The point of this final project is for you to conduct some independent research about the relationship between technology and inequality.5-6 pages, research paperTechnological supply chain analysisTrace a portion of the supply chain of a technological commodity of your choice, illustrating how your focus on the underlying material processes and structures of digital technologies reveals an important aspect of technology’s political, social, or environmental implications. For example, you could look at the environmental impact of bitcoin mining towns in Montana; PG&E electrical grids in California and their impacts on California fires; how UCSB deals with its used electronics; the impacts of e-waste processing in China; etc. The aim of this analysis is to show how tracing the material paths of technologies reveals previously unseen dimensions of how technology affects society – not just in terms of subjectivity or consumption, but in terms of its wider economies of making, moving, and discarding.Some guidelines for a supply chain analysis. 1) Select a technology or a technological infrastructure (e.g. 3D home printers, wearable technology, the new Amazon Alexa engineer office in Santa Barbara). Depending on which of the options you pick above, you should trace the material or underlying systems of how that technology is employed, used, or disseminated in spatial terms, i.e. how the digita
l ‘hits the ground’ in some way. You should aim to analyze only one component of a complex process (e.g. where cellphone towers are located and how that affects internet access to rural communities, vs. the entire history of the internet.)2) Trace the technology through its various physical and social transformations it undergoes on the way to the consumer, or trace the way that technology transforms social space. The point of the paper is to explore the range of ways in which technologies are an assemblage of labor, legislation, movement, management, production, and cultural signification. It is also to understand the origins, transformations, environmental impacts and labor processes that occur in the making of technologies, or in turn, the way that technologies impact and transform places and people. 3) After learning as much as you can about the aspect of technology you have chosen, examine what the political, social, cultural, and/or environmental implications of their production may be. You should aim to make some argument that reflects on how an awareness of how a technology is invented, purchased, shipped, handled, advertised and sold reveals their complex underbelly, and how these technologies reveal or shape processes of global inequality.4) you should try to explore different dimensions of the impacts and processes involved in the dissemination or production of that technology.