Billions of phones are discarded every year, but not all of them immediately become waste – many phone discards are working or repairable equipment that can be repurposed. Even though reusable and repairable equipment will become waste either in whole or in part at some point, before that, it can be a site of creativity and innovation, support livelihoods and employment, access to technology, technological upgrading, skill and knowledge transfer, and material inputs for productive industry.

Many broken phones end up in phone farms – curious sociotechnical operations consisting of discarded smartphones simultaneously connected to a central power source and network. By utilising sophisticated software applications, phone farms can centrally manage their constituent devices and execute repetitive tasks at scale – such as social media engagement hacking, mobile game hacking, or cryptocurrency mining.

A sort of guerrilla infrastructure, phone farms require elaborate auxiliary maintenance. This includes cooling systems and power management techniques to handle the demands of continuous operation, mobilising transnational networks of electronic discard trade, technological know-how, and opportunistic entrepreneurship. Widely practiced across emerging economies, phone farming contributes to the scaling of automated media systems while producing unexpected consequences for our media and information environment.

Drawing on preliminary fieldwork in Southeast Asia, this talk will trace the typical workflow of a phone farm and the extensive transnational networks of people and technologies on which it relies. Challenging the general misconception that phone farming is a fringe and ephemeral practice on the edges of the digital economy, this talk will demonstrate how phone farms are an integral – if often invisible – part of the global platform economy. Through a series of provocations on the geography of economic participation, the interconnection between the formal and informal economies, and the global distribution of hardware, the talk invites the audience to rethink the complex and often hidden infrastructural networks underpinning our digital lives.

Speaker's bio

Dang Nguyen is a Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society (ADM+S), located in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Australia.

Dang holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and a Master of Science in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford, where she was a Chevening Scholar. She has been a Fox Fellow at Yale University and a Majority World Scholar at Yale Law School. Dang also serves as a media and technology expert on the International Panel for the Information Environment (IPIE).

Dang studies the social implications of media and technology by using methods from a range of disciplines and looking beyond Western contexts. She is currently researching the informal sector within platform economies across Southeast Asia. During her visit at King’s, Dang will be presenting preliminary findings from her ongoing fieldwork in Vietnam on the proliferation of phone farms and other informal platform activities. More details about Dang’s works can be found here.