All the News That’s Fit to Print How the Media Hide Undocumented Workers

All the News That’s Fit to Print
How the Media Hide Undocumented Workers
By Aviva Chomsky
In our post-modern (or post-post-modern?) age, we are supposedly transcending the material certainties of the past. The virtual world of the Internet is replacing the “real,” material world, as theory asks us to question the very notion of reality. Yet that virtual world turns out to rely heavily on some distinctly old systems and realities, including the physical labor of those who produce, care for, and provide the goods and services for the post-industrial information economy.
As it happens, this increasingly invisible, underground economy of muscles and sweat, blood and effort intersects in the most intimate ways with those who enjoy the benefits of the virtual world. Of course, our connection to that virtual world comes through physical devices, and each of them follows a commodity chain that begins with the mining of rare earth elements and ends at a toxic disposal or recycling site, usually somewhere in the Third World.
Closer to home, too, the incontrovertible realities of our physical lives depend on labor -- often that of undocumented immigrants -- invisible but far from virtual, that makes apparently endless mundane daily routines possible.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176099/tomgram%3A_aviva_chomsky%2C_a_newspaper's_crisis_reveals_unreported_worlds/#more