Towards an Ethical Electronics? Ecologies of Congolese Conflict Minerals

Abstract

This paper asks how coltan, casseterite, wolframite and gold ores mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo relate networked microelectronics to brutal warlords, and what legal and industrial actions have been enacted by activists, NGOs, politicians and businesses aiming to address this situation. Exploring these questions requires the abandonment of immaterialist rhetorics of technology; tropes of cyberspace, virtuality, cloud computing and other discourses of digital disembodiment, instead inviting materialist analysis relating to the geological, geopolitical, industrial and informational flows surrounding globalized microelectronics industries.The paper applies media ecologies and object-oriented ontology to explore ethics and electronics, in particular focussing upon the legislative action of Dodd-Frank Section 1502 and the release of the Fairphone as moves explicitly designed to address Congolese conflict minerals and networked microelectronics in which the networked technologies that are the ‘causes’ of social and ecological pathologies are simultaneously being used to mitigate their deleterious impacts.

Keywords

• OOO
• Ecology
• Digital
• Coltan
• Microelectronics
• Materiality