RT Journal Article
T1 Technologies of Romance: Mineralogy: a digital account
A1 Lee Mackinnon
YR 2019
VO 
IS Autumn 2019
K1 colonialism
K1 conflict minerals
K1 Congo
K1 digital technology
K1 mineralogy
K1 mobile phone
AB This article examines the digital media revolution as a revolution reliant upon a sustained legacy of colonial violence in regions such as the Congo, the locale of this study. Contemporary production is foreshadowed by the industrial genocide of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries visited upon the Congo by Belgium. In an era defined by globally distributed trade networks, colonialism is equally distributed and mercurial – its complex supply chains obfuscating responsibility toward either the environment or its human inhabitants.
The paper looks at the minerals required for latter day digital devices which have become the latest iteration of conflict in the region. Minerals are traced through a number of modern technologies including matches, atomic clocks and mobile devices, all of which evoke alchemical transformation and spectacle. We trace the legacy of colonial violence through smartphones, as the contemporary epitome of technical supremacy – highlighting their qualities of immediacy, mobility and making the remote proximate, especially by bringing remotely sourced geological elements into everyday use. Moving away from our own techno-romantic affiliation with such commodities, the article highlights the fact that focus on effect often further obfuscates the causal factors and consequences of resource extraction in commodity production. Even as we summon stories of global trade with our fingertips on mobile, networked devices, we are implicated in these cycles of violence.
NO Nadim, T and Wagner, N (eds), 2018, The Influencing Machine (Berlin: Verlag and nGbk)

NO Action Against Impunity for Human Rights

NO Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations

NO As Esther Leslie and Helen Hester have put it respectively, automated devices appear more animate than their operators or the bodies that they eventually replace (Leslie, 2002; Hester, 2016).

PB The Science Museum Group
SN 2054-5770
LA eng
DO 10.15180/191212
UL https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/mineralogy-a-digital-account/
WT Science Museum Group Journal
OL 30