Dalia Hatalova Blog Post #16/15

One fascinating video I encountered a few years ago is Workers Leaving the Googleplex, made in 2011 by Andrew Norman Wilson. A former Google employee, Wilson critiques the hierarchization of labor in the company, where different tiers of workers exist that have varying levels of privileges. While Google is advertised as a dream job, this "dream" employment and benefit remains reserved for an elite category of workers. Meanwhile, scanners and other companies remain in poor working conditions and are badly paid. Wilson's story about his challenges in obtaining any footage of these workers reveals how guarded information on this treatment of employees is. 

I thought that the film may be removed from Ensmenger's research, but nevertheless points in some similar directions on obfuscation.  Ensmenger reveals the way that the mining for uranium and lithium ravages populations and nature outside of the United States but remains invisible to the more affluent part of the global population who uses these technologies. He writes, "seen from this perspective, the digital economy is a global phenomenon, even though access to digital technologies is not" (S21). But the fact remains that the global impact of the digital is obfuscated by images of natural and cultural traditions that are untouched by working conditions for the production of technology, viewed in documentaries and magazines, such as National Geographic. The work of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado is powerful in that it ruptures the typical images of locals far away from it all to show the physical toll on workers in dismal situations. (Below are images by Salgado from the Serra Pelada Gold Mine in Brazil taken in 1986.)

On a smaller and more local scale, Ensmenger's revelations about the invisibility of the mechanisms of labor on the components needed for the "ethereal" technology are paralleled by Wilson's work on the way that Google, as an employer, attempts to maintain only the elite workers in the public light. Hiding the underpaid workers who do the "dirty" work who are necessary for these technologies to function (a process attempted to be aestheticized by building on racial stereotypes at times, as seen in Lisa Nakumara's work on Navajo women) is a bodily equivalent of the desire to undermine consumption of material resources needed to uphold the production of technology. Meanwhile, Wilson's work also harks back to surveillance, but this time, pushing back on Google itself by revealing that the image of a utopian Google workplace is only the tip of the labor iceberg in the company. Both Wilson and Salgado, even if working with greatly different styles, are able to render visible through the indexical images some of the labor conditions, making the cinematic/photographic medium a tool for understanding workers and impact that are hidden in inaccessible regions.