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ABSTRACT
This article explores the industrial sacrifice zone of Endicott, New York, which in 1924 became the birthplace of International Business Machines Corporation and quickly established itself as an industrial launching pad for the production and innovation of modern computing technologies. Drawing on ethnographic research and taking a micropolitical ecology approach, I consider industrial decay and community corrosion key agents for understanding the sedimentary record of neoliberal “technocapitalism” [Suarez-Villa, Luis. 2009. Technocapitalism: A Critical Perspective on Technological Innovation and Corporatism. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press]. In particular, I explore here how the flip-side of local narratives of deindustrialization and economic sacrifice are other narratives of coping and navigating community decline. These local sacrifice zone narratives, I argue, expose key dimensions of surviving corporate neoliberal and technocapital sacrifice.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 According to Suarez-Villa (Citation2009, 3-4) “technocapitalism” is used to describe a “new form of capitalism that is heavily grounded in corporate power and its exploitation of technological creativity … The generation of technology in this new era of capitalism is therefore a social phenomenon that relies as much on technical functionality as on the co-optation of cultural attributes.”
2 Jason Moore, for example, has radically rethought the economy–ecology relationship, suggesting that “‘The economy’ and ‘the environment’ are not independent of each other. Capitalism is not an economic system; it is not a social system; it is a way of organizing nature” (Moore Citation2015, 2).