Digital Infrastructure, Liminality, and World-Making Via Asia| Laboring in Electronic and Digital Waste Infrastructures: Colonial Temporalities of Violence in Asia

Abstract

This article studies artworks that highlight and critique networks of electronic waste and digital waste in digital media. Digital waste refers to images of pornographic, abusive, or violent nature on platforms like YouTube and Facebook that are “cleaned” by content moderators. Global signal traffic demands labor that is particularly dependent on particular colored bodies who bear the brunt of toxic pollution from e-waste disposal and posttraumatic stress due to durational exposure to graphic violence. From a temporal perspective, this analysis looks at media infrastructure through a postcolonial lens to study the temporal violence and necropolitics of digital culture.