One of the ways we can make AI legible is to trace the largely unseen life cycle of a tech object, from the mine to the dump. Physical materials make their way around the globe, are refined, combined, and eventually disposed of and separated, passing through many hands along the way. For example, e-waste, the people who live with it, and its pollutants are invisible to us here in the U.S. When we trade in our old smart phone for a newer model, the old one seems to disappear into thin air.  But it doesn’t – it gets shipped to a country in the global South like Ghana where it lives a whole other life.

Each year, migrants in search of opportunity make their way to Accra, the capital of Ghana, from northern Ghana and neighboring countries like Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. Thousands end up in Agbogbloshie, a makeshift settlement within Accra nicknamed “Sodom and Gomorrah” by locals. In order to survive, they make their living by scavenging metals from the e-waste dump there and selling them to scrappers. The informal recycling system is mostly tolerated by the local government, but this way of life is still precarious and dangerous. Workers are regularly evicted without warning, forced to watch powerlessly as their homes are demolished with their belongings inside them. Government officials cite the toxicity of the dump as the reason for the sudden evictions. Often these redevelopment projects are funded by donors in the name of helping the scrappers, but these projects exclude the voices of the people they are supposed to assist. Like e-waste in our country, the residents of Agbobgbloshie are treated as disposable and invisible.

Life in Agbobgbloshie highlights how artificial intelligence infrastructure is inextricably intertwined with migrant labor and environmental issues, ever haunted by the ghost of colonialism.