Temporada 1 · Rizomas en Combustión · JVV-T1-14

Plutonic ontology: data mining vs. lithium mining

I A twin abyss under the ground and the cloud

The word “mining” lives in two realms:

Plutonic: drilling the crust, blasting rock, pumping brine to extract lithium, cobalt, nickel.
Digital: boring into databases, dredging clicks, grinding biographies to feed AI and speculate on consumption futures.

Both operations share an ontology: extract a hidden resource, refine it, monetise it, leave a crater—physical or affective—behind.

II Physiology of the tangible mine

Saline lithium (Altiplano)
- 8,000 litres of water per kilo; evaporation that leaves toxic crusts and thirsty alpacas.
Cobalt (Katanga)
- An artisanal pit, children with hammers; metal dust that scars the lung.
HPAL nickel (Indonesia)
- Autoclaves at 270 °C, sulphuric acid; red sludge spat into the sea.

The “green heart” of the energy transition beats on top of grey guts.

III Anatomy of the data mine

Mass scraping
- Bots sniff profiles, shake down forums, archive selfies; the raw material of surveillance.
Prediction models
- Algorithms polish that pulp into statistical gems: propensity to buy, ideological bias, credit vulnerability.
Emotional landfill
- Users exhausted by notifications, conspiracies and phantom ads—heaps of “attentional waste”.

Lithium recharges your phone; data recharges the algorithm that decides what you watch, buy or vote for.

IV Axes of intersection

Pair of vectors	Convergence	Shock
Energy	Data centres demand megawatts; lithium batteries store renewable peaks to cool the racks.	The byte and the ion fight over the same power grid.
Labour	Miners under the Altiplano sun ←→ annotators in click farms.	Both invisible, both underpaid.
Coloniality	The global North designs, the global South supplies the material and the labour.	Data colonialism adds a “cognitive south”: dialects and gestures appropriated.
Waste	Toxic brines vs. dumps of toxic memes.	Water contamination / semiotic contamination.

V Looking for an integrating spark

Double chain of custody
- A blockchain that tags a tonne of lithium and a gigabyte of data: provenance, labour rights, water/energy footprint.
Extraction dividends
- Every electric vehicle should pay a royalty to the salt-flat communities and to the users whose driving routes train the autopilot.
Recursive recycling
- Lithium recovered from ageing batteries; datasets “composted” to bury biases and regenerate privacy.
Trans-mining union
- A coalition of rock workers and data labellers: a living wage, environmental audits, the right to disconnect physically and digitally.

VI Paradoxes of the plutonic pulse

Vampire efficiency — Denser batteries drive up demand for newly mined lithium; compressing AI models devours more GPU.
Cognitive greenwashing — Apps add a “carbon-neutral” label while auctioning sensitive data to political brokers.
North-side revolt — China's export restrictions on gallium and germanium strain the supply chain; the West fears a shortage of chips and green micro-sensors.

VII Coda: digging without emptying the planet (or the psyche)

“Every scroll sinks a drill, every battery spark bleeds brine.”

Plutonic ontology reveals the mirror: mining the Earth and mining the mind follow the same thermodynamic logic: lower local entropy, raise global entropy.
James proposes a brake-and-clutch, not a simple reverse gear: extract less, recycle more, always pay back, audit everything.
Perhaps the real transition will come when the smartphone shows not only how much charge is left but how much Altiplano water and how many human hours it contains.