There are the wars that take center stage in Ukraine, Gaza or South
Lebanon. There are all these wars, ongoing or whose embers remain alive,and which are less talked about: from Yemen to Ethiopia, from Myanmar to
Syria, via Afghanistan. And then there are the underground wars, little
known, which nevertheless concern us, such as those for the extraction
of minerals without which smartphones, computers and electric cars would
not work. ---- A censored war ---- These are the wars that interest me,
specifically the one in Congo (Kinshasa) which passes under the media
radar. For example, in the first half of 2024, the American daily The
New York Times published around fifty articles on the Congo compared to
more than 3,200 on Ukraine, not to mention the Israel-Palestine war.
This conflict in Central Africa is not the subject of any media coverage
provoking popular indignation, which de facto dismantles the myth of the
information society.
It is true that it is difficult and dangerous to investigate in the
Congo, activists are imprisoned, journalists are threatened and UN
experts are assassinated. For their part, the mainstream media are
making the Congolese conflict invisible: the Bolloré group's media do
not report on its subcontractors who transport conflict minerals to take
them out of the African continent. Big Tech, for its part, has no
interest in making known its responsibility and complicity in the
atrocities in the Congo. Let us return to the origins of this quarter
century of Congolese war, namely mining.
Extractivism, paradise and hell underground
A central activity of capitalism, extractivism represents its doctrine
and practice regarding the exploitation of natural resources (mining,
fossil fuels, agriculture, forestry). Extractivism was born with
capitalism and vice versa, chosen as a type of exploitation of the soil
and subsoil from the 16th century, called the "golden age" in the
Americas. It is therefore the productivist, growth-oriented,
undifferentiated version - by definition globalized - of artisanal
extraction, the latter conversely intended for local production in line
with a way of life and a culture. Extractivism underlies the ideology of
private property, a conception of land seen as an infinite and unlimited
resource to be exploited to produce, grow, develop, innovate, etc.
Private property has become a category of capitalism synonymous with
barbarism as a violent dispossession of the commons, of what belongs to
the community and to public affairs. The specificity of this
relationship to the land and this acquisition of raw materials is to be
destructive. Extractivism plunders and kills men and nature via work
camps and pollutes the environment. These misdeeds, which date back to
the beginnings of colonization, have never abated since then. In this
sense, digital barbarism is the heir to capitalist barbarism, each phase
of whose development is achieved through political violence in the
Congo. At the beginning of the 21st century, we entered a new
extractivist era with the digital revolution, and this for two reasons.
On the one hand, because the digital industry is a mining industry. With
its fifty metals making up a smartphone, digital is close to covering
Mendeleev's table (or periodic table which lists all the chemical
elements, including the 88 metallic elements from silver to zinc). It is
precisely here that this technological transformation of capitalism
affects the Congo, the only country in the world to have all these
natural elements in its subsoil. On the other hand, the digital economy
is an extractivist economy in the sense that it is based on the
extraction of personal data, or the plundering of privacy,
characteristic of a totalitarian regime.
Dematerialization and transition, locomotives of techno-capitalism
Dematerialization is one of the most powerful ideologies of contemporary
capitalism. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the aerial and
polished representation of digital technology promoted by its defenders,
dematerializing is equivalent to computerizing and digitizing. More
technology means more raw materials. Just one example: landline phones
in the 1960s were made of about ten metals, the first cell phones in the
1990s of about thirty, and smartphones in the 2020s of about fifty.
Worldwide, more than a billion of them are produced each year, to which
must be added the billions of screens of all kinds, computers,
televisions, tablets, video game consoles, virtual reality headsets and
other connected objects. So much for the terminals, and so much for the
infrastructure needed to use them: servers and data centers, routers and
connectors, submarine and underground cables, boxes, antennas and
satellites. All require basic and technological metals. But to produce
and build them, assemble and dismantle them, a lot of energy is still
needed, various steps that this time require the extraction of
hydrocarbons (coal, gas and oil), uranium (nuclear energy), water
(hydroelectricity and metallurgical processes). The digital
infrastructure thus becomes the largest thing built by the human
species. To the point that several specialists estimate that the current
technological configuration of our digital societies is untenable in the
near future, stating that at the current rate, we have less than thirty
years of digital technology left ahead of us. Hence the crazy
extractivist projects at the bottom of the oceans, under the poles, on
the Moon, asteroids and other planets. As a mineral carnivore, digital
technology eats the earth, warms the climate and dries out the planet,
not to mention the electrical and electronic waste that is experiencing
the greatest increase in the world.
Just like dematerialization, transition is one of the main ideologies of
current capitalism. Because transition is in reality an addition of
technologies and energies, in accordance with capitalism which is
defined by the accumulation of goods, that is to say perpetual growth.
The metals concerned are also partly the same as those coveted by the
digital industry. Photovoltaic panels, wind turbines on land and at sea
as well as so-called decarbonized cars are produced from the same metals
intended more generally for the high-tech sector, including the arms
industry. Within an extractivist context that is de facto unprecedented,
Congo represents a synthesis of this energy and digital accumulation.
Neither digitalization nor transition without Congo
This Central African country, with an area equivalent to more than four
times the size of France, is a mineralogical exception, with soil and
subsoil of inestimable wealth. As such, it is described as a "geological
scandal" as it is full of natural resources. Since the industrial
revolution, Congo has supplied raw materials to the various stages of
globalization: rubber for the tire industry and the civilization of the
automobile at the end of the 19th century, metals useful in times of war
for the two world conflicts of the 20th century (zinc, copper, lead,
manganese, etc.), cobalt during the Cold War and the arms race, and even
uranium from Katanga (southeastern province) at the origin of the atomic
bomb that brought humanity into the nuclear age. Congo responds to the
computerization of the world in the 1990s-2000s through the abundance
and mineralogical diversity of its subsoil, in particular those
described as blood minerals: coltan (tantalum) which is used to
manufacture capacitors, cassiterite (tin) for soldering electronic
circuits (and which contributes with indium to making touch screens),
wolfram (tungsten) used for the ringtone and vibrator, gold for printed
circuits, all present in Kivu (eastern province). Let's add copper for
cables, germanium for wifi technology, cobalt and lithium for telephone
and laptop batteries as well as for electric cars, all available and
exploited in Congo. To be clear, without Congo, no iPad or Switch, no
electric bike or Tesla. Bill Gates and Elon Musk do not exist.
Congo devastated by the digital revolution
Mining not only contributes to armed conflicts in the Congo, it
determines them and is at their origin. The war that began in 1996,
still ongoing 28 years later, was financed by the extractive industry,
in this case North American mining multinationals, led by Canada, as
Alain Deneault described. Laurent-Désiré Kabila, associated with
neighboring countries (Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi) in the "rebellion"
AFDL (Alliance of Democratic Forces for Liberation), ousted Mobutu Sese
Seko from power in 1997 thanks to the support of the global extractive
sector. And it is the computerization of the world, at the source of
this mining rush on the Congo, which triggered a cycle of violence and
instability, of greed and diverse and varied interests, renewed with
each technological innovation (smartphone in 2007, tablet in 2010, 5G
and electric car today). The extractive industry is therefore at the
origin of the first Congo war which began in 1996, then of the second
between 1998 and 2003, which is still going on, accentuated since
November 2021. Mining multinationals have colluded with Congolese and
foreign armed groups that have marketed minerals intended for the
emerging digital industry, as the United Nations has very well
documented. All the protagonists in this conflict had their eye on
Congolese wealth to the point that the economy was structured around its
exploitation. Congolese metals have fueled arms trafficking and given
economic and political power to warlords, mafia members and traffickers
of all kinds, the beginning of a chain that begins in Central Africa and
ends with IT multinationals. The Congolese elites have also enriched
themselves and built their power through advantageous contracts for
foreign companies, when they have not sold off their populations' land.
This kleptocracy is supported by capitalist powers of all stripes, both
Western and Eastern, because everyone needs the Congo to industrialize
and become a high-tech power. So everyone helps themselves: the United
States, Canada, South Africa, Europe, China, India, the United Arab
Emirates, etc.
Supranational capitalist institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank
finance extractivist projects and write the Congolese mining code. The
minerals are plundered by neighboring countries, particularly Rwanda and
Uganda. Smuggling and corruption allow the minerals to be transported to
the ports of Kenya and Tanzania in complete opacity, then taken out of
the African continent to Western metallurgists and Asian component
assembly plants, to end up as technological gadgets marketed all over
the world: a whole geopolitics that makes Congo the center of our
connected world.
Concerning France, the State, via the BRGM (Bureau de Recherches
Géologiques et Minières), recently entered into agreements with the
Congolese government to explore and better understand its subsoil, a
typically neocolonial approach. French-African multinationals such as
Total, Perenco and Bolloré exploit the Congolese subsoil (extraction of
hydrocarbons, transport of mining products). France is also captivated
by the extractivist fury. This is evidenced by the struggles against the
opening of the Échassières mine, the controversies surrounding the
exploitation of lithium mines by geothermal energy in the North of
Alsace, not to mention the extraction of gold in Guyana and nickel in
New Caledonia.
Digital barbarism
The digital tsunami is generating a new form of modern barbarism, which
is part of the long term, as an extension of the exploitation of the
resources of the African Great Lakes countries. This is what Dr. Denis
Mukwege, 2008 Nobel Peace Prize winner, emphasizes about the "macabre
continuum that reifies the Congolese from slavery to today, including
the crimes of King Leopold II and the horrors of colonization." For five
centuries, or half a millennium of capitalist savagery, the Congo has
been stripped to supply globalization with men and raw materials.
Since the mid-1990s, the Congolese tragedy has been measured in several
million deaths, 7 million displaced persons, 4 million refugees,
hundreds of women victims of sexual violence and genital mutilation. To
this must be added tens of thousands of children killed in mines, entire
territories contaminated by mining activity, razed forests, waterways
poisoned by heavy metals, rivers and lakes where life has disappeared,
fauna and flora eradicated. Thirty years of digital technology in the
world means thirty years of Congolese deaths and dead lands in the Congo
on which technological development is based.
Getting out of extractivism and the connected world
Mining in the Congo must therefore be put into perspective with the
fundamental needs of the Congolese populations, deprived of their means
of subsistence, which can only be defined by themselves with a view to
reappropriating their fertile and nourishing lands. Beyond the Congo,
the smartphone with its fifty metals is today without a doubt the
colonial object par excellence, the ultimate colonizing agent so little
denigrated, but still a geological aberration, a terrestrial impasse and
is a sign of geopolitical irresponsibility: it pillages, seizes,
expropriates, rapes and potentially lynches all the territories as well
as the indigenous populations endowed with a metal among these fifty.
The smartphone is by definition destructive even before its use: it must
therefore be abandoned as soon as possible. This means that we must
organize collectively to stop the production of this type of bloody and
ecocidal gadget. We must also stop scientific research in the service of
industrialists, in order to no longer let engineers supported by experts
and technocrats decide on technological directions that are leading the
world towards its end.
If critical thinking is a consistent thought, then from what has just
been said, mining has no future in Congo or elsewhere. The only future
of mining is the politicization of technology that has become its main
stimulant. Technology must indeed be the subject of debates,
discussions, consultations, arbitrations, in the sense of technological
de-escalation, de-digitization of life, and multiple forms of
disconnection. Each assembly, council, collective, from the smallest to
the largest scale, must ask itself the question of its relationship to
technologies, in terms of design and equipment, operation and
dismantling, and above all social needs.
We must challenge the elites at all levels and expose them to the
stupidity of their technological projects, boycott Big Tech, support
legal proceedings against them, expose their murderous venality. We
must, as much as possible, set up public debates on digital degrowth,
consultations on the limitation of technologies, their devastating
production and consumption. And continue to expose digital development
as being untenable for humanity and unsustainable for the planet.
We must still collectively institute and make non-connection and
disconnection constitutional. And consequently, among other directions,
put back human and paper from school to university, multiply the
spaces-times without screens. In fact, all initiatives, proposals,
actions that contribute to blocking industrial projects that fuel
digitalization and electrification must be supported, just as anything
that slows down, prevents and sabotages mining projects, electronic
production, the installation of digital factories (Amazon data centers
and warehouses for example). We can only encourage and participate in
anything that contributes to stopping and dismantling the globalized
technological megamachine.
If we are all caught in the nets of the digital economy, we must find
collective ways to escape. We must ask the question of suspending, or
even abandoning, electronic production, which is so deadly. It is urgent
to break the fetishism of technological merchandise and to discuss
limiting, or even stopping, the production of screens on which the
accumulation of domination and the power of Big Tech is based. Companies
that are using all their influence to prevent an international law from
imposing real traceability that would prohibit them from using these
metals stained with Congolese blood.
A front against these multinationals is essential in order to limit
their powers until they are dismantled. The initiative launched by the
association Génération Lumière that crossed France this summer and
brought together hundreds of people to raise awareness of the massacres
generated by extractivism is a first outline of collective mobilization.
The fight in Allier against the lithium mine, led by the association
Stop Mines 03, with the slogan "neither here nor elsewhere", is another
example. Which must now be intensified and multiplied.
Fabien LEBRUN
November 2024
Fabien Lebrun is a researcher, author of On achève bien les enfants.
Écrans et destructivité numérique (Le Bord de l'eau, 2020) and Barbarie
numérique. Another story of the connected world which has just been
published by L'Échappée.
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4319
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