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The Materiality of Digital Culture - Comment Magazine

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It's not as invisible—or as disembodying—as our devices lead us to believe.

In the Chinese city of Baotou, there is an artificial lake, composed chiefly of tarry toxic sludge, that may best be described as infernal. Baotou is the economic hub of Inner Mongolia, a Chinese province that shares most of its border with Mongolia. Baotou was a relatively undistinguished industrial city in the mid-twentieth century. By the early 2000s, however, the city’s mining industry was responsible for 45 percent of the global economy’s supply of rare-earth metals, a variety of metals that have become essential components of our twenty-first-century technologies. Rare-earth metals are…

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