supply chains and us
Supply chains and us was a multimedia website about supply chains.
From 2020 to 2022, I collaborated with researcherMiriam Matthissen on a variety of projects related to supply chains and global logistics.
We reconnected in 2020 over a shared interest in supply chains and international logistics networks, which we witnessed breaking down in real time during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. After I gave a talk at the Critical Theory Reading Group, we started havine bi-weekly calls that eventually expanded into a larger Supply Chains Reading Group after we organised a session at the Mozilla Festival in 2021.
As an expression of our converging (and diverging) interests, Miriam and I developed supply-chains.us, an attempt to creatively encapsulate the overwhelming feeling of being in the supply chain, not just the logistical factual nature of it. As a part of this process, we made a “scrollytelling” essay about supply chains alongside collages that combined open access imagery and soundscapes from various steps of the supply chain.
The brief text enclosed in the piece is below:
50 mineral elements are used in 98% of all electronic devices, from consumer cell phones to computers, from solar panels to electric cars.
As we head towards an ever more digital future, we are becoming increasingly dependent on extractive and global processes to support it.
For many of us, the electronic supply chain is characterised by its seamlessness and abstraction. Think: ‘one-click ordering’ or ‘next day delivery’.
Yet, these processes invariably depend on labour that is often tedious and slow, and carried out under precarious and hazardous conditions.
While many journalists have reported on supply chain working conditions, they sometimes end up reproducing the dominant narratives surrounding these processes.
Such narratives center the consumer of a marketed end product, forgetting that the electronic supply chain doesn’t stop with the consumer at all…
…but continues on into recycling centers, with salvagers, and at e-waste sites around the world…
…Reminding us that words like ‘end consumer’ and ‘end product’ are situated, and offer only a partial perspective of consumer technology life cycles.
They beg the questions: end consumer of what and end product for whom?
supply-chains.us is a living archive that traces these uneven geographies, extractive processes, and forgotten labour involved in the production of our digital life.
While this work is no longer online, here are a few screenshots:
Image preview and talks
