16. Chips all the Way Down: Epistemologies and Ontologies of the Microchip
MC Forelle, Cornell University; Zane Griffin Talley Cooper, University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
Among the many consequences of the COVID-19 global pandemic was a reckoning with the deeply entangled nature of the supply chain and its impact on our digital material reality. Work stoppages caused by the pandemic closed and slowed work at many of the mines that produced the minerals critical for building microchips, and at the chip foundries that manufactured them. Consequently, consumer devices of all kinds were hard to come by: automotive manufacturing slowed to a near halt, video game console shipments stagnated, and orders for cryptocurrency mining machines fell into chaos. As science and technology scholars, we view this moment of breakdown as an inflection point for revealing an important, but frequently taken-for-granted truth (Jackson, 2014; Graham & Marvin, 2001): microchips do not exist at just one layer of our contemporary digital moment, but rather, it’s chips the whole way down.
To explore the varied histories and cultures of the microchip, we invite abstracts that re-center the role of this essential technology, from any myriad of approaches and theoretical commitments. In short, we want to explore the political and cultural topologies of the microchip, from the humble origins of the first metal-oxide semiconductors (Bassett, 2007), to Google’s TensorFlow. Some potential topics could include: the political economy and cultural milieu of microchip manufacturing; the logistics of microchip integration and dissemination; e-waste and other forms of microchip disposal (or recycling); or the ideologies of innovation and technological progress that microchips contribute to or are developed from.
