10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17252
In this paper we will think ethnographically about how material vulnerability is dealt with and conceived of in the practice of informal menders. We explore different practices to “care for matter”, mobilized in dealing with obsolete computers, categorized as electronic waste, and will analyse the epistemic repertoires to acknowledge and intervene in such computers vulnerabilities. In dialogue with STS and Repair and Maintenance Studies literature, we will move from vulnerability as an ontological quality of the world to the enacted properties and epistemic repertoires emerging from concrete “tests”, through which we might learn how vulnerability matters. In particular, we pay attention to three specific vulnerability tests performed by these informal menders, underpinning particular distributions of labour as well as concrete enactments of vulnerability, and how to make it matter. Namely, sensing matter: manipulative practices of electronic waste whereby vulnerability is enacted as a property of materials; setting up informal experiments: informal practices of trial and error whereby vulnerability appears as a result of dis/functioning technical systems; and intervening in obsolescence: whereby sociomaterial orders regulate how material vulnerabilities are redistributed and put to the test.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17252
2
en
Blanca Callén
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
electronic waste
Vulnerability Tests. Matters of “Care for Matter” in E-waste Practices
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
6
Essays
2016-01-29
2023-06-17
2016-01-29
2023-08-03
17-40
TS
Blanca Callén
2015
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17252
17
BAU-Design College of Barcelona. UVIC
2038-3460
2
electronic waste
en
40
Vulnerability Tests. Matters of “Care for Matter” in E-waste Practices
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17252/16116
6
                                                                                           Essay
                                                                                                 17




Vulnerability Tests
Matters of “Care for Matter” in E-waste Practices

              Blanca Callén                            Tomás Sánchez Criado
     BAU-Design College of Barcelona. UVIC!           Munich Center for Technology in Society,
                                                                  TU München
!
     Abstract: In this paper we will think ethnographically about how material
     vulnerability is dealt with and conceived of in the practice of informal
     menders. We explore different practices to “care for matter”, mobilized in
     dealing with obsolete computers, categorized as electronic waste, and will
     analyse the epistemic repertoires to acknowledge and intervene in such
     computers vulnerabilities. In dialogue with STS and Repair and Maintenance
     Studies literature, we will move from vulnerability as an ontological quality
     of the world to the enacted properties and epistemic repertoires emerging
     from concrete “tests”, through which we might learn how vulnerability
     matters. In particular, we pay attention to three specific vulnerability tests
     performed by these informal menders, underpinning particular distributions
     of labour as well as concrete enactments of vulnerability, and how to make
     it matter. Namely, sensing matter: manipulative practices of electronic waste
     whereby vulnerability is enacted as a property of materials; setting up
     informal experiments: informal practices of trial and error whereby
     vulnerability appears as a result of dis/functioning technical systems; and
     intervening in obsolescence: whereby sociomaterial orders regulate how
     material vulnerabilities are redistributed and put to the test.

     Keywords: maintenance & repair; matters of care; vulnerability; test;
     electronic waste.

     Corresponding author: Blanca Callén, GREDITS Research Group. BAU-
     Design College of Barcelona. UVIC, Carrer de Pujades, 118, 08005 - Email:
     blanca.callen@baued.es.




1. Introduction: Dealing with E-waste

    Observing the world around us, we might realise that material vulner-
ability is probably inevitable, a kind of ontological condition affecting all
matter and bodies. Something we might take for granted, be it because of
the passage of time or because of the wear and misuse of our everyday

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
6 (2) pp. 17-40 - ISSN 2038-3460
!
www.tecnoscienza.net                                2015

!
18                                                               Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

things. However, in this paper we would like to reflect on how such vul-
nerability is dealt with and conceived of, or as we will say ‘enacted’ or
made to matter, in maintenance and repair practices. Through different
empirical vignettes drawn from ethnographic fieldwork on informal prac-
tices of mending, reusing, repairing and hacking of electronic waste in
Spain, we will try to explore how such material care – or “care for mat-
ter” – practices mobilized to deal with obsolete computers could also be
thought of as powerful epistemic repertoires to acknowledge, make per-
ceptible and intervene in particular vulnerable matters. More specifically,
we would like to consider these practices as working experimental trials
or vulnerability “tests”, similar to the ones occurring in the implementa-
tion, repair and maintenance of other diverse matters, objects and infra-
structures. We would like to put forward that these vulnerability tests al-
so underpin the ethical and political orders and ecologies that are being
sustained, maintained and produced alongside.
    Hence, this paper seeks to develop a twofold argument: On the one
hand, we seek to foreground the importance of material care or “care for
matter,” and the recognition of vulnerability occurring there, paying at-
tention to the situated knowledge methods mobilized to tackle it, to un-
derstand it and, eventually, to intervene in it. On the other hand, and as
an effect of the previous point, we would like to suggest “mending” as a
particular form of maintenance and repair practice, whereby conservation
is exerted in a more interventional and politically nuanced register.
    The ethnographic material we would like to think about stems from a
research project1 on informal but innovative responses to e-waste prob-
lems carried out in Spain between 2012 and 2014 by Blanca. Considering
the limited results of public policies on e-waste and the relative novelty of
this emerging ecological problem, the aim was to explore the material and
epistemic informal practices arising at the margins of institutionalized
managerial circuits, in the space that seems to appear between a main-
stream consumerist conception of electronics and the e-waste treatment
solutions, focused on recycling. The idea was to understand how these in-
formal experiences might be practically altering (be it resisting, avoiding,
slowing, hacking or transforming) the managerial processing sequence
that goes from “computers” to “e-waste”, but also offering alternative
models on how to make electronic waste matter. Hence, Blanca observed
three different experiences.
    The first one was a group of informal migrant waste pickers who look
for metal pieces and components in the streets of Barcelona2. Living and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
     1
      To know more about the “Politics of scrapping” research project, see
http://politicadechatarra.wordpress.com/.
    2
      From November to December 2012, Blanca visited their warehouse three or
four times a week and used to accompany one of them in his daily activities.
Besides fieldwork direct observation and informal interviewing, several individual
Callén & Criado                                                                                                19
trading, at that time, in an impoverished neighbourhood’s huge squatted
warehouse, they wandered around the city every day picking up scrap
metal and precious objects to sell them to bigger scrap-traders. In the
case of still “useful” computers and electronic devices, they were sent –
either directly or through middlemen traders – to second-hand markets in
Africa through informal but trustworthy networks of contacts in order to
have them repaired and sold again.
     The second and third were located in Madrid3: Obsoletos, a small
hacker research project in Madrid, composed of four friends trained in
different scientific and technical disciplines. Thanks to a grant from the
Spanish Ministry of Culture they organized several workshops and meet-
ings to teach how to rebuild obsolete computers and to create other
“hacks” from discarded components and devices. They also published a
blog4 dedicated to the analysis of different aspects of technological obso-
lescence and to document their creations, such as a soap bubble-maker, a
hard drive speaker or a laser oscilloscope. Despite the fact that their edu-
cational project finished a few years ago, they still blog, collaborate with
other groups and develop some hacks and creations just for fun or the
pleasure of learning.
     And Cyclicka, a self-managed computer repair collective workshop5
that operated, at that time, as an informal learning hub inside a huge so-
cial centre in Madrid. They were hosted there and, as an exchange, they
offered help with maintenance and repair services. Old computers were
donated (mostly by neighbours) and volunteers gave lessons on computer
refurbishment. There was also a weekly repair workshop open to the pub-
lic. The repaired and refurbished computers could either be sold by re-
pairers – who then earned two thirds of the money – or given for free to
social and activist local projects. They could also be given to schools and
educational projects all over the world, thanks to a self-managed social
network called Labdoo6, which puts laptop’ donors, repairers, carriers,
petitioners and receivers in touch.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
interviews were also made with different waste-pickers, a “middle-man” trader
and a local seller who used to make deals with scrap-traders in the warehouse.
    3
      From October to November 2012, Blanca hired a place in the co-working
space of the Obsoletos’ warehouse. However, considering the decrease in their
activities as a group, what was to be observational fieldwork turned into an
ethnographic research carried out through individual and collective interviews
and a documentary analysis of their blog, which operated as an archive of their
past activities and publications about e-waste, hacking and repair of electronic
products. In the case of Cyclicka, Blanca made a participatory observation of their
activities and interviewed different participants of Cyclicka and Labdoo. Also, a
public presentation of the research project operated as a debate and collective
interview with Cyclicka’s crew.
    4
      See http://obsoletos.org/
    5
      See http://blogs.latabacalera.net/cyclicka/
    6
      See http://www.labdoo.org/es
20                                                          Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)


2. Re-enlivening Mending, Tackling Vulnerable Matter

    These practices indeed bear witness to how, since the 1970s, in differ-
ent countries of both the so-called developed North and the Global
South, different collectives have begun to explore other models of design
and production, different habits and everyday routine practices (be it in
communes or in self-organized groups and institutions; see Turner 2006),
building different narratives and manifestos on what it would be like to
inhabit a finite world, thinking of alternative distributions of goods and
community economies (Roelvink, St. Martin and Gibson-Graham, 2015),
talking about other kinds of relationships with the immediate environ-
ment, personal and collective resources and the things around us.
    We use the word “menders” to describe those diverse collectives en-
gaged in different sorts of mending and repair practices, be it through
professional practice or through the revival of traditional crafts and the
articulation of new technological hopes via open-access technologies –
such as “do it yourself” (DIY) and “do it with others” (DIWO) philoso-
phies and other sorts of participatory design projects (e.g. hacker or mak-
er cultures studied by Kelty 2008). Indeed, many of these collectives have
articulated a critique of innovation (Suchman and Bishop 2000) – reana-
lysing Schumpeter’s works on capitalistic “destructive creation” – by fo-
cusing not only on the sheer ingenuity of designers and engineers in mate-
rializing their ideas but also, and more fundamentally, on the practical is-
sues related to the user adoption together with the work of technical im-
plementation and the practicalities of maintenance and material wear af-
fecting the objects and technical systems conceived of by them (Akrich et
al. 2002; de Laet and Mol 2000). To use Ingold’s (2013) vocabulary these
collectives warn us against focusing exclusively on practices of “form-
giving” and direct our attention towards the crucial practicalities of
“form-keeping” in our life with materials.
    Following this interest in maintenance and repair, some research and
social projects, such as the ones observed by Blanca, have already started
to explore the reach and effects, as well as the limits and scope of what
could be called, in line with the recent re-enlivening of craftsmanship and
workshop cultures, “mending cultures” – see also Dant (2010), Oroza
(2009) and Sennett (2008). Many activist projects and experiences that
critique design’s logic of conception and its grandeur are also claiming
mending and repair practices as vibrant social and innovative acts, far
removed from the tedious, and domestic attributes usually ascribed to
them (being considered by some as “chores”). From this perspective,
mending means establishing direct, caring and lasting relationships with
our surrounding material world. For some, these new “craft consumers”
(Campbell 2005), “lead users” (von Hippel 2005) or “creative communi-
ties” (Meroni 2007) are defining a sort of open-source “new DIY age”
(Hoftijzer 2009) or “Post-Professional Era” (Atkinson 2010) where
Callén & Criado                                                         21
mending and repair result in opportunities for social, economic and tech-
nological innovation. Without any doubt, the everyday practices of such
menders constitute particular cultures that could maybe challenge and
redefine, in more creative and sustainable terms, our economies and envi-
ronments as well as our role as active citizens or the way we approach our
daily infrastructure and socio-technical systems, or more generally how
we approach design (Papanek 1971).
    These movements signal, indeed, the emergence of more conscious
and sustainable growth ideals in which the meanings attributed to values,
the definition of matter and design, as well as the concepts of time and
the economy are affected. For instance, Graham and Thrift (2007) note
that perhaps the main imperative in more responsible forms of object de-
sign should be to address “repairability,” hence stressing their potential
for a renewal of economic and industrial practices. Such potential is also
put forward by Gregson et al. (2009) who analyse different practices of
object maintenance at home, thus showing their importance, in terms of
competence, purchasing power or parenthood, for the social lives of con-
sumers. Recent research has also put under a critical lens key aspects of
unsustainable practices of consumption, such as the “planned obsoles-
cence” of technological devices (Huisman et al. 2008; Maycroft 2009).
    What remains clear for many of these projects is that, sooner or later,
more or less intensively, everybody experiences material vulnerability at
some point, revealing the neglected, denied, bracketed or forgotten coun-
terparts of common modern assumptions regarding subjects and objects
(Jackson 2014). Or, “thinking big”: the risks to economic, social and en-
vironmental well-being posed by, amongst other issues, environmental
damage and climate change, the shortage of natural resources, the global
financial crisis, or the increase in impoverished, vulnerable and marginal-
ized populations both in the North and in the Global South, are just
some of the current problematic expressions of widespread social oblivi-
ousness to the conditions of finitude and fragility affecting not only our
organic and social bodies but also the “bodies” of those objects we live
by.
    Many of these themes have also been present in recent STS literature,
such as Bijker’s (2006) reflections on how our contemporary technologi-
cal cultures are underwritten by variegated and polysemic forms of vul-
nerability having both positive and negative aspects: ranging from the
negative vulnerability appearing in the presence of increasing technosci-
entific risks requiring us to develop precautionary principles to the posi-
tive discovery of many forms of grassroots resilience and coping practices
in relation to such risks (Hommels, Mesman and Bijker 2014). Indeed,
many STS works related to feminist literature have been stressing the im-
portance of paying attention to what some philosophers name “ontologi-
cal vulnerability” (Connolly 2013). When talking about subjects, the use
of vulnerability has become central to many feminist students of techno-
science, for it summons an ethical repertoire different to the liberal and
22                                                                   Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

modern conception of subjects as autonomous and free individuals. The-
se scholars rather talk of bodies as fragmentary entities in need of con-
stant careful practices to be “held together”, as Mol (2002) puts it. But
this could also affect how we think about matter: an attention to broken-
ness and decay mobilizes other theoretical and practical engagements dif-
ferent from the ones available when using the concept of “object,” as a
closed-down and ready-made commodity – an object “at hand”, part of
the “furniture of the world” to use the vocabulary of analytical philoso-
phy –. Indeed, we could follow Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s reflections
(2011) to foreground how repair, maintenance or other “care for matter”
practices might be taken as epistemic repertoires addressing matters that,
despite usually remaining hidden or not easily visible, are still crucial and
necessary for the fragile continuity of our common but uneven socio-
material worlds.
    Hence, despite the fact that vulnerability is in many practical situa-
tions easy to identify – such as when a clear breakage happens while using
something, after an accident or as a result of a disaster – it usually emerg-
es out as part of an ongoing process of sensing and practical manipula-
tion, hardly ever recognised at first glance. Hence, although vulnerability
and wear are constitutive of any entity or matter, as many feminists writ-
ers working on ethics of care have long argued (Tronto 1993; Pérez
Orozco 2014; Mol 2008), they are not so evident and perceptible if we do
not pay enough attention. And this is, precisely, what the observed mend-
ing practices around e-waste do: to experiment and identify material vul-
nerability through attentive and careful “tests” on matter. In clear analogy
with what Latour stated in Irreductions:

     […] There are only trials of strength, of weakness. Or more simply, there
     are only trials. This is my point of departure: a verb, “to try.” […] It is be-
     cause nothing is, by itself, reducible or irreducible to anything else that
     there are only trials (of strength, of weakness). What is neither reducible
     nor irreducible has to be tested, counted, and measured (Latour 1988,
     158).

    Building from this, our aim in the following section would be to de-
scribe and read such practices of handling, treatment, repair or mainte-
nance of e-waste as “vulnerability tests”: that is, situated and overlapping
informal experimental settings allowing practitioners to sense and discuss
different meanings, expressions, values and distributions of electronic
waste, enacting particular versions of their vulnerability and how it might
matter. More specifically, the first test on sensing matter focuses on how
matter or functional vulnerabilities are sensed through manipulation. We
also refer to a second type of test, consisting of setting up informal exper-
iments whereby epistemic repertoires and methodical knowledge about
vulnerability are produced. At a third moment, by intervening in socio-
material orders, these collectives can “put to a test” the policy regulations
Callén & Criado                                                                       23
and governmental dispositions that rule, order and distribute our daily
and unequal vulnerabilities. That is, the ontologies and boundaries of
waste appear as multiple and unstable situated effects of performance
(Mol 2002) through explorations, and interventions, very much in line
with what Maintenance and Repair Studies have shown (Denis and Pon-
tille 2014a, 2014b; Henke 1999; López and Sánchez Criado, 2015; Orr
1996; Sanne 2009, 2014).
     Hence, versions of vulnerability are enacted in these experimental
testing activities that produce particular forms of both informal and for-
mal knowledge on matter that might help us think “more carefully” – or
care “better” – about the ecological dimension of e-waste. To conclude,
we will suggest that such vulnerability tests could be extremely important
beyond a concrete analysis of e-waste practices to devise “more caring”
analytical tools, especially in STS, allowing us to think more responsibly
and carefully about how, under which conditions and effects vulnerability
is collectively enacted but, also, how it might be intervened in.


3. Tests: Enacting Versions of Material Vulnerability by
Scrapping Metals and Repairing Computers

    In this section we would like to delineate empirically three “vulnera-
bility tests” taking place in the observed practices. A first test involving
sensing matter where vulnerability emerges as a property of materials
sensed through manipulation. Second, a form of testing that entails set-
ting up informal experiments where vulnerability is enacted as a property
of dis/functioning technical systems. And third, a testing regime interven-
ing in obsolescence, whereby vulnerability is highlighted as a sociomaterial
order related to policy instruments that rule, order and differently dis-
tribute our daily vulnerabilities.

3.1. Sensing Matter: Vulnerability as a Property of Materials

When doing fieldwork with waste-pickers in Barcelona learning how they
weighed the value of their findings, Blanca accompanied Marcel along his
daily work of searching for and manipulating scrap:

    In most of the cases, it requires them both to recognize different kinds of
    materials at hand – especially metals – and to know if the electronic devic-
    es found are still functional. These variables help them to mark the right
    price in negotiating with others. The magnet, as I learnt, is a key tool in all
    these processes: if the piece attracts some materials, it is ferrous. If not,
    you just need to scratch a bit to distinguish brass from aluminium. But the
    best paid is copper, known by its reddish colour. Marcel, the closer in-
    formant who has taught me the trade and with whom I have walked most,
    tells me that it was also very important to know how to “crack open” the
24                                                                   Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

     things you have found: “You never know what you can find inside”. A
     wrong blow on the incorrect part can make the opening and access much
     more difficult, in terms of effort and time. The most difficult task is to
     crack open motors. Whether they come from fridges, washing-machines or
     any other small device, the motor is where the biggest quantity of copper
     can be found. Today he recalled his first day as a waste-picker, when he
     found a motor but he had to sell it as a whole: “At the beginning it was
     very difficult: as I didn’t know what to do to extract the motor. Some-
     times, it took me a week” (Excerpt from Blanca’s fieldnotes).

   But how do they face the unknown? How do they tackle and deal
with strange “new” devices? The weight is the clue:

     Marcel also explains: “Until now, I didn’t know what it was, but if it
     weighs, you have to break it. Because if it is heavy, it may have a big motor
     inside. Because the most important [material] is copper. Then, you break
     it and you can get 2 or 3 kilos of copper from just the motor”. And after
     this, he mutters very quick calculations about how much money he can
     make if he extracts the motor. “[…] But if you don’t even know that this is
     a motor, how can you know that there is copper inside!?”, he concludes”
     (Excerpt from Blanca’s fieldnotes).

   Another day, there was a case of a lamp that turned out to be hiding a
very big piece of copper inside, and of a CPU (see Fig. 1).

     Marcel suspected there was copper inside because of the sound and the
     weight when manipulating it. I had asked him before if it might not be
     better to sell it as a whole. That is, as a lamp. But he shook his head saying
     it would not sell “because it doesn’t “look” like an antique”. If it were an
     antique, it would have some value. In the case of computers, he seemed to
     know much better what to do with them because of the standardization of
     their assembly, components or materials. One of the CPUs he found was
     completely taken apart. The owner told him that it was very old and this
     was evident because of the external “appearance”. The most precious part,
     he told me, was the electricity supplier – because there was most copper
     inside – then the hard disk – either because of its aluminium or because
     some people buy them separately and lastly some small copper pieces
     welded to the motherboard. If the computers or electronic devices were
     still functional, he would send them to the Moroccan neighbour traders.
     The method used to work this out is a pretty simple one: he plugged them
     in. If they turned on, they are OK. Nevertheless, he maintained that every-
     thing is repairable in Africa, quite unlike what happens in Europe. “You
     are used to throwing things out and buying another one”, Marcel said”
     (Excerpt from Blanca’s fieldnotes).
Callén & Criado                                                                        25




Fig. 1 – Waste-picker in the squatted warehouse in Barcelona extracting some copper pieces
welded in a motherboard. Taken by Blanca Callén (14/12/2012) and used with permission.


    In such explorations, waste-pickers tried many different methods be-
fore knowing if a given object was a valuable find or before stating a clear
diagnosis. It would seem clear that all electrical devices have some copper
inside but one never knows how much. The act of weighing things, such
as in the example of the lamp, gives some clues – there might be a trans-
former inside and, hence, also copper. But despite the expertise of people
such as Marcel, for him distinguishing the different kind of metals that
the lamp was composed of required a new test involving the use of a
magnet plus scratching. Through these actions, he could know first the
existence and then the value of something of worth inside the lamp. In
this case, the objective was not to repair a physical breakage or an electric
vulnerability, but to extract something valuable from it.
    These vulnerability tests are related to sensing the object’s properties,
creating conditions to let “matter speak” in order to know about it – to
use Sanne’s (2009) wording in his analysis of the on site diagnostic work
of railway maintenance technicians –. For instance, a great part of waste-
pickers’ tasks consist of checking the things they have found in order to
determine their properties, or to know if the devices work properly or
not, leading to troubleshooting moments where practitioners must decide
what to do, guided by preliminary diagnosis.
26                                                                  Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

    Many of these repair and maintenance situations are indeed sensory
practices (Dant and Bowles 2003; Dant 2010) in which practitioners en-
gage in “[…] rhythmic repetitions of gesture entailed in handling tools
and materials […] set up through the continual sensory attunement of the
practitioner’s movements to the inherent rhythmicity of those compo-
nents of the environment with which he or she is engaged” (Ingold 2013,
115). Indeed, this is what happens when weighing findings or when
scratching and observing emerging colours under the scratch, or when
carefully listening to whistles from the CPUs. To use Leroi-Gourhan’s
words, these waste-pickers’ practices entail “a dialogue between the mak-
er [or repair practitioner] and the material employed” (quoted in Ingold
2013, 115), where material nuances and potentialities emerge. Through
situated and sensuous cognitive practices “in the wild” (Hutchins 1995)
that almost never follow “logical” or “standard” procedures of thought
(Denis and Pontille 2014a), waste-pickers produce a particular version of
vulnerability: entailing practical knowledge over the material weaknesses
and potentialities of those things they are putting their hands on, in order
to know if they can keep on manipulating them or if their ontological sta-
tus must be shifted and altered to continue exploring the life of materials
(see Ingold 2013).

3.2. Setting Informal Experiments: Vulnerability as a Property of
Technical Systems

   Nevertheless, vulnerability tests are not limited to the materiality of
technologies discovered through sensing and manipulation. Sometimes
they also entail opening up apparently “closed” objects or technical sys-
tems (see Fig. 2). The guys from Obsoletos know this well, as it became
evident in one conversation with Blanca, telling the story of a computer
found in the bin:

     Fernando said, “It was only the graphic card that was ruined”. Probably,
     Fernando continued, the owners had thought that since they could not see
     anything it had stopped working. And, as they state, the same thing
     happens with the 90% of the computers that they find. Indeed, the cause
     of their breakdown is not “material” or “physical” but “human”, as they
     say. In that particular case, they just changed the graphic card replacing it
     with a reused one that was extracted from another obsolete computer. “In
     any case, if you rescue two obsolete computers, you have 98% of
     possibilities of getting a working one. If you have three computers and it
     still doesn’t work, you are a jinx”. This is why, as they say, in order to
     repair and refurbish computers, or even for hacking, it is extremely
     important to have plenty of functional spare parts and components. But
     having a huge amount of them, without knowing if they work or not, has
     absolutely no value (Excerpt from Blanca’s fieldnotes).
Callén & Criado                                                                     27




Fig. 2 – Exhibition in La Casa Encendida (Madrid) in May 2005 where Obsoletos displayed
  an opened-up but still running computer to show its functioning to public. Taken from
http://obsoletos.org/2008/05/ordenador-abierto-mayo-de-2005/ and used with permission.



    Indeed, another day in Madrid around that same time, visiting the Cy-
clicka workshop Blanca suggested throwing away a damaged hard disk
from a broken computer:

    Javier, Cyclicka founder, appears out of the blue and tells me not to do it.
    He explains me that they could still use it as an external data hard disk.
    The same happens a while after when collectively exploring a damaged
    CD player, whose motor could still be useful to make or hack new devices.
    Or with several old-fashioned keyboards, whose printed circuits could still
    be used for videogame consoles (Excerpt from Blanca’s fieldnotes).

    This way, a computer is not treated as an entire closed part or stand-
ard object with a unique function, but as a “system” of heterogeneous
components. This is the basis for testing computers’ functionalities as, in
an analogy with a particular version of the scientific method, the isolation
of different variables through “trial and error” becomes crucial for de-
tecting problems and finding solutions. After repairing the aforemen-
tioned computer, that with the damaged hard disk, people from Cyclicka
put a sticker on it with the name of the collective to whom it was going to
be donated. When they came to pick it up, the repairer asked them as
28                                                                     Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

soon as they arrived: “What exactly are you going to use it for?”. “Editing
texts and designing some flyers,” they answered. “In that case, it’s OK”.
Probably, if the future functions of the computer had been much more
complex, the power or CPU’s outputs would not have been enough.




Fig. 3 – Shelves with donated computers, in Cyclicka’s workshop, waiting to be refurbished
or cannibalized. Taken by Blanca Callén (4/11/2012) and used with permission.

    Unlike other devices, the preliminary diagnosis of computers is easier
because of their similarities: all have the same type of components with
their same respective functions, are made from the same kind of
materials, and everyone knew it. Their accumulated knowledge about
standard functions and dysfunctions allowed them to very quickly
identify the reasons for the damage. If the computer’s screen in the bin
was completely black and there had been current coming into the CPU,
then, it was likely that it would have to do with something technical
related to visualization, such as the graphic card. However, there is
usually not just one reason for the failure and there are not straight-
forward ways to know what they are. The connection between the event
(e.g. a black screen) and its potential cause (e.g. graphic card) is a very
direct and common one. In many cases, the diagnosis is also based on
sensory and attentive bodily dispositions by repairers. As Tilan, one of the
waste-pickers who worked also as repairer explained, “Often, you know
what the problem is because of the whistle it makes. You remove what
Callén & Criado                                                          29
doesn’t work and put in components that work. And if it doesn’t whistle
then it works”. But when the failure signal is not so obvious or even there
are no signals, the possible causes multiply. In that case, repairers and
refurbishers manage several hypotheses and, as in scientific trial-and-error
practices, they try to isolate causes, one by one, rejecting options and
clearing up reasons for damage (if possible). Whilst these practices also
entail sensing matter, we believe that here lies another form of
vulnerability test, related to setting up informal experiments.
    Although in much STS literature the experiment as experimentum or
controlled setting is cast off from the world of experientia – or the “sheer
liveliness and messiness of quotidian practices” (Tironi 2014, 116), we
could consider these informal sites and events as experimental settings of
a kind, whereby a particular enactment of vulnerability emerges out. In
fact, most of the recent literature on experimental cultures in STS (Knorr-
Cetina 1999) signals the very particular, situated and non-standard
conditions of experimentation, involving active testing, that take place in
many spaces beyond “the lab” (Gross and Krohn 2005), and which could
help us reframe experimentation as a methodical learning device about
matter using different probes (see Dickel et al. 2014).
    In the case of waste-pickers, if computers seem to work after a
precarious check – i.e. plugging in – it means that they might sell them,
for instance, as a whole to Moroccan traders. If through these tests a
useless or dysfunctional device emerges, its matter is requalified: it is
dismantled for components or materials. A similar thing happens in
Obsoletos and Cyclicka’s cases: once they have checked that the
computer does not work properly, a diagnosis is needed in order to know
which part to change. Except for the motherboard which, “if it is burnt,
then everything is burnt and there is no option of mending. That
[computer] can already be taken to the scrapheap, to be destroyed”,
Tilan, the waste-picker/repairer told Blanca. Afterwards, they might be
“cannibalized” and broken down into disperse spare functional parts that
will be used for reviving other, better machines. But if the processor and
motherboard are in a good enough state and have reasonably good
capabilities – which can be known by the age of production – then repair
might be attempted.
    Through these trial and error moments, if successful, computers
appear as a “system” composed of a myriad co-functioning components.
And in this practical recognition of the computer’s openness and
modularity resides the possibility of reuse, repair or hack. Then, the
computers’ states are transformed from pieces of matter into functioning
devices, from “black-boxed objects” into “modular systems”. Just by
daring to open it and start working on experimental hypotheses about the
role of components and variables, by isolating them and testing different
combinations, the observed participants can manage to reuse their
obsolete computers and parts and transform them into a completely
different functioning entity. Such informal menders are establishing and
30                                                         Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

proposing different ontologies for electronics that emerge in the space
they open between apparently non-working computers and potential
realms of waste. In this sense, they experimentally prove the possibilities
of material existence and resistance: a computer is not valued and
considered here “for what it is, but for what it “might become” (Gregson
et al. 2010, 853). And these electronic components still have a life due to
their ‘fluid ontology’ (cf. de Laet and Mol, 2000), that is, because of the
adaptation, reconfiguration and changeability they allow in practice.
    Isabelle Stengers’s (2010) arguments on the importance of
experiments might be of great interest to apply to these situations:
experiments enable us to pose new questions, whereby if successful we
grant different agencies the power to allow us to say something new about
the world. This is what happens in the transformation of e-waste residues
into electronic or metal resources, or in turning passive consumers into
daring hackers and menders. Indeed, we would suggest referring to the
aforementioned empirical stances as informal “atmospheres of
indagation,” “unfolding”, “multiform” and “ambiguous ambiences”,
“meticulous, open and agonically needed” inquiries (Tironi 2014, 118-
119) whereby material vulnerability is enacted through informal
experimental settings. In these settings discarded computers are
submitted to functioning-tests in which they are re-valued, engaging in
the production of relevant knowledge to hack, mend, circulate or extract
metal from them.

3.3. Intervening Obsolescence: Vulnerability as a Sociomaterial
Order

    By collecting, repairing, refurbishing or taking apart e-waste, the
observed menders and waste-pickers are not only addressing material
vulnerability through sensory gestures or building some knowledge
around breakages and wear through trial and error. Alongside the
aforementioned vulnerability tests, they also, more importantly, engage in
world-making interventions. In putting their hands on these devices and
objects they are affecting and displacing what is understood as the core of
e-waste, that is, obsolescence. And we believe that in these interventions,
a third enactment of vulnerability emerges in the shape of an entire socio-
material order. In other words, a particular regime governing socio-
material conditions that regulates how electronic vulnerabilities are
tackled and distributed – through uneven epistemic repertoires and
divisions of labour, legitimacy and responsibilities – is put to the test.
Sometimes, such vulnerabilities suddenly emerge from a very quick
glance. In other cases, they are disclosed in the shape of the waste-
pickers’ tools. No matter how big, this socio-material order can be
revealed in very mundane gestures:
Callén & Criado                                                                     31
    “[…] there are many people that see [us] as miserable or think that we are
    stupid”, explains Marcel. And “sometimes it bothers me when you are
    working and someone looks at you in a way… as if you were scrap”, just as
    the same waste that they collect (Excerpt from Blanca’s fieldnotes).

   Using the magnet or plugging in the devices to see if they work, in the
case of waste-pickers, become indexes of alternative ways of dealing with
and constructing knowledge on what would be called “e-waste”:

    Most of their tools also come from the streets: “We find them, as scrap.
    But sometimes we have to buy tools such as pliers, because they are not so
    easy to find”, Marcel explained. They also need to use maths and
    economy… and physical capabilities, “to break things”. Because, “if you
    find a fridge on the street, who is going to help you? One day [...] I had to
    take one over my head” (Excerpt from Blanca’s fieldnotes).

    Nevertheless, such knowledge is not necessarily based on formal
education, such as some Obsoletos and Cyclicka’s participants have. In
the case of waste-pickers, they pass through self-teaching processes just
by:

    “[…] being near of people with a higher level than yours […] That’s why
    I’ve learnt [to repair computers]”, Tilan said. He lived with some Eastern
    European housemates whom he learnt from just by “watching,
    watching…”. Like the case of Marcel, who learnt from his times in Libya,
    where he used to work as labourer and also “watched” and “paid attention
    to what the technician did”” (Excerpt from Blanca’s fieldnotes).

    In this way, such epistemic settings speak of their vulnerability, as
illegal migrants, that urges them to take advantage of dumped objects in
order to make a living through irregular methods and informal circuits.
So, leaving aside the fact that many of them do not necessarily know
about electronics, the urgent need for money and the lack of proper tools
or space, can also explain why most of their finds are more likely to
become spare parts and extracted metals than repaired devices.
    But something analogous happens the case of Cycklicka and
Obsoletos, where what was a black computer’s screen for the original
owner became the component of a refurbished computer, or where two
useless computers for their respective owners were decomposed and
recomposed into a completely refurbished computer for a cultural project
plus spare parts. Such interventions and ways of dealing with e-waste
speak of their conditions of possibility and the very particular “epistemic
culture” (Knorr-Cetina 1999) of these mending projects, more or less
closely connected with access to education in science and technical areas.
    Despite the differences between the waste-pickers and the menders’
approaches, as an effect of both alternative ways of dealing with these
materials and technological systems, electronics’ obsolescence is
32                                                              Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

intervened in by displacing its limits, and the “consumerist economy”
category of waste7 is put to the test. Indeed, as one of the waste-pickers
once said: “I’ve never accepted the word “rubbish” because everything
has been found in the street and has some value”. Only if you submit it to
particular vulnerability tests, we could add. Then, while for original
owners those old or broken devices had entered the realm of “waste”, for
these informal and precarious menders a potentially new next shape is
attempted through several different troubleshooting efforts. And through
these scrapping and repairing practices they are revalued and might be
reused as, for example, raw material for industry, in the case of scrap and
metals sold by informal trash collectors, or as old refurbished computers.
    In the same vein as in Garfinkel’s (1967) “breaching experiments,”
the kind of vulnerability tests that are set up when intervening in
obsolescence might reveal underlying orders that we had taken for
granted. They reveal the orders ruling how to describe such things as
computers, and how to manage them at a certain point as waste. And in
doing so, these mending practices put to the test what counts as
“vulnerable” and in need of repair, who has the legitimacy to deal with
our infrastructural vulnerabilities, or under which conditions this can be
done. Such tests reveal to us “who,” “in what way,” “under which
conditions” and “exposed to what risks” is making the fragility and
vulnerability of our everyday material infrastructures8, such as electronics
and computing networks, matter. That is, the sort of epistemic agencies
and knowledge production that can be fostered in alternative repair
practices.
    This way, both daring to take something negligible from the streets
and recovering discarded old electronics interfere with e-waste ontologies
and social legitimations, making space for other possibilities than the
contemporary “e-waste regimes”9 (Callén, unpublished; Gille 2010) that
regulate societal relationships with discarded electronics. With “e-waste
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    7
      Involving end-users’ ready-made conceptions of how a computer functions,
mostly reduced to higher speed computer processing, bigger capacity, lighter
weight and newer aesthetics. These make devices “more vulnerable” – as
unknown, closed-up and inaccessible ready-to-use objects that rapidly turn into
waste – and very dependent on service economy circuits, mostly limited to
guarantees from manufacturers and the expertise of official technical services.
    8
      See Sánchez Criado et al. (2015), for an analogous development of design
experiments showing the vulnerability of their makers and things through the
prototyping of DIY technical aids.
    9
      The utility of this concept lies in framing: “waste regime is a macro-level
concept but is concerned with the production, circulation, and transformation of
waste as a concrete material” (Gille 2010, 1056). For a more detailed description
about the Spanish “waste regime”, in a transition point between a “metal regime”
– where e-waste did not exist as a particular category –, and a promising but
limited “e-waste regime” presenting several failures and margins for
improvement, see Callén (unpublished).
Callén & Criado                                                                33
regimes” we refer to those regimes and orders that rule the
transformation between different ontological states of things and their
circulation along formal or informal circuits and channels. The current
“e-waste regime” that these waste-pickers and menders practices
intervene in is also a very particular legal arrangement. Based on a
European Directive10, the actual managerial system of e-waste pivots
around the Extended Responsibility Principle, which puts producers in
charge of their own products’ environmental effects, engaging them in the
prevention of contamination due to wrongly or irregularly treated
hazardous materials and components. These policies practically
foreground “recycling” as the main solution to the problem of e-waste. In
this equation citizens only play a role as consumers who have the right
and duty to dispose of their electronic appliances using specified circuits
of recollection (partially paid for by them through invisible fees on
purchase). Once the devices are thrown out, their legal status changes:
they are formally considered “waste”, in custody by administration, and
cannot be put back into circulation, no matter if they are still functioning.
The status of this waste can only be changed by the producers, who have
the right to make profit from it, as recycled raw matter. The “selection
and extraction of waste placed in the public thoroughfare” is in many
places considered a “minor infraction” prosecuted and fined11 but also
condemned through scornful, degrading gazes.
    Nevertheless, practices of recovering, reusing, repairing or
refurbishing obsolete devices resist and test the limits of this current
order while pointing to different ones, more connected with circular and
“green” economies (McDonough and Braungart 2002; Ellen MacArthur
Foundation 2013). Hence, they make perceptible some of the
vulnerabilities of our unsustainable patterns and cycles of production and
consumption, re-materializing electronics and problematizing the
attached utopian imaginaries of innovation and progress (even bringing
other more materialistic utopian imaginaries to the fore (Callén,
forthcoming). By putting their hands on them, they intervene and subvert
the electronics’ material-semiotic core: “obsolescence”, the quality of
being out of date, in disuse or devalued due to a depletion or loss in its
original functionality, desirability or value; a key factor in increasing
consumption, fostering innovation and, as a consequence, producing
waste. Obsolescence might indeed be the most powerful mechanism
ruling our economic, industrial and symbolic relations to electronics from
the 1930s onwards (Maycroft 2009, 26). A mechanism that defines the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
      See Official Diary of the European Union (2003).
     10

      For instance, the Municipal Ordinances of Barcelona – similar to other city
     11

hall measures in the country – play an important role here as another legal layer,
charging these illegal extraction activities with a 450,76€ fine (BOPB 2001).
34                                                           Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

ever-increasing need for new objects by stressing their value of power,
speed, novelty, high-performance, lightness or mobility.
    However, these practices of mending might indeed bear witness to
how the capitalist logics of consumption is not entirely deterministic on
our relationships with things and, in fact, can be altered. Proving, in a
nutshell, that the current “e-waste regime” cannot be taken as a final step
but as a disputed, unfinished and temporary system whose effects, at
different levels – human, material, economic or ecological –, should be
contested and mended, not without great effort. Through these practices
obsolescence is put to a test: hence, the kind of vulnerabilities that appear
as relevant are not only related to material properties or to
dis/functioning technical systems, but rather to socio-material orders as a
whole. That is, to particular policy regulations about how material
vulnerabilities are unevenly distributed through power relationships,
different epistemic repertoires and divisions of labour, legitimacy and
responsibilities.


4. Concluding Remarks. Matters of “Care for Matter” in
Mending e-Waste

    Summing up, through an empirical ethnographic account of the
practices of different informal menders – waste-pickers in Barcelona, and
the Obsoletos and Cyclicka workshops in Madrid – we have tried to
understand the important role that “vulnerability tests” play in reckoning
the different meanings, values and distributions of vulnerability through
exploration. Indeed, we have tried to explore three sets of vulnerability
tests, namely: (a) sensing matter: manipulative practices of electronic
waste whereby vulnerability is enacted as a property of materials; (b)
setting up informal experiments: more or less methodical practices of trial
and error whereby vulnerability appears as a result of dis/functioning
technical systems; (c) intervening in obsolescence whereby sociomaterial
orders regulating how electronic waste vulnerabilities are distributed are
put to test.
    These tests might help us reframe how we approach material
vulnerability, not as something to be avoided, dismissed or “repaired”,
but as something to think more responsibly. That is, not incurring in “one
size fits all” obsessive vindications of safety and security (Bijker 2006). In
fact, through these tests – or through other variations and innovations on
them – we are indeed taught how to “think carefully” about material
vulnerability (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012, 204): that is, being attentive to
how vulnerable matters are performed (Denis and Pontille 2014b). As we
see it, carefully thinking about vulnerability could very well point to a
more careful way of empirically and materially intervening in knowledge
production in STS (Munk and Abrahamsson 2012; Ratto et al. 2014).
Callén & Criado                                                          35
Indeed, we would like to suggest an engagement in the production of
what might be called matters of “care for matter”.
    Care, in the broad sense given to it by Joan Tronto as “[…] everything
that we do to maintain, continue and repair “our world” so that we can
live in it as well as possible” (Tronto 1993, 103), involves not only “care-
giving” or “care-receiving” activities, but also forms of “taking care of”
and “caring about”. Very much along the same lines, “thinking with care”
for Maria Puig de la Bellacasa implies developing “matters of care”, that
is accounts that count in: “[…] participants and issues who have not
managed or are not likely to succeed in articulating their concerns, or
whose modes of articulation indicate a politics that is “imperceptible”
within prevalent ways of understanding” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011, 95).
    In our case, we have considered that the main result of the different
vulnerability tests performed by informal menders make perceptible to us
not only some of the vulnerable effects but also the ecologies of practices
(see Stengers 2010) necessary to take care of vulnerable things, such as
electronic objects that have been thrown away. And in doing so, they
show us how to think carefully is closely related to how we might care
about such things, beyond e-waste. In dialogue with STS and repair and
maintenance literature (Jackson 2014; Rosner et al. 2013), these
variegated tests to “care for matter” show not only how the object of
mending might go beyond “materials” but could also include socio-
material orders.
    Echoing feminist care ethics reflections (Tronto 1993), we could say
that the mending interventions of waste-pickers and the Obsoletos and
Cyclicka workshops also test how “care of things” regimes bring to life
and sustain particular sociomaterial orders (Denis and Pontille 2014a),
helping to politicize the regime of obsolescence’s way of impeding that
abject and discarded matters might be intervened in to change their status
beyond “waste”, together with its “differential distribution of
vulnerability” (Butler 2004) and its North-South divides. Indeed, these
mending practices bring about a different nuance to maintenance and
repair going beyond the conservation of given socio-material orders –
repeatedly reinstalled through sensory and attentive negotiations or
attunement with people and materials, such as in much infrastructural
repair work (Denis and Pontille, 2014a; Henke, 1999; Orr, 1996) –. In
deploying their particular vulnerability tests menders intervene and
engage in active alterations, or even subversions, of the vulnerable social-
material orders of electronic waste, showing us powerful ways to care
about material vulnerability, and alternative forms of engaging in its
maintenance and repair.
36                                                                 Tecnoscienza – 6 (2)

Acknowledgements

    Our special thanks go to Jonnet Middleton, Daniel López, David Pontille and
Jérôme Denis, Aviv Kruglanski and Vahida Ramujkic for the stimulating discus-
sions about repair and maintenance practices. Special thanks to the people who
have helped us and passionately showed, through the fieldwork, how to repair our
everyday infrastructure with care and pride: En torno a la silla, Obsoletos, Cy-
clicka and the waste-pickers in Barcelona. We want to give special thanks too to
Becks Smith for her generous and sharp English proofreading. This work has
been possible thanks to the economic aid from the Spanish Sub-Program for
Postdoctoral Mobility in Foreign Centers (2011) to attend Lancaster University,
in the case of Blanca, and the Alliance 4 Universities Postdoctoral Fellowship at
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in the case of Tomás.


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