Wurman, Peter R. et al., System and Method for Transporting Personnel Within an Active Workspace, US 9,280,157 B2 (Reno, NV, filed September 4, 2013, and issued March 8, 2016), http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?Docid=09280157. Hidden among the thousands of other publicly available patents owned by Amazon, U.S. patent number 9,280,157 represents an extraordinary illustration of worker alienation, a stark moment in the relationship between humans and machines. Apple was the first company to put a truly powerful computer in the pockets of millions when it launched the iPhone in 2007. 15 8. Kate Davies and Liam Young, Tales from the Dark Side of the City: The Breastmilk of the Volcano Bolivia and the Atacama Desert Expedition (London: Unknown Fields, 2016). All Rights Reserved. According to the Aymara legends about the creation of Bolivia, the volcanic mountains of the Andean plateau were creations of tragedy. Some of these, like Sony’s Walkman, were the first of their kind. Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). It seemingly paid off—although neither companies disclosed sales figures, analysts estimated that between 700,000 and 800,000 Droids were sold in roughly one month following its launch. Sorolla Museum Madrid, Spain. It cemented Google’s Android platform as the iPhone’s biggest competition. In the same way that medieval alchemists hid their research behind cyphers and cryptic symbolism, contemporary processes for using minerals in devices are protected behind NDAs and trade secrets. Maybe it has something to do with providing a metaphor for increasingly out-of-shape Americans. ... etc) because it may not last. The TV that serves as a portal to binge-watching and -gaming. But that kind of convenience didn’t come cheap. Put simply: each small moment of convenience – be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song – requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. Charles Marcum II (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015). After soaking up the sights, head to One Café for casual fare, One Mix for small plates and cocktails or, the gem, One Dine for a full dining experience with … They are key elements in communication systems from fiber optic cables, signal amplification in mobile communication towers to satellites and GPS technology. Like in Fuchs’ work, our triangles are not isolated, but linked to one another in the production process. But in contrast to user visibility, the precise details about the phases of birth, life and death of networked devices are obscured. The Kindle quickly took over the e-reader market, becoming the best-selling product in the history of Amazon.com in 2010. He invented the first magnetic clock, many early automatons, and the megaphone. Why is the Segway personal scooter such a potent cultural symbol? Nintendo’s debut front-loading, rain-gray console showed up just in time to save the games industry from its excesses, arriving a few years after a crash that capsized many of the field’s biggest players. If we look at the production and exploitation system through a fractal visual structure, the smallest triangle would represent natural resources and means of labor, i.e. Others, such as the iPod, propelled an existing idea into the mainstream. As a Guardian investigation reports “tin mining is a lucrative but destructive trade that has scarred the island's landscape, bulldozed its farms and forests, killed off its fish stocks and coral reefs, and dented tourism to its pretty palm-lined beaches. Click to see the map in the full scale or download map in pdf format here, The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources, By Kate Crawford Their use peaked around 2001, as faster alternatives that carried data over cable lines arrived. The scope is overwhelming: from indentured labor in mines for extracting the minerals that form the physical basis of information technologies; to the work of strictly controlled and sometimes dangerous hardware manufacturing and assembly processes in Chinese factories; to exploited outsourced cognitive workers in developing countries labelling AI training data sets; to the informal physical workers cleaning up toxic waste dumps. “Apple Supplier Responsibility 2018 Progress Report” (Cupertino CA: Apple, 2018), https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2018_Progress_Report.pdf. Earlier devices, like the GriDPad and Palm Pilot, had smaller touchscreens users had to operate with a stylus. Marketed toward children, carried by soldiers, and affordable to everyone, this small, brown leatherette and cardboard camera introduced the term “snapshot” through its ease of use and low cost. Obsoleting noisy, tangle-prone magnetic tape (as well as the binary of “original” versus “copy”) the DVD player made it possible to watch crisp digital movies off a tiny platter just 12 centimeters in diameter—still the de facto size for mainstream optical media (like Blu-ray) today. A mature palaquium gutta could yield around 300 grams of latex. Chris Ely, “The Life Expectancy of Electronics,” Consumer Technology Association, September 16, 2014, https://www.cta.tech/News/Blog/Articles/2014/September/The-Life-Expectancy-of-Electronics.aspx. Glass also showed the potential pitfalls of easily identifiable wearables, perhaps best proven by the coining of the term “Glassholes” for its early adopters. Think of the gear you can’t live without: The smartphone you constantly check. A life-support system can be shared, it cannot be owned as private property or exploited for private profit. The true costs of these systems – social, environmental, economic, and political – remain hidden and may stay that way for some time. Acknowledgements: Our deep thanks go to Michelle Thorne and Jon Rogers at the Mozilla Foundation, who invited us to a retreat in summer 2017 where we first conceptualized this project. All business? It sold poorly in the months after its launch in September 1977, but when games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man arrived a few years later, sales shot into the millions, positioning Atari at the vanguard of the incipient video gaming revolution. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. The historian John Tully describes how local Malay, Chinese and Dayak workers were paid little for the dangerous works of felling the trees and slowly collecting the latex. (It was both a PR stunt and an epic humblebrag: Cooper called his biggest rival at AT&T.) “This Is What We Die For: Human Rights Abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Power the Global Trade in Cobalt” (London: Amnesty International, 2016), https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/AFR6231832016ENGLISH.PDF. People inside the homes of aristocrats would have no idea how a magical statue was speaking and conveying all manner of information. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”. The stack that is required to interact with an Amazon Echo goes well beyond the multi-layered ‘technical stack’ of data modeling, hardware, servers and networks. This is an interaction with Amazon’s Echo device. Many of the triangles shown on this map hide different stories of labor exploitation and inhumane working conditions. There is much to be said about how this labelling process abrogates and crystallizes meaning, and further, how this process is driven by clickworkers being paid fractions of a cent for this digital piecework. The device comes in several styles, such as gunmetal grey or a basic beige, designed to either “blend in or stand out.” But even the shiny design options maintain a kind of blankness: nothing will alert the owner to the vast network that subtends and drives its interactive capacities. Glass, for example, made it easy for users to surreptitiously record video, which led some restaurants, bars and movie theaters to ban the device. 50 2 The camera that goes with you on every vacation. If we look at the scale of average income for each activity in the production process of one device, which is shown on the left side of our map, we see the dramatic difference in income earned. In 2009, China produced 95% of the world's supply of these elements, and it has been estimated that the single mine known as Bayan Obo contains 70% of the world's reserves. Melbourne's food, drink, coffee, art, theatre and sport culture are among the best in the world, and we reckon you should try to experience every single one of them at least once before you die. Cam Simpson, “The Deadly Tin Inside Your Smartphone,” Bloomberg, August 24, 2012, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-08-23/the-deadly-tin-inside-your-smartphone. Listening systems, even at this early stage, were about power, class, and secrecy. The ruby red model was the first to integrate the tapedeck into the camera. The territories are dominated by a few global mega-companies, which are creating new infrastructures and mechanisms for the accumulation of capital and exploitation of human and planetary resources. Julia Glum, “The Median Amazon Employee’s Salary Is $28,000. Sony’s Walkman was the first music player to combine portability, simplicity and affordability. Google Glass, which cost $1,500 for those invited to a sort of public beta test, never took off. 46. (Did the user feel the question was understood?) With its graphical user interface, easy-to-use mouse and overall friendly appearance, the Macintosh was Apple’s best hope to take on IBM. Originally selling in the U.K. for around £440, it would cost more than $6,500 today. As interesting as the device itself is, the Nest thermostat really turned heads in 2014 when the company behind it was bought by Google for $3.2 billion. Olga Russakovsky et al., “ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge,” International Journal of Computer Vision 115, no. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our. It presents a sleek surface with no ability to open it, repair it or change how it functions. Alex Hern, “Royal Free Breached UK Data Law in 1.6m Patient Deal with Google’s DeepMind,” The Guardian, July 3, 2017, sec. Priced at just $1 (with film that was similarly inexpensive) when it was introduced in February 1900, the Brownie took cameras off tripods and put them into everyday use. In The Elements of Power, David S. Abraham describes the invisible networks of rare metals traders in global electronics supply chains: “The network to get rare metals from the mine to your laptop travels through a murky network of traders, processors, and component manufacturers. No surprise, as the chunky, relatively affordable keyboard-housed system—users plugged the whole thing into a TV with an RF box—did more to popularize the idea of the personal home computer than any device since. While consumers become accustomed to a small hardware device in their living rooms, or a phone app, or a semi-autonomous car, the real work is being done within machine learning systems that are generally remote from the user and utterly invisible to her. It brought the arcade experience home for $199 (about $800 adjusted for inflation), including a pair of iconic digital joysticks and games with computer-controlled opponents–a home console first. The entire information age? Amazon began as an online bookstore, so it’s no surprise that its most influential piece of hardware changed the way we read. ‘OK.’ The room lights up. Supply chains are often layered on top of one another, in a sprawling network. Ob aktuelle Trends für Frauen-, Herren- oder sogar Kindermode, wirklich jeder findet dort sein persönliches Sale-Highlight. Those suppliers are themselves linked downstream to tens of thousands of component manufacturers that acquire materials from hundreds of refineries that buy ingredients from different smelters, which are supplied by unknown numbers of traders that deal directly with both legal and illegal mining operations. Early pagers allowed users to send codes to one another, like 411 for “what’s going on” or 911 to indicate an emergency (for obvious reasons). But their impact will live forever, like the movies they captured. An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. It ushered in the phenomena of private space in public created by the isolating effect of headphones. His talking statue was a very early listening system: essentially a microphone made from a huge spiral tube, which could convey the conversations from a public square and up through the tube, and then piped through the mouth of a statue kept within an aristocrat’s private chambers. In his book A Geology of Media, Jussi Parikka suggests that we try to think of media not from Marshall McLuhan’s point of view – in which media are extensions of human senses The list—which is ordered by influence—was assembled and deliberated on at (extreme) length by TIME’s technology and business editors, writers and reporters. This becomes a complex structure of supply chains within supply chains, a zooming fractal of tens of thousands of suppliers, millions of kilometers of shipped materials and hundreds of thousands of workers included within the process even before the product is assembled on the line. The Segway—as hyped and as mocked as it has been—is a defining example of “last mile” transportation, an electric scooter designed to make walking obsolete. 26 Following up on the success of the Walkman, Sony unveiled this portable CD player in 1984, just a year after the music industry adopted the format. Need proof? Here, the worker becomes a part of a machinic ballet, held upright in a cage which dictates and constrains their movement. Amnesty has documented children as young as 7 working in the mines. The iPhone is a family of very successful products. In an era of extractivism, the real value of that data is controlled and exploited by the very few at the top of the pyramid. They play a role in color displays, loudspeakers, camera lenses, GPS systems, rechargeable batteries, hard drives and many other components. This map and essay will be on display there as part of the 'Artificially Intelligent' show from Sep 6 - Dec 31, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyvZ41XjUjY, https://nacla.org/news/bolivia-bets-state-run-lithium-industry, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/26/business/lithium-ion-battery-airline-safety.html, https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-lithium-battery-future/, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2017.1303425, https://www.cta.tech/News/Blog/Articles/2014/September/The-Life-Expectancy-of-Electronics.aspx, https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/AFR6231832016ENGLISH.PDF, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8676.2008.00035.x, http://time.com/money/5262923/amazon-employee-median-salary-jeff-bezos/, https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/conflict-minerals-white-paper.html, https://www.philips.com/a-w/about/company/suppliers/supplier-sustainability/our-programs/conflict-minerals.html, http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/uscorp1/conflict-minerals?s=corp, https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2018_Progress_Report.pdf, http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/rmt2017_en.pdf, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-pollution, http://www.worldshipping.org/industry-issues/safety/Containers_Lost_at_Sea_-_2017_Update_FINAL_July_10.pdf, https://www.mining-technology.com/features/featurethe-false-monopoly-china-and-the-rare-earths-trade-4646712/, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/nov/23/tin-mining-indonesia-bangka, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-08-23/the-deadly-tin-inside-your-smartphone, https://www.wired.com/2014/06/inside-amazon-warehouse/, http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?Docid=09280157, https://storage.googleapis.com/p4-production-content/international/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/35f0ac1a-clickclean2016-hires.pdf, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-015-0816-y, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/business/yourmoney/25Stream.html, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/03/google-deepmind-16m-patient-royal-free-deal-data-protection-act. 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