Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 159

for as long as anyone, at least anyone under forty, can remember? It may
seem that way, but this is not the case, especially in the IT industry, where
fundamental changes in the global division of labor are the norm. Begin-
ning in the 1950s, for example, computer electronics production began in
the rooms and garages of amateurs who, like the amateur “Radio Boys”
of the 1920s, started an industry through interpersonal networks of tech
friends playing with modiied off-the-shelf components. It also began in
the laboratories of a small group of universities where the building blocks
of computer communication were invented and then sent into produc-
tion with industry partners. IT production moved irst to the factories
of big computer irms like IBM and DEC whose skilled workforce in the
U.S. Northeast, including upstate New York and the Boston area, irmly
established the computer industry. But providing a strong foundation
does not guarantee labor stability. During this time, production began
to shift to the U.S. West Coast as Silicon Valley emerged as a center of
digital technology production. This was partly because the expansion of
a division of labor in IT production made it possible to hire low-skilled
workers for an important part of the process that could be completed in
a factory or even at home. There were considerable workplace hazards
associated with this work because it involved dangerous chemicals, which
were often cooked up in the apartments and homes of immigrant workers.
One consequence was the rise of a signiicant toxic-waste issue in Silicon
Valley, which the Environmental Protection Agency singled out as the
site of the most toxic of the many “Superfund” sites in the country (Pel-
low and Park 2002).
While remnants of hazardous production remain in California, it was
not long before the industry went in search of offshore production sites
where authoritarian governments could enforce a regime of low wages,
labor discipline, and weak environmental protection. The irst stop was
Southeast Asia—Malaysia, Singapore, and then Vietnam—where the IT
production process began. But that too was short-lived as the transition
to a state-directed capitalist economy in China overwhelmed other pro-
duction sites with cheap labor subject to the near-complete control of
companies like Taiwan-based electronics irm Foxconn or China's own
Huawei, a world leader in the provision of telecommunications equip-
ment. Based in the new industrial heartland of eastern and southern
China—which replaced the old one, now a rust belt in northeast China,