Synthetic Lives: The Futures of Mining

ongoing

The global extractive industry is undergoing three critical transformations: first, the advent of synthetic or lab-grown minerals, impacting the mining industry and the extraction of resources from nature; second, the creation of fully automated mining operations, seeking to render human work redundant or accessory to that of bots, drones, and other autonomous machines; third, the introduction of digital data and disintermediation technologies for mining management and traceability. Taken together, these innovations anticipate a future of mining that replaces nature with synthetic substances, human labor with intelligent machines, and intermediaries with unmediated accountability. This project responds to these changing conditions with a novel conceptualization of the emergent relationship entangling synthetic and natural objects, humans and machines, material and digital spaces: Synthetic Lives. It asks: What is the role of humans and non-human nature in increasingly synthetic, automated, and digital mining economies? This research innovates by bringing together three related areas of scholarly enquiry: i) resource materialities, to destabilize the divide between nature and culture; ii) mediation and technology, to problematize the separation between humans and machines; iii) algorithmic governance and digital transparency in mining sites, to untangle how material and digital properties are co-produced. Through a multi-sited and multi-methods study, it contributes to these fields of research in three case studies: synthetic laboratories, automated mines, and digital and data-driven mining processes. Interlacing these three foci, Synthetic Lives assists policy-making on environmental, employment, and social-digital issues, and inaugurates a debate of anthropological import: What are the political, epistemological, ecological, and economic consequences of a future that promises to be entangled in synthetic properties, autonomous machines, and digital technologies?