Tree

Full title

FUTURES Thoughts: What Grows in a Silicon Forest? Environmental Amnesia in High Tech Expansion

Abstract

This paper introduces some of the lesser known environmental factors involved in high tech expansion and the techniques adopted by industry to play down hazards for ongoing political subsidies. Taking the examples of Aloha and Hillsboro, two of Intel’s Washington County campuses outside Portland, Oregon, archival materials dating from the first wave of silicon manufacturing highlight the cosy patriarchy that allowed business interests to trump concerns of local host communities, predating the pro-active community engagement activities adopted by corporate responsibility programs today.

Extrapolating from Oregon, this paper will illustrate how corporate sustainability techniques – in particular, the concept of “net positive water” – create consensus on which sustainability metrics matter, influence the reviews process for state-sponsored funding, and enable environmental amnesia. Combining ethnographic fieldwork, cultural geography, open source intelligence methods and personal experience working in the sector, the aim is to provide insight on the lived realities in sacrifice zones for high tech industrial policy, as Europe and the UK signal intent to follow similar investment pathways.

About the speaker

Melissa Gregg is Professor of Digital Futures in the Bristol Digital Futures Institute & University of Bristol Business School. Following an early career in Australian academia, she joined Intel US in 2013 where she led User Experience as Senior Principal Engineer in the Client Computing Group before building the first team focused on product carbon emissions reduction for the CTO. Her academic publications include The Affect Theory Reader (Duke UP, 2010), Work's Intimacy (Polity, 2011), Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy (Duke UP, 2018) and the multigraph Media and Management (Meson, 2021).

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