Brooklyn.

While it sounds good  —Per Scholas is a not-for-profit helping technologically underserved neighborhoods like the South Bronx — there is nothing on either Mr. Rubbish or the Per Scholas website saying where/how the electronics are recycled beyond saying that it is done in an ‘environmentally compliant manner’. That doesn’t mean they are not sold and shipped overseas, unlike the 4^th Bin that Cindy posted about, which clearly states exactly how and where any toxic materials are recycled.

“With the exception of rechargeable batteries, it is legal for nyc residents to discard electronics in the trash until the year 2015. Recycling electronics, such as cell phones, televisions, and computers (along with rechargeable batteries found in many of these items), keeps potentially harmful materials out of the waste stream and the environment.”  That’s going to be an awful lot of e-waste over the next few years.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/html/stuff/harmful_hh_prod_electronics.shtml

So I was thinking last weekend as I was taking all sorts of recycling away by bike (compost and textiles to the green markets, paint to the DSNY drop-off) and wondering how I could carry all the electronics in the basket to a drop-off)  that it would be great if someone came by with a cart  (or something non-polluting?) in the neighborhoods, with the ‘bring out yer metal, bring out yer tvs” approach of rag and scrap collectors of the past. Maybe more people would actually recycle their electronics and appliances if it were easier (without a car, many of the recycling places are hard to get to) and it didn’t cost anything?

jenny

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Excess – Control

March 9, 2011 at 2:35 pm · Filed under Base 6: Information Management

By Vicky

Many of these readings made me think about the problem of control, excess, and privacy. When we have too much of something, how do we control it? Garbage needs to be efficiently handled because we will always be producing waste. “The sheer mass of waste would not allow it to be glossed over” (Bauman).  With digital waste, how do we control and get a handle of all the information we consume? We are constantly trying to master and control all the info we are fed, and even encouraged to continue creating excess of information, contrary to our negative view of excess as something we need to cut down on (plastic water bottles, food waste). Digital waste results in deadlinks, chemical residue from obsolete technologies, an endless overload of information. When you die, your social media will still live on for people to see. Like garbage pickers, data scientists have to “extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data”. Once we throw out information into cyberspace, we no longer own it and we lose control of our own personal data.The Economist article Data Deluge made me think about business intelligence used by sites like Facebook and Gmail. Our “likes” or “dislikes” can be sold to advertisers so they can tailor ads you see, when you private email your friend that you want to go on vacation and the next time you log into your Gmail an ad for Expedia or lastminutevacations.com pops up. These are daily examples of how we lose control of our personal data once its out there in cyberspace, to be sold like property. Tim Jordan’s piece Cyberpower made me think about the illusion of freedom and limited capabilities technology allows us. Only a select group of people in society, the programmers, have control of the format in which we can participate electronically. “Our individual powers in cyberspace are defined by the technology we are using and the capabilities this technology has to offer”. Twitter allows you a 140 character limit. “add post here” within these confines dictated by the programmer, even WordPress, the platform we use to host our ideas has limitations of restricting certain media formats, etc. We are allowed to freely create or express ourselves but are ultimately restrained by the collective bodies in cyberspace.

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(99) Media in the dump

March 9, 2011 at 11:46 am · Filed under Base 6: Information Management

A better garbgologist than I could make a convincing case that the desire for an immaterial web is produced both by the loss of metaphysical comfort AND the inability to accept a historical materialism. Perhaps trash is the anti-heroic, the under-mensch, hanging by a rope between God and Beast

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(99) Information Overload then and Now

March 8, 2011 at 8:18 pm · Filed under Base 6: Information Management

Up until my mother’s days in college (1959) i was still common to have a commonplace book within whch one collected quotes and other bits. Indeed my recently departed pal who was older than my mother printed one through Proteus Gownaus Press Proteotypes. It used to be said that John Milton was the last person who could honestly imgine that he had read the relevent literature of his day. Perhaps one of the appeals of the Bible is the idea that one book fits all.  What is relevant? What is trash?  Nietzsche said bad eyesight saved him from too many books. How to sort? Did anyone ever know?  Maybe … I suspect the dust bin overflows even more than Nietzsche’s ubermensch

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