Rocks Reads Roundup, 9/13 (should have been 9/11)
Holy shit the sky was orange in California and I fucking hate everything
Hello rocks readers! This week's newsletter is late because I was on deadline for some freelance work and also the world keeps happening and I'm not dealing very well. Longer-form material is also delayed to late this week; thank you for your patience as I once again re-learn How To Newsletter and live at the same time during this Book of Revelations period.
This week's links are kind of a weird grab bag of mostly news-y things and one research/creative reference project.
Forget pumpkin spice season: it's moon mining season, folks. (I'm so sorry, clearly a little too punchy today.) NASA announced a new request for proposals to do preliminary lunar resource collection–basically, prove they can collect regolith from the surface of the moon and deliver it to NASA via "in-place ownership transfer." I think that just means it stays on the moon, which would make sense because in the announcement post NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine mentions how this solicitation is an opening move for pursuing "in-situ resource utilization"–basically, mining stuff in space and using it to do more things in space, rather than returning minerals to Earth. As far as I understand it the long game for that is using moon resources to build shit to go to Mars. Space mining should probably go into the long list of "things I should explain in more detail in this newsletter at some point", and I can admittedly be really, really cynical about space stuff, but it's hard for me to read moon mining and onward to Mars as having noble humanity-improving intentions. It sort of just feels like escapism. Which, I get a lot of people need right now, but it continues to be very telling that it's literally easier to move forward moon-mining policy right now than it is to like, pay Americans to stay at home during a pandemic.
From deep space to deep sea: The Financial Times ran a short piece about how one of the handful of companies who has permits to do deep-sea mineral extraction is annoyed that...they aren't doing deep-sea mineral extraction yet because the regulations aren't finalized. Lots of people have been trying to make ocean minerals a thing for a stupid long time, and it's probably no surprise that one of the companies permitted to do it eventually is a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin. It's probably even less of a surprise that the Lockheed guy interviewed in this story cites the "we need to be less reliant on China" talking point to rush regulations on an incredibly environmentally risky activity. I don't know, maybe this link is more interesting as a piece of context for like, the financial class' perspective on seabed mining?
Old rare earth recycling news, but new to me and apparently to E-Scrap News: back in July, the Department of Defense announced a new Defense Production Act funding program focused on "the timely availability of essential domestic industrial resources to support national defense and homeland security requirements through the use of highly tailored economic incentives." Such essential domestic industrial resources include rare earth magnets, and among the companies funded by the DoD is Texas-based Urban Mining Co. The company received $28.8 million from the DoD. Urban Mining Co. also received a PPE loan for between $150,000 and $300,000. This isn't mentioned as a knock on the company–honestly their tech is pretty interesting, you can read a paper about their approach, and I would be happy to see them succeed if it leads to a more environmentally friendly approach to magnet recycling that reduces the need for toxic mining. Mostly I think this is interesting because I feel like people sort of stopped making much ado about the Defense Production Act when the ventilator crisis of March and April died down, so I was kind of surprised to learn it's still being used and specifically, as the July press release states, used to "retain critical workforce capabilities throughout the disruption caused by COVID-19 and to restore some jobs lost because of the pandemic." And it's interesting that rare earth magnets are considered part of that "critical workforce."
An informal gold mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's South Kivu province collapsed on Saturday due to flooding, killing 50 people. The mine was not owned by a corporate multinational; it was one of the many small-scale mines worked by artisanal miners in DRC. This isn't newsworthy because it happens rarely, honestly I was a little surprised it made the newswire. Mining accidents and deaths in the informal sector are very, very common and the informal sector is very big. At least one-fifth of DRC's cobalt, for example, is mined by hand. But it's not so simple as "well we just need to get responsible companies to be in charge of the mines"–would you believe that uh, lots of mining companies are dicks to their workers and don't actually give a fuck about child labor? Not to mention tend to have more automated processes, thus employing fewer people, which leads people back to the informal sector. The Fair Cobalt Alliance is one of the more recent efforts to repair this part of the supply chain that at least on paper seems less shitty than past attempts in this sector–for example, they want to actually invest in schools and raising household incomes so kids don't have to work in mines (most of these initiatives stop at "we'll rigorously surveil this site to make sure there's no child labor"). I'm probably too jaded about this stuff so I tend to assume industry-based "responsible sourcing" initiatives are in large part snake oil, but the fact Fairphone was a founding partner makes me a little optimistic. (The primary steward of the FCA, The Impact Facility, has some extremely We're Neoliberal Please Give Us Money rhetoric on its "About Us" page though.)
stones.computer is a repository of recommended readings around "post-digital materiality" in the words of its creators, Jonas Parnow and Paul Heinicker. It's a nicely organized collection, although I think as an overall reading list it's unfortunate that it's pretty white. It's also a little annoying that what Black authors are included, they're mostly contemporary authors and heavily in the lineup as they relate to topics "affecting the marginalized" (a handful of Asian authors appear in the less explicitly "identity politics"-y categories). I mean, including thinkers like Simone Browne and Ruha Benjamin is good, but it's sort of the bare minimum of keeping up with the discourse. I also think it's really interesting that of the texts included written before 1999, two are by women (A Cyborg Manifesto and Affective Computing) and all are by white people. What happens if we add, say, Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) as a text for thinking through "Spatial Order"? Where in these various categories would we put Frantz Fanon or Huey Newton? Why does this reading list have so many texts by white women quoting Sylvia Wynter but...no Sylvia Wynter? IDK, it's an interesting framing device and I'm not knocking the readings they did include (I have read many of them, am excited to read more). It just made me think more about how what ends up in the technology-space-infrastructure-whateverthefuck canon might further ossify the impression that computer history took place in a vacuum separate from anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti-extractivist struggles–that we're in an extractive "turn" rather than ready to admit there’s basically no digital or computational without extraction and colonial violence.
Thanks so much for joining me, more rocks and reads later this week!