Slavery | The Geological Basis of Slavery and Digital Warfare – El Salto

We only know of two types of mining: diesel-based and mining carried out by slaves. Diesel production has dropped from 27.5 million barrels per day since 2018 to 22 in 2022 (20% less), equivalent to the production of 2005. There are currently around 50 million modern slaves in the world. According to Walk Free (ILO-UN), these are people who are subjected to forced labour, sell their bodies or are forcibly married. About a quarter are girls and boys. A high percentage work in the textile sector, are sex objects or live poorly in mining driven by Chinese, American and European capital, which has gained strong momentum in the high-precision weapons sector in recent years. Our so-called green transformation is fundamentally based on the efficiency of its supposed digital tools, but it is also military. To extract the minerals that are fashionable among innovative ministries for digital transformation, widely dispersed geological resources are needed and there is no artificial intelligence that can compete with the most efficient way of mining in such conditions: human hands, including those of a child.

To process a tonne of copper at a rock concentration level between 1% and 3%, an average energy intensity of between 100 and 150 GJ is needed with traditional diesel-based mining, but as the concentration level drops and from 0.5%, energy consumption has quadrupled, processes have become more expensive and we are forced to crush mountain ranges to extract the precious metal from the earth. Since 1975, the amount of rock that must be crushed to extract a tonne of copper has increased 14 times. In the case of uranium, coal or rare earths, the evolution is similar, since we are talking about non-renewable resources.

So, the rise of recycling is once again justified by an exclusively economic logic that will leave aside “unimportant” things like health, freedom or human dignity. The secondary impact on our favorite dustbins: the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, ecosystems and living beings, including our human bodies, has for decades been a headache for the rich societies we have built with hydrocarbons and fossilized solar energy as key geological materials. These allowed us to start. A bottomless pit for our health systems. But the origin of this growing impact outside and inside our bodies is hidden from those who must continue to consume to boost the economy.

The geology of precision weapons and the performance of massacres

According to data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), 38% of the reserves of the so-called “rare earths” on our planet can be found in China. Before the Covid 19 pandemic ordered by the WHO, this country supplied 80% of these geological materials to the West in 2019. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has 75% of cobalt. For example, cerium is used in batteries and most devices, with displays and magnets made of neodymium and samarium that withstand the high humidity rates and extreme temperatures required in modern military equipment. They are used in the wings of fighter aircraft, as guidance for missiles, aircraft engines, submarines and tanks. They are essential in satellite communications, new radars and sonars, systems with jet turbines, advanced precision weapons combined with lasers and satellites, and the entire ecosystem of communication and information networks based on artificial intelligence applied to the Internet of Things. This new technological paradigm, basically military, whose demonstration we see day by day in Ukraine, Sudan, Congo or Palestine, is based on the mining of rare earths, copper, cobalt, lithium, for the storage and distribution of energy and information. Which requires greater integration and interconnection of devices with greater concurrency, from centralized to peripheral processing.

Three-quarters of the amount of cobalt present in our digital devices, our infrastructure for transforming and capturing “clean” energy, and our precision weapons industry – with the help of Chinese funds and Western capital – have turned the Democratic Republic of the Congo into one of the poorest and most slave-owning countries in the world (74% of its population lives below the poverty line). But that same world remains indifferent because apparently we are unable to see or do not want to see any other way to participate in the dream of green growth, public or private, and that is, the one borne by those of us who are still alive and who cannot yet make decisions about their lives because, well, they are either small children or not yet born but already in debt for a lifetime. Paradoxically, the reduction of environmental requirements is the new pretext to promote the “green economy”, in the implementation of wind or photovoltaic megaprojects and in the mining that underpins their deployment, with its transport, energy, digital and military infrastructures that accompany a transition. If it cannot be deployed from virtually or openly totalitarian regimes it is doomed to the greatest failures.

The objective: to promote investment and subsidize a shift in the extractive model for the benefit of large investment funds and a complicit political class that collects a few crumbs.

Rebellion and disobedience, moral obligation

In Congo, hundreds of thousands of people work in this skilled economy euphemistically called artisanal, including thousands of so-called “cobalt children” as young as five or six years old. Young children dig in surface scrapes to collect whatever they can and, especially girls, sift through and pick through. When they find a bag of dirt and stone they have to separate the cobalt-containing parts from the rotten and toxic water puddles. Then, as they grow older, if they are teenagers, they start digging tunnels manually, which requires more strength, but without support, ventilation or protection they usually collapse and die buried alive. There are thousands of children and teenagers who work this way alongside their parents; many are already orphaned. The book Cobalt Red by British Academy of Sciences Professor Siddharth Kara (ed. Captain Swing, 2024) describes hundreds of these kinds of experiences that underpin our digital transformation.

Barcelona is one of the few cities that has studied the phenomenon behind closed doors. Around 3,200 scrap metal dealers or recyclers work to earn around 20 euros a day by collecting metal. Most are migrants with irregular status, around 80% Africans without ID. The circular economy promoted by the EU with opinions like SC/048 is being ignored by institutions as is the invaluable recycling work carried out by these marginalised people without housing or labour rights. Scrap dealers and intermediaries recycle around 400 kg of metals, aluminium, copper, mixed metals or steel per day for an average of 0.19 euros per kg of iron or 5.6 euros for clean copper. These are data from the Wastecare Report, 2024, of the University of Barcelona. “Are we willing to keep slaves to achieve better recycling rates?” asks Federico Demaría, professor of ecological economics at the University of Barcelona and co-author of the report.

There are many voices calling for a stop to this kind of social and environmental injustice, as it directly collides with the 17 SDGs of the ill-fated 2030 Agenda, fortunately, there is also a backdrop of civil uprisings and growing popular protests, one of the best known of which is the youth exposed to civil disobedience that institutions try to hide and silence with mechanisms like the gag law. Internationally, the new Luddites are flourishing, working as a network to stem this psychopathic tide of war against life. Community groups like the LAPD Stop Spying Coalition are organizing to destroy the algorithms of police programs. The growing campaign to ban government use of facial recognition software has won significant victories in California, Massachusetts, and Germany. Amazon employees sabotaged their own company to stop the authorities from selling said software. On the streets of Hong Kong, protesters implement techniques to evade the algorithmic gaze by using lasers that confuse facial recognition cameras or knocking down “smart” streetlights equipped with surveillance equipment. France’s Les Solèvements de la Terre mocks the gendarmerie as functioning as a metamorphosed critical mass. Indifference and lack of radicalism towards the war declared against our lives is a way to justify genocide for “economic development”. But this is no longer possible, not even undermining the critical foundations of what we have considered acceptable to date. Rebellion and disobedience have become moral obligations for every being who still considers itself human.