E-waste scavenging in Ghana is digital labor obscured by the immaterial-labor focus

Evidence

Cajetan Iheka, in his book African Ecomedia, explores the impact of consumer waste via media production and discusses how the “promise of [media] infrastructure is undermined in Africa by the ecological consequences of its ruins,” while also advancing an ethics for how these ruins might be represented via “alternative media practices suitable for an era of ecological precarity.” In one case study, Iheka explores Agbogbloshie, one of the largest e-waste dump sites in the world. Located outside Accra, the capital city of Ghana, Agbogbloshie, which was once a wetland area, is now occupied by laborers collecting scrap metal—primarily copper, which is harvested by burning automobile and electronic wiring. This makes the area both environmentally damaging and extremely harmful to work in. … The manual labor that powers Agbogbloshie is crucial to the functioning of the global digital network and thus deserves to be understood as digital labor… . Digitality has always been associated with smart, geeky, labor, so it is easy to discount manual work that is nevertheless pertinent to digital processes… . This emphasis around being “on” the internet favors “immaterial labor.” … It can easily overshadow the heavy and dirty work involved in electronic waste disposal and recycling. Furthermore, the location of Agbogbloshie in Africa, far away from the cities driving the current global order, contributes to its marginalization in discussions of the digital sphere and labor. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 266

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s labor theory of value analysis: the manual copper-harvesting labor at Agbogbloshie is the material substrate the influencer economy’s ‘immaterial labor’ obscures and depends on.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: Iheka’s ‘infrastructural disposition’ concept and Andrejevic’s alignment of online exploitation with sweatshop labor could reframe where commodity value actually gets generated in the Corpocene.