I am going to use my blog post today to attempt to respond to a question both Todd and Nathaniel bring up regarding Lisa Nakamura’s article “Indigenous Circuits.” The question regards the importance of the Fairchild plant producing technological materials. Todd says of the article: “it only marginally relates this to technology or the technology field. The company that exploited these women only happened to be a technology company” and Nathaniel speaks to the exploitation involved in making the metaphorical sausage and asks, “But this is not unique to computer chips, is it?”

Initially, I read “Indigenous Circuits” as a relatively straightforward account of a historical case study that is important for the public to know about because the recent discourse on worker exploitation has predominantly centered on the “outsourcing” of international practices (a notable result of neoliberalism’s globalized economy) and has ignored instances of “insourcing” in America. One thing Nakamura aims at is “really looking at digital media, not only seeing its images but seeing into it, into the histories of its platforms, both machine and human, [which] is absolutely necessary for us to understand how digital labor is configured today” (920). Perhaps Nakamura’s case study can speak to labor in general as well as digital labor specifically, but here it is clear that she intends to add something to the digital media conversation.

Still, the article’s central content does seem like it could be directly applicable to any type of large industrial company. For example, in Nakamura’s explication of the Shiprock Dedication Commemorative Brochure, she explains that the juxtaposed images of Navajo blanket and integrated circuit make “the visual argument that Indian rugs are merely a different material iteration of the same pattern or aesthetic tradition found within the integrated circuit” and in turn show how “adaptable” the Navajo women are in terms of the work they do (929). The move on the part of Fairchild in its design of the brochure seems to make the point that the workers could have been shifted to production of any material and the company would have found a way to narrativize the shift as a fitting adaptation. Here, I have to agree with Todd that “the company…only happened to be a technology company.”

However, when Nakamura closes her paper, she expands the subject matter to include the exploitation of the labor of women of color across the globe but underlines the connection to digital media: “the existence of cheap, female labor is absolutely taken for granted as a precondition of digital media’s existence” (936). She goes on to add the claim that “innovation and development are impossible without access to hardware that can be produced flexibly, cheaply and consistently” (937). I’m interested in pursuing this question in seminar as I am realizing that I can’t quite put my finger on evidence in Nakamura’s case study that proves why the fact that Fairchild was a digital media/technology company and exploited the labor of Navajo women wasn’t happenstance.