Abstract
In an attempt to comprehend the intersection between the short and accelerated human history with the deep and slow history of the planet, this essay imaginatively follows the temporal and spatial movement of a lithium atom. The essay focuses on the extractive enterprise deployed by SQM, a transnational mining company operating in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Proposing a fictional ethnography methodology, the essay historicizes lithium extraction and its political implications, from its extraction from Chilean subsoils to its assemblage into an iPhone cell phone battery in one of Apple’s manufacturing bases in China and later commercialization in the United States and Chile, where the lithium atom originated. The essay highlights lithium extraction’s different scales and geopolitics to reflect on how transnational technology companies design the global world based on economic gains while destroying vital spaces where human and nonhuman beings have lived together for centuries.
Is it right to speak of a “particular” atom of carbon? For the chemist there exist some doubts, because until 1970 he did not have the techniques permitting him to see, or in any event isolate, a single atom; no doubts exist for the narrator, who therefore sets out to narrate.
—Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
What began in the stellar soup of the Big Bang is now ready for the battery.
—Unknown Fields, The Breastmilk of the Volcano
Many, many years ago, long before humans appeared, the mountains and volcanoes, which were stars, descended from the firmament to the earth, with the purpose of establishing order on it and helping life, under multiple forms, to develop. There is no univocal version, but one of the legends of the Atacama people tells that the warrior volcano called Licancabur, son of the volcano Láscar, fell in love with Kimal, a peak located today in the Domeyko Mountain Range, whom he married. But Licancabur was not the only one courting the beautiful Kimal. Juriques, his brother, tried to kidnap her, so, in revenge, Licancabur cut off his head. This explains the mountain’s current form, as it is headless. The dispute of the two brothers deeply displeased Láscar, who in punishment decided to separate Kimal from his two sons, banishing her to the other side of the great valley of Atacama. The sadness that the separation produced in the lovers was so great that their tears ended up flooding the valleys that, with the passage of time, the sun would transform into salt flats. Fortunately, the distance between Licancabur and Kimal is shortened every summer solstice, allowing their shadows to embrace each other at sunrise and sunset. The Licancabur was one of the most important volcanoes for the various peoples who inhabited, and still inhabit, the Atacama Region. The cult of Licancabur, along with other volcanoes, was a key element for the modes of organization of the people of the region, modes that their heirs have seen completely altered, mainly thanks to the constant discovery of mineral deposits that have made the region an extractive zone. Lithium, the panacea of a chimerical “green ecology,” accelerates the evaporation of tears that are no longer only those of Licancabur and Kimal but also those of the heirs of those who not so long ago offered them tributes in gratitude for maintaining the conditions that made life possible.
“Our sun, by comparison, is a mere eight light-minutes away,”1 noted Stephen Hawking in his famous book on time. I emphasize the adjective mere in this sentence because although it seems ironic when we learn that the galaxy in which the planet we inhabit is only one among hundreds of billions of other galaxies, we can actually see that it is a relatively small distance, only that its scale is difficult to grasp; hence our only choice is to resort to the imagination, even more so if we take into account that the galaxies, according to Edwin Hubble, are moving away from Earth. Knowledge of all this deep history is new, only beginning about one hundred years ago, or a little more if we take into consideration Einstein’s theory of relativity. The universe, Joanna Zylinska noted, “serves as a fictitious point of unity” that allows us to apprehend the unfolding of matter through time and space.2 The universe began with the big bang, an explosion that occurred some 13.82 billion years ago and that today, given the geological force that humanity has reached, we understand more clearly, as Jussi Parikka would say, we carry their remains in our pockets, as well as in our own bodies:3 “Anthropogenic global warming,” noted Dispesh Chrakabarty,
brings into view the collision—or the running up against one another—of three histories that from the point of view of human history are normally assumed to be working at such different and distinct paces that they are treated as processes separate from one another for all practical purposes: the history of the Earth system, the history of life including that of human evolution on the planet, and the more recent history of industrial civilization (for many, capitalism).4
Throughout the last century we barely managed to see ourselves as biological beings inhabiting a human history, under the names of “culture” or “civilization.” But the crisis we have produced (in heterogeneous ways, and with different implications), as Chakrabarty adds, forces us involuntarily to “unintentionally straddle these three histories, which operate on different scales and at different speeds.”5 The technological devices that connect us to the world are small infrastructures that emerge from larger ones, and knowledge of them can enable us to understand this ensemble of scales and at different speeds. Likewise, it is a question of asking ourselves what the consumer of commodities usually overlooks: that is to say, how that which is not a commodity becomes one, damaging the world throughout the entire process of production, circulation, and consumption.
In addition to hydrogen and helium, lithium, the lightest of all metals, came from the big bang, and given the boom in electromobility and “green” energy, lithium has become the new oil—not black but white. Along with sodium, potassium, rubidium, cesium, and francium, lithium is part of the alkalis, the first group of the periodic table, located just below hydrogen. The dangerous ease with which they lose their outermost electron allows alkalines to share very similar properties and characteristics, and as soon as they come into contact with almost anything (including air or water), they produce a violently explosive reaction. Thus they are noisy and unruly elements, as Adrian Basher puts it, known for their extremely reactive behavior, which makes lithium in particular a key energetic material.6 These properties are what makes lithium a highly valued element.
Lithium has the fortune (or misfortune) of being a relatively abundant resource, especially in Chile, whose geological and geographical location makes it a key country for scrutinizing the relationship between humanities and energies.7 Saltpeter as a fertilizer, coal and whale oil as fuels, and copper as a great conductor of heat and electricity are elements that have allowed Chile to become a key global player. Lithium’s inscription in the modern history of the earth is due to the fact that its geology is energized. Lithium and its potential to store energy has been discovered at a time when there is an urgent need to displace fossil fuels. But an issue that is often overlooked is that the territory where it is found is also inhabited by Indigenous peoples and nonhuman agents that relate to it in a nonextractivist way. It is essential to consider how, as energy, lithium can contribute not only to the economy but also, essentially, to the cultural and political configuration of the societies that use it. Chemistry mediates our senses while helping to shape the forms of cultural and economic exchanges that we as humans give ourselves (or impose) so that the elements are presented as agents that organize our relationship with the earth. Lithium is thus called upon to reimagine this relationship, not so much in the way it is extracted but in the future it could lead to.
Globally lithium is found in three potentially exploitable sources: rock ores or pegmatites; sedimentary rocks (such as clay); and brines, mainly in salt flats and continental lagoons. The first type is found in Australia, the United States, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Canada, and has an estimated world resource share of 27 percent, while the second type, with a 7 percent share, is found in the United States, Mexico, Serbia, and Peru. The third type, our interest here, is located in the so-called lithium triangle of Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia, with a 60 percent share.8 These three countries have a large number of closed basins whose central depression is occupied by saline lakes and salt crusts, known as salt flats, the largest worldwide being Uyuni in Bolivia. Salar de Atacama in Chile is today one of the most important sources of lithium production in the world with one of the largest reserves, producing approximately 25 percent of the world’s lithium for batteries. According to José Cabello’s data,9 if Chile were to reach the anticipated production of 48,800 tons in the future (18,000 tons are currently produced), there would still be enough lithium for three more centuries. Cabello, by the way, is one of the many researchers to report on the state of lithium and its future without addressing the cultural and environmental cost of its extraction. The Salar de Atacama is home to an important national reserve of flamingos but also hosts everything from microorganisms to diverse Indigenous peoples that have lived there for thousands of years. It is located in the Atacama Region in northern Chile, and its geography was shaped mainly by geological, climatic, and tectonic factors, which gave rise to an extremely arid area crossed by desert climate, which has persisted at least since the middle Miocene10—that is, for a little more than fourteen million years. But the history of the salt flats goes further back, to around sixty-five million years ago, when a sea rich in carbonates very slowly ended up forming sedimentary rocks called limestone, that with the rise of the Andes mountain range can now be found at more than four thousand meters above sea level.11 Several million years later, another important process, subduction, will take place, which describes the folding of the oceanic plates under the South American plate. In the case of South America, it is the Nazca plate, whose collision produced the chain of volcanoes that cross the country, and which in the North allowed the crust to soften and deform, giving rise to a series of endorheic basins, which, together with the scarce rainfall in the area, make water a very scarce commodity.
Its geology, together with the extreme climate of the Atacama Region, contribute to massive deposits of minerals such as nitrate and copper, as well as lithium. All these minerals have marked the political and economic history of the country since the nineteenth century, an infinitely small history but of important significance to the land and to the future of humanity. The region is configured by a thick accumulation of diverse sediments that go from the middle Tertiary to the beginning of the Holocene, while the Salar de Atacama, located at 2,500 meters above sea level, in the Andean Predepression, is a bead enclosed between the Precordillera and the Western Cordillera, in which there are found continental clastic and evaporitic sediments from the Cenozoic.12 For those who visit the northern part of Chile, the landscape is of a radical singularity, different from what you are familiar with if you were born, as in my case, in the central zone of the country. It is quite a rugged landscape, the most arid in the world, a testing ground for lunar vehicles, and a place from which, thanks to its clear skies, you can observe this and other galaxies. So the salt flats, “vestiges of ancient paleo-lakes” according to Cristóbal Bonelli and Cristina Dorador,13 as well as the salt lakes found in the region, were formed by desiccation during the Holocene, which, thanks to the help of the sun, allows one of the most important evaporite complexes in the world to take place. This allows lithium to be precipitated in a “natural” and economic way, making this a comparative advantage of its production if contrasted with its extraction in Australia, which although faster (traditional mining, extractive), has higher costs.
As I will try to show in what follows, lithium’s historical and geological position makes it possible to think about multiscale processes in Chile. This allows us to understand the global articulation of infrastructures that make up the Anthropocene and its environmental damage. The current extraction of lithium in the Salar de Atacama may be an indication of the way in which deep time is disseminated around the globe, articulating different scales and speeds. While Chile is the main seller of lithium (in the form of the carbonate Li2 CO3), the main buyers are China, South Korea, and Japan, which require it mainly for the production of batteries that they then sell to countries in the Global North, but increasingly it is also traded in their domestic markets. Lithium thus begins a space journey that can bring it back to the same place from where it was extracted. In so doing, it contributes to the configuration of new geopolitical dynamics that have led to the emergence of powerful economic blocs which embody the technological vanguard of the twenty-first century and are displacing the so-called Global North and its influence on world politics.14
Lithium has a deep cosmic and geological history that extractivism, framed in dictatorial and postdictatorial policies and privatizations, has folded over our present. Our daily and not so daily agenda is organized today thanks to its batteries. To understand its relevance in the context of the climate crisis (it is said to be the axis of a postcarbon future), we will imagine the journey of one of its atoms, from the big bang to our phones. This temporal journey will be reinscribed in a spatial journey, since Li, the chemical symbol for lithium, will travel around the world. We know that, chemically, we cannot speak of a certain atom of lithium, nor of carbon, nor of anything, let alone follow it. But we can imagine it. There, near the surface of a small lagoon, Li will remain for millions of years until a beautiful bird shakes it up a bit and then returns it to the monotony to which it was more than used to. Only in 2019 will its tranquility be completely altered. It will be extracted from the Salar de Atacama, where it arrived some 4.6 billion years ago, dragged by an immense cloud of turbulent cosmic matter. From there Li will be exported to China in the form of lithium carbonate (Li2CO3), a type of inorganic salt that will force it to share its travels with another character like it, in the company of one atom of carbon and two of oxygen.
To fictionalize its journey some readings have been fundamental, in particular the work on media geology by Parikka and the ethnography on mushrooms by Anna Tsing. From the arts, I have also drawn on the project research by Unknown Fields (UK/Australia), led by Kate Davies and Liam Young, who conducted an expedition to the lithium salt flats of Bolivia and Chile. Without them, I would hardly have been able to imagine this fictitious and still tentative ethnography that takes place on an element that seems to have a determining political, economic, and ecological role for the next two or three centuries.
The interest in imagining the circuit that Li traverses is due, on the one hand, to the fact that, as Deborah Cowen has pointed out, “the entire network of infrastructures, technologies, spaces, workers, and violence that makes the circulation of stuff possible remains tucked out of sight for those who engage with logistics only as consumers.”15 But, on the other hand, those who research logistics chains, probably because of the gigantic scale of the whole circuit, do not usually go through it in its entirety. Martin Arboleda’s Planetary Mine (2020) shows how the mining industry is part of important supply chains linking Chile to China; however, Li actually goes in a circle operating as a synecdoche not only of lithium extraction but also of other minerals (such as copper) that supply the technology market. The fact that Li returns, as we shall see below, to the interior of an iPhone lends its journey a tone of hopelessness, given that his journey has not altered the conditions that have made humanity a geological agent. On the contrary, Li’s displacements show that extractivism moves around the world through the infrastructures that make possible its return as a commodity in the service of technological devices that satisfy needs that only a few decades ago we did not have. Li, therefore, is a fiction in the etymological sense of the term, since it plasms or figures16 an image of the way of life that has made the so-called Anthropocene possible, thus opening the way for an articulation between imagination and research. Given the interest of this text in the daily dimension of the predation of the world, I have decided to keep the term Anthropocene without assuming it as a homogenizing term.17 The owners and managers of companies such as SQM and Albemarle have a much greater responsibility than those who work for them or those who buy the products that carry the minerals they extract from the Salar de Atacama. However, I am interested in highlighting the anthropic dimension of insignificance articulated on a global scale, since it is a particular way of life that accompanies the mode of production we call capitalism while also being an effect of it. This means that the ethnographic does not focus on Li’s customs but, inversely, on the way of life of humans who have made it an energetic commodity, whose extraction leads them (us) to destroy the life of other peoples and their environments.
If we were to ask Li to introduce itself, it would surely say (boasting!): “As my name indicates, which in Greek is lithos, I am a metal that loves stones, I am a lithophile! I know. You will say that how can it be possible to love stones if they found me in an aqueous solution, but who thus called me first met others like me in a petalite mine in Sweden. Believe it or not, I am the least dense or the lightest of all solids, which gives me a certain peculiarity. I can be white when I keep my metallic form, but also turn dark in certain damp spaces. You can easily cut me with a knife, but when I mix with other metals like aluminum, I make very strong and light alloys.” And then Li would add: “I am generally a helpful and very serviceable character. You can find me acting as the positive half of many batteries and as part of high-performance industrial lubricants. When I get together with my friend chlorine as lithium chloride, we are remarkably good at absorbing large amounts of water. When I join up with oxygen and carbon as lithium carbonate, we help restore damaged personalities.”
The scientific mineral history is recent, as its discovery dates back only to 1817. Before lithium carbonate (an inorganic salt) was employed in battery manufacturing, it was (and still is) used in very low concentration to treat bipolar disorder, depression, and a variety of other psychiatric and medical conditions. For the discovery of this medical use, we need to go back to 1948, although almost a century earlier, in the form of lithium salts, it was already recommended for the treatment of gout, urinary calculi, rheumatism, mania, depression, and headache.18
It could be said that after the stellar nucleosynthesis to which he owes its appearance, time for Li has been very dull, I would even say nonexistent if it were not for the effect caused by temperature variations. By way of counterpoint, Li has witnessed events such as the Great Oxidation; the phototrophic microbial mats of the Salar de Atacama near it “were the forests of the past. Fossil stromatolites, their fossil remains, constitute the oldest reliable traces of life on earth. These microbial ecosystems dominated shallow aquatic and terrestrial habitats before large multicellular organisms expanded 550 million years ago.”19 Li thus witnessed the emergence of not only oxygen and cyanobacteria but also the emergence of life on earth, as well as thousands of other minerals that took on one or more oxidized forms.
When the chemist Johan August Arfwedson discovered lithium in 1817, he did so in the form of spodumene and lepidolite, extracted from a petalite mine on Utö Island. That same year, a flock of Andean flamingos from the Salar de Uyuni came in search of food (diatomaceous algae) to the basin of the Salar de Atacama, specifically to a lagoon located twenty kilometers from what is now the SQM plant, the main producer of lithium carbonate. There Li was randomly absorbed by a thirsty flamingo, which a few days later, after passing it through its digestive system, ended up expelling it into the same lagoon, and it sank some thirty meters deep, where it will remain barely altered by climatic conditions. Those humans who for thousands of years have been making their way to this lagoon still do so, to thank it for its existence and the water it gives them. In return, they have assumed its care as the most important of their tasks on earth. They felt responsible for it and for what it contains and gives them: life.
Nearing two centuries since their encounter with that Andean flamingo, Li will again be sucked in, but now by a pump, set in motion by a subcontracted worker, who will transport it along those twenty kilometers to then discharge it through a system of pipes into a system of solar evaporation pools. Li got to see what Cristóbal Bonelli and Cristina Dorador have called “micro-disasters”20—that is, the slow but persistent disappearance (caused by extractivism) of thousands of unique microbial communities that managed to adapt to an extreme climate and diversify into microscopic oases of life. Li has witnessed not only the birth of life in certain forms but also the beginning of its extinction. Li has never moved so much, so fast.
Thinking about what has come to be called the Anthropocene confronts us with the problem of scales and their dynamic relationships. Deep time and everyday time are assembled from infrastructures that put us in relation with other humans but also with other species and materials. The ethnographies required to apprehend these assemblages, folds, and relations come from the imagination of an anthropology that is more than human, capable of transforming the climate crisis as well as other phenomena of the Anthropocene into research problems. Infrastructures, understood as projects that alter land, water, and atmosphere, ranging from plantations to factories, including international transactions,21 are the concern of this work. But infrastructures are ambivalent objects, because in the case of Li, whose extraction is done in the name of the climate crisis, eventually Li could help to reduce the disastrous effects caused by the climate crisis by replacing oil with lithium, albeit without lessening the energy drive. What the various companies that will make Li a mere commodity, as well as the governments that also seek to profit from their fellow atoms, do not want to produce is a way of life that is not sustained by consumption but fed with another type of energy. When ecological policies depend on infrastructures that shape what Tsing calls “landscape structures,” what emerges is not a greener or less polluted world but repeatable patterns of human and nonhuman destruction.22 I have placed Li at the center of an infrastructure embedded in the Salar de Atacama because through it we can not only see the corridors of global logistics but travel the road that will take it, mounted on various fossil fuel–powered means of transport, around the world and then return it to almost the same point from which Li departed. The lithium revolution, therefore, throws us into a vicious circle that only corroborates Michel Marder’s assessment that we continue to consider the planet as “an energy container, its depths waiting to be breached, penetrated, and appropriated.”23 The way we understand mobility and transform it into a life goal that makes us addicted to energy is what is killing us, whether with oil, lithium, or hydrogen.
We left Li at an SQM evaporation pond. It is actually a network of pools measuring forty-four square kilometers. The Salar de Atacama has one of the highest evaporation rates and one of the lowest precipitation rates, which makes it an ideal place to obtain lithium, given that it also has the sun as a natural energy resource to concentrate the minerals, aided by the wind. Li then passes from well to well through a pumping system that, in addition to lithium, provides a potassium concentrate, since the brines have accompanied Li for millions of years. Li comes out in a concentrated form, and with a purity level of 6 percent, but to form part of a battery it must reach 99.5 percent in carbonate form. Li is therefore loaded onto a truck and transported to a plant where it will be helped to reach its highest possible purity. So far only one year has passed, but Li has not stopped moving for a single day, which contrasts radically with its stationary existence over millions of years. Li is beginning a journey through a logistics chain whose entire route we will have to imagine. Now it has to be chemically processed in a lithium carbonate plant (located in the same SQM), for which it is made to react with sodium carbonate, thus obtaining a white powder that will be washed, filtered, dried, and packaged for final sale.24 In another truck it is transported to Puerto Angamos, Bahía de Mejillones, Antofagasta Region, on its way to China.
Li’s path through the production system requires a lot of water in an environment that lacks it. Its extraction has radically altered the diverse ecosystems of the Salar de Atacama, so its use entails a dispute over the appropriation and use of goods considered common by the different peoples who have historically lived there. SQM insists in its various publications and advertisements that it is a company that strictly follows a Biotic Environmental Monitoring Plan in order to protect, as stated on its website, “the main sensitive environmental systems.”25 But all the peoples who have sustainably inhabited different parts of the salt flat, Atacameños, Aymaras, and Quechas as well as Kollas and Diaguitas, have seen their living conditions disrupted and have filed important lawsuits against the company. As Melisa Argento and Florencia Puente have pointed out, “Mining, under the conditions of transnational capital, with the use of chemicals and increasingly advanced technologies, is already an economic activity that disputes in the territories the main resources such as energy and land, progressively displacing the old forms of reproduction of subsistence farming and livestock raising, while producing peasant identity reconfigurations in coexistence with mining workers.”26 Lithium mining is a mining that operates on lakes, ponds, and salt flats in which the recovery of the water level extracted from them will never compensate for the water stored by natural processes, which affects the hydrography of the Salar de Atacama as well as all forms of life that still exist there. Flamingos like the one that sent Li to the bottom of a lagoon have declined dramatically in the last twelve years, which coincides with the increase in global demand for lithium. The decline in surface water availability has led to population declines in three flamingo species.27 And while, at the regional level beyond the Salar de Atacama, flamingos are not declining drastically, expansion projects by the two main producing companies (SQM and Albemarle) should be a wake-up call.
Let us go back to Puerto Angamos, where Li was taken in order to embark on a ship bound for the province of Canton, the second province in China in terms of the percentage of lithium carbonate imports extracted from the Salar de Atacama.28 Li might land in Shanghai, where 2020 saw about 40 percent of China’s total lithium carbonate imports arrive,29 or in South Korea, where Samsung and other tech companies also require Li for lithium-ion battery projects that have been expanding since 2018. But chance takes Li to the Port of Shenzhen, from where it moves north and overland some eighty kilometers, in order to reach Dongguan, a city located in the center of the province, where the battery cells that will later be inserted into an Apple smartphone are manufactured. Li’s job is to operate as an electrolyte—that is, it will behave as an electrical conductor and transform its chemical energy into electrical energy. Since a battery is basically a storage container, to recover once it has been depleted Li has to be connected to an electrical grid to accumulate chemical energy that will set the device to which it was assembled in motion. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
In Dongguan, Li is part of a lithium-ion battery in which, given its name, we can see that it will play a central role. Being a light metal that has the tendency to shed its outermost electron, Li generates energy as if its life depended on it. In fact it gives an electron to anyone, even air. Lithium is the metal with the lowest reduction potential (the ability of a chemical species to accept electrons and undergo a reduction in a redox reaction), which gives Li its electrochemical potential. A battery, in very simple terms, is composed of three elements, which may well end up looking like a stack of sheets: one that acts as an anode (copper) or negative electrode and another as a cathode (aluminum) or positive electrode, to which a third is added to separate them that acts as an electrolyte, whose task will be to maintain the balance between the charges of the anode and the cathode and then make the lithium ions flow from one end to the other. Once the cell has given rise to the battery and the battery begins to operate, Li moves much more than in the pumping system, to such an extent that we can say that mobility will be its permanent state. Once the cell has been completed and the battery has been produced, Li passes through many hands that will check its condition and function, until it is reliably confirmed that it is ready to be sent to Shenzhen Desay Battery Technology Company Limited, about seventy kilometers to the south, where the battery as a whole will be assembled under the guidelines required for an iPhone, Apple’s best-selling and most profitable product. From there it is put on a truck again to Foxconn some thirty kilometers to the west, still within Zhengzhou, although it could also have gone to Henan, Hubei, Jiangsu, Shanxi, Sichuan, and Zhejiang, other companies that assemble Apple’s iPhones.
Foxconn, the Taiwanese multinational that has become the world’s largest technology manufacturer and contract service provider, China’s leading exporter, and one of the world’s largest employers, produces about 50 percent of Apple’s iPhones.30 In the production process, parts are assembled from fifty countries and nearly two hundred suppliers.31 The list of countries grows if we consider the suppliers’ suppliers:. neither SQM nor the country to which it belongs are mentioned, nor is the Democratic Republic of Congo, where cobalt, another of the critical elements used in the manufacture of batteries, is extracted.32 Like so many other companies in the Global North, Apple and SQM present various commitments of responsibility toward the environment and the workers with whom they are linked, but the logistic chain that allows them to produce and circulate is so entangled that, from a certain distance, it is not difficult to invisibilize the labor and environmental exploitation. These modes of exploitation are considered externalities, obliterating areas such as the health and welfare of workers or environmental damage, since they have no direct cost to the company, which does nothing but reduce them as much as possible.33 This disregard is part of an ideological framework that sees the material, be it hardware, human labor, or nature, as completely disposable, privileging, on the contrary, the software, the “supposedly” immaterial.34 That is why it does not matter where Li comes from, nor the externalities produced by its extraction.
About 75 percent of the periodic table is represented in an iPhone, and its gathering, the US Geological Survey has shown, is accomplished by acquiring minerals from five continents.35 “Media history,” noted Parikka, “conflates with earth history,”36 histories that are carried in our pockets. If to the resource of minerals we add, on the one hand, the way in which they are extracted and, on the other, the labor conditions required to do so, we will acknowledge that the vertiginous present that technological devices weave and the speed they allow us rests on multiple levels of exploitation. As Parikka has pointed out, “Data mining might be a leading hype term for our digital age of the moment, but it is enabled only by the sort of mining that we associate with the ground and its ungrounding. Digital culture starts in the depths and deep times of the planet. Sadly, this story is most often more obscene than something to be celebrated with awe.”37
Our fingers glide over a screen configured from a mixture of indium oxide and tin oxide. Its light, if it is an LED display, comes from gallium. And thanks to Li, it all works perfectly and for quite some time. At Foxconn, then, the battery of which our atom is a central part is assembled into an iPhone that after going through about four hundred steps is finished and ready to be tested, just like the other 350 devices made each minute.38 If all goes well, the iPhone powered by Li is packed in a beautiful box and stacked on a wooden base where it will wait to be transferred on a truck that will take it to a huge customs center that is next to Foxconn, in order to accelerate both its internment and its internationalization. Li continues for four kilometers in the same truck it left in, heading for Zhengzhou airport, where it boards a Boeing 747 bound for California. Once in the United States, from the airport Li is transferred by truck to Laguna Boulevard in the city of Elk Grove, near Sacramento, where Apple’s logistics center operates. But its stay in the West will be very short, since the iPhone Li is in was already sold months before it was finished, so it will quickly have to follow the path that the market has set for it, although now by sea. It is transferred again by truck to the Port of Los Angeles and shipped to Chile. Chance has now brought Li back, although it does not arrive at the port from which it left but at the Port of Valparaíso, from where it is taken by truck to the Aufbau store in Antofagasta, where the same worker who contributed to its extraction will buy it, thanks to the bonus obtained at the end of a strike initiated to improve working conditions. Li returns in less than a year to the place from where it might never have left.
This circle, which is imaginary but could very well happen, shows the everyday life in which Li has begun to insert itself.
The world seems to have been more accessible when it was not as fully known as now when we can see in detail each of its corners from our iPhones. Through this device, which operates thanks to the energy provided by atoms such as Li, we can buy whatever we want or can ship from and to any continent. We live in a hyperconnected world on a nonhuman scale, logistically designed to sustain global consumption. It is anchored in the way of life that, in order to respond “to those consumers’ most evanescent material needs,”39 is destroying every space it seeks to make profitable. On this planetary scale individual responsibility for the destruction of the planet seems not to be perceived, but, as Timothy Clark has pointed out, “the cumulative impact of their insignificance is worse.”40 And this, if we pay attention, could be understood by asking ourselves about the geological materiality of the devices with which we organize our daily life today, which is equivalent to asking ourselves about their mode of production, circulation, consumption, and transformation into waste. Hence the need to ponder and imagine the Anthropocene from an insignificant atom of lithium.
Li’s fiction has aimed to visualize, on the one hand, the way in which heterogeneous temporalities unfold in a small device and, on the other hand, the effect of the extraction of a key mineral for contemporary technology and especially for a possible energy transition. Minerals such as lithium are billions of years old, and today they organize our daily lives. Smartphones are micro-infrastructures in which the speed at which the digitization of life throws us is interwoven with the slow time of minerals and their subsequent transformation into waste. In three more years, the worker who mined Li will possibly replace his iPhone. His son will use it as a toy that will end up with other debris in the trash. There a collector will sell it to a recycling store that will send it through an illegal recycling chain to central Africa, from where, in turn, the battery will travel to China, the leading country for recycling lithium carbonate. And who knows if one day Li will return again to Chile, but by other routes that we are not yet able to imagine? I hope, in any case, that we do not fail and that Li can rather contribute to a better world, a world in which electromobility is not the goal of its extraction but an effective way to reduce our energy mania.
Notes
Hawking, Brief History of Time, 35 (emphasis added).
nv11543511C12Cochilco, Oferta y demanda del litio. The remaining percentage is composed of zeolites (3 percent in Serbia) and geothermal deposits (3 percent in the California-Mexico border, Germany, and northern Chile).
On the importance of the term plasma, see nv11543511C25rodríguez freire, Los manos de la ficción.
A reflection by the Indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak led me to hold this position: “A little boy on his mother’s lap swings his little leg and sinks into the ground. Because in order to move through the world we live in today, this baby is going to use cleaning products, fabrics, materials that are eating some part of the Earth. Involuntarily, he is already preying on the planet.” Krenak, Life Is Not Useful, 96.
All production and logistics can be found on SQM’s website, https://www.sqmlitio.cl/en/nosotros/cadena-logistica-y-trazabilidad/ (accessed December 17, 2024).
“Seguimiento ambiental biótico,” SQM: Solutions for Human Progress, https://www.sqmsenlinea.com/monitoreo-biotico (accessed December 17, 2024). All translations from Spanish are mine unless otherwise stated.
To review Chinese imports of lithium carbonate between 2017 and 2021, see SMM, “Overview of China’s Exports and Imports.”
“Supply Chain Innovation,” Apple, https://www.apple.com/nz/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Supplier-List.pdf (accessed December 17, 2024).
Apple, after being asked by Amnesty to investigate, is supposedly no longer linked to mines that employ children, but in practice they now work at night, when no one can see them, as is the case in Gokombe. On this subject see Aldekoa, “Congo, el país de la herida eterna”; Aldekoa, “La fiebre del oro azul.”
Let us quickly review some of the chemical elements used and their origin: Argentina and Chile provide lithium for batteries, the same as China and Australia; from South Africa, Russia, and Canada comes platinum, which operates as a catalyst for electronic processes (circuits, capacitors, and boards); from Belarus, Canada, and Russia also comes potassium, used for screens; tantalum, for capacitors, comes from Rwanda, Brazil, and DRC; silver for circuits is acquired from Mexico, China, and Peru; indium, responsible for the electrical conduction of the screen, is found in China and South Korea; tin comes from China, Indonesia, Burma, and Peru, for liquid crystal screens and circuits; graphite from India and China is used for anodes. Only industrial sand, used to produce LEDs, screens, loudspeakers, and vibration motors, comes from the United States. Nothing from Europe, although deposits of sphalerite, a sulfide from which indium is obtained, are also found in Germany, Sweden, and Spain. And oil, known as black gold, which is used to make the plastic that makes up more than half of a device, could not be left out.
