Chip, Body, Earth: Toxic Temporalities of Intel Processor Production

• In Event: Time-Scapes of Toxicity (1): Making Boundaries

Abstract

The early production of Intel processors in Silicon Valley heavily relied upon an array of toxic chemicals. Working intimately with these chemicals, workers internalized burns and bleaching as well as long-term injuries to organs. At the same time, these chemicals seeped into the earth below production facilities, contaminating the soil and water tables. Processor production thus enfolds three distinct temporalities of chip, body and earth, bringing together times of technicity, labor and nature.
Chip time is a time of clock cycles, executing thousands of instructions per second. Yet contrary to other theorizations, time doesn’t become elided into ‘real-time’, but is underpinned strongly by the uniformity and regularity of ‘clock-time’. Body time plays out over decades within the predominantly female and immigrant work force of semiconductor manufacture. A ‘time lag’ occurs in which toxicity unfolds internally in the slow decay of the corporeal. Earth time here entails the designation of the factory site as a SuperFund site by the Environmental Protection Agency, a toxicity that will take 300 years to cleanup. Processor production thus brings these three forms of temporality together. Yet time is never simply ‘left alone’, but rather compressed and expanded in significant ways. Indeed, the difference between time scales becomes a kind of ‘time arbitrage’, forming a hinge for the accumulation of capital, even while degrading skins and soils.

Author

• Luke Munn, Institute for Culture & Society, Western Sydney University