April 21, 2025

Two trees grow, gnarled and resolute, against the last standing brick wall of Radio Corporation of America’s (RCA) former factory in Taoyuan, Taiwan. In the subtropical rain and sun, grasses and white flowers have overtaken bare patches, edging over ruins of foundations. Pollution-monitoring wells surround the ghosts of buildings that once held sterile white rooms where dark-haired young women in white lab coats hovered over microscopes and circuit boards. A red shrine to the local land god sits next to a green metal sign along the fence that says “Former RCA Taoyuan Plant, Groundwater Pollution Remediation Site.” 

The success of TSMC, the world’s leading manufacturers of advanced chips for AI, would be incomplete without RCA. In 1992, after RCA was acquired by Thomson Consumer Electronics, the factory shut down and operations were moved to Guangdong, China, a whistleblower alerted a local legislator that RCA had been dumping carcinogenic waste chemicals into the Taoyuan site. 

Down the street from the former factory, I visit the RCA Workers’ Care Association office. Inside, former RCA worker Liu Ho Yun (劉荷雲) leans on her walking cane and points to a large piece of kraft paper on the wall, her dreamscapes sketched out in marker. In addition to polluting the soil and groundwater, RCA exposed workers like Liu Ho Yun to toxic, carcinogenic chemicals including trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene/tetrachloroethylene (PCE) as they built circuit boards and electronics, causing unprecedented rates of cancer and other metabolic disease — resulting in long term injury and death in its mostly female workforce. In 2004 remediation of the highly contaminated site in Taoyuan began, and in 2005, former RCA workers, with the support of the Taiwan Association for Victims of Occupational Injuries (TAVOI) began a decades long legal battle for recognition of and compensation for their workplace harms. In their organizing, RCA worker-activists formed alliances and solidarities transnationally, with former semiconductor workers in Korea, through Supporters for the Health and Rights of People in the Semiconductor Industry (SHARPS), as well as the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition in the US. Alongside the ongoing legal case, the former workers have begun a new chapter of activism: petitioning and asking for the former site, once remediated, to become a public memorial park instead of a planned shopping mall.

“RCA Workers Group Hopes to Build Memorial Park,” February 27 2025, TYE News.

The work of the RCA activists in this campaign leave us with a number of lessons as we navigate the current moment of AI hype and its attendant infrastructural expansion in the face of planetary polycrisis. 

The fog of cold wars

The case of RCA reminds us of the global, diffuse, and discursive soft militarisms that persist, in the long temporal reach of Cold War imaginaries. The first Cold War, from the late 1940s onwards, was fought by the US not just through the visible, hard militarisms of nuclear weapons building, draconian security measures and the expansion of the defense industry. It was also waged through soft militarisms — seemingly benevolent acts such as direct aid to newly postcolonial countries at risk of falling to communism, or through a combination of technological and economic development programs like the “Green Revolution,” designed to counter the “Red” Revolution. The Green Revolution was supported by a multitude of actors — from agribusiness to philanthropies and the US government — and it brought a range of agricultural technologies such as high yield seeds, machinery and agricultural chemicals to newly post-colonial countries, emphasizing the Truman administration’s recognition of agribusiness as a “key front” in the Cold War, as well as the need to win “hearts and minds by winning stomachs.” Technology transfer projects propagated by the US followed a similar template, where American technological goods were sent directly to other places; the US government, American philanthropies and corporations all created incentives and programs for developing countries to manufacture and build their own technologies for export or domestic consumption. Both these types of development agendas had severe, long lasting social and ecological consequences, in particular for small farmers and working class people. It was this climate of Cold War soft militarism that set the conditions for RCA in Taiwan.

RCA factories in Taiwan were set up during the Cold War in the 1960s, when the US placed Korea and Taiwan under the US Seventh Fleet for military protection, rendering these places as blocks to Chinese communism and sites of economic development and manufacture for exports to the US. Technology transfer relationships between RCA and the Taiwanese government were foundational to the creation of the semiconductor industry in Taiwan today. In the 1970s, the Taiwanese government created the Electronics Research and Service Organization (ERSO) which sent about 40 engineers to be trained by RCA. Upon their return, these engineers would set up Taiwan’s first IC fabrication facility. 

The environmental tragedy of RCA shows how securitization in “cold wars” manifests beyond military escalation. The current discursive Cold War 2.0 or AI arms race between US and China has created an atmosphere of authoritarian control in both countries alongside economic nationalism, which proposes domestic economic development at all costs. We can read the power of such narratives in the ways the AI race has securitized semiconductor manufacture as a matter of national security in the EU, the US, Korea (home to the second biggest producer of chips globally, Samsung), and the “silicon shield” in Taiwan. The first Cold War solidified the ties between economic and technological development as a point of national security, and normalized development by any means, despite social and environmental consequences. Within the unfolding Cold War 2.0, it is important to learn from the past. As in the historical case of RCA in Taiwan, sweeping state policies around the imperative for chip manufacture should prompt questions like: Who will bear the weight of harm? Who profits? Who gets to leave the site of contamination and who must stay?

Nature is not separate from technology

The contaminated RCA site and the death of workers from chemical exposure underscore the false binary between “the environment” versus “the digital.” The screen you are reading on can only materially exist because of nature and the environment. Unsettling the natural versus artificial binary is paramount in both building and understanding sociotechnical systems, as it falsely renders humans and our technologies outside of, or counter to “nature” or “the natural.” As William Cronon reminds us, constructions of “nature” and the “the natural” as forms of pristine wilderness unspoiled by humans and our machines are not only re-instantiations of settler colonial romanticism, but counter to the very goal of ensuring environmental justice for all beings. The dualistic tendency to position civilization and technology as forces of progress that “tame” the chaos of nature has deep historical roots in the West, as Carolyn Merchant, Vandana Shiva and others have written about. Such a dualistic ideology has historically been propagated by forces of capital expansion that seek to dominate or eradicate other ways of knowing, seeing, and being in the world. The health and thriving of workers is deeply connected to the health of the local environment — especially as workers often live in the areas surrounding a work site. Some of the earliest advocates for environmental justice in Silicon Valley’s semiconductor fabrication pollution included union organizers, former workers, and occupational health activists from SCCOSH; they saw past this binary and recognized that environmental health is occupational health. 

Although they don’t seem like living objects, circuit boards and semiconductors are sophisticated feats of engineering that bear strong ecological parallels to an industrially farmed, genetically engineered tomato. To make chips, high quality silica (mostly from North Carolina) is engineered and transformed, with the semiconductor fabrication process utilizing an unprecedented amount of water and energy — the Hsinchu Science Park, home to TSMC’s main fabs for example, use 160,000 tons of water per day. According to a recent report by the Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology, in places like Taiwan, climate change will intrinsically impact semiconductor production, creating conditions where technical solutions like wastewater recycling will struggle to address issues around resource crowding. 

Chemicals are also used extensively throughout the chip manufacturing process, and the semiconductor industry has had a long track record of polluting human and non-human bodies — whether in Silicon Valley or in Korea, causing high rates of cancer, leukemia, and reproductive disorders. As Lee Jong-Ran, one of the cofounders of SHARPS, told me, “The semiconductor industry is a very toxic industry. We already know from Silicon Valley that it’s toxic, but it doesn’t just stop there — it all came down to East Asia, to Korea, Taiwan and Japan, and then it just becomes passed down to cheaper labor and countries with less safety regulations…this production, this whole procedure in production itself is the problem.”

The amount and full list of chemicals are often opaque, as industry claims it is necessary to protect trade secrets. Since the 1980s, the number of chemicals used in the chip manufacturing process has grown. Recently, researchers and organizations like CHIPS Communities United have pointed to the concerns around PFAS (forever chemicals) being released into semiconductor wastewater streams. The continued use of PFAS runs counter to warnings from scientists that we have crossed a dangerous planetary threshold.

The power of alliances and resistance

The legacies of RCA’s pollution and its former workers’ approach to transnational solidarity in organizing despite multiple axes of empire remind us that, in the words of Brian Hioe, “we all live in the belly of the beast” — and that mutual aid and organizing are essential to our survival. While concepts such as the “AI supply chain,” “infrastructure,” and “waste” are helpful heuristics and offer a shared vocabulary for understanding the environmental impacts of computing, these concepts have their own embedded political and social valencies. Simply addressing negative impacts in one “part” of the supply chain or one piece of infrastructure obfuscates the greater dynamics of militarism and forms of tech-driven development that view life as expendable. Emerging frames around “metabolic media” (or even geologic media) may prove helpful, as the ecological impacts of semiconductor manufacture in an AI boom are not restricted to spatial or temporal boundaries of nation states. Whether it’s RCA or Samsung’s illegal dumping and discharge of waste, we see corporations claim a “right to pollute” through legal mechanisms that were meant to protect life.

Corporations, markets, and globalization are not the only entities that can figure alliances transnationally and across time. In response to the announcement of TSMC’s increased investment in the US, Po-Jen Hsu of the Environmental Rights Foundation recently called for global democratic solidarity, saying, “Our alliance should be grounded not in short-term economic interests but in the shared values of democracy and freedom.” There are many moments in a long lineage we can look to as models of resistance: whether the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition that worked in transpacific contexts, the environmental groups that worked to address Hsinchu Science Park industrial pollution in the 1980s and ’90s, the artists and academics looking at water use by fabs, the farmers and fishers who contested wastewater discharge plans in the Central Taiwan Science Park and Kaohsiung — and of course, the former RCA workers. 

Back at the RCA Workers’ Care Association office, Liu Ho Yun points to each image she drew of her night time dreamscapes, telling me about each one: premonitions of the deaths of her colleagues, people dressed in white, an old friend appearing as a peanut soup street vendor with a strange, long fingernail. Weeks later, after I leave Taiwan, I have anxiety dreams about telling her story wrong, dreams of tsunami floods out the window, an intense search for clean water in a bare concrete building. In this time when nationalism supersedes state function, we must remember our own dreams, and imagine a future other than one where technological development is premised on overcoming the earth’s limitations. After all, without a sustaining world to live on, microchips and semiconductors mean very little.