Mining

Mining is an industry that likes to maintain a certain element of distance from the rest of the world. The practice of mining for minerals rarely takes place close to homes. If it weren’t for the sea of high-vis clothing that we now see pouring through many city airports in resource-rich countries such as Australia and Canada, and for the immense importance which the mining industry now plays for the economies of such countries, mining may well have remained in isolation for many decades to come. But the cocoon of safety which this industry has enjoyed from the wider world for so long is starting to crack. Discussions about mining—about the culture of mining—are starting to emerge. We are starting to hear about the environmental concerns, the gender issues, the difficulties of sustainability for companies and employees, the impacts of operations on indigenous cultures, the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, and so on. We are starting to hear stories of mining that do not suit the image of an industry that would no doubt wish to hold on to a (now dubious) reputation as the most successful outcome of man’s emergence into modern capitalist industrialisation; where man is the ultimate controller and everything is his (usually not hers) for the taking. And there appear to be no limits to what we are willing to mine. The literal interpretation of ‘mining’ is the extraction of something from the ground. But in addition to such mining of physical resources, the exploitation of information at large scale – now known as data mining – is also turning into a burgeoning industry, generating new intellectual and economic opportunities while raising complex ethical concerns. Here, too, many of the concerns now raised for resources mining apply, mirroring that debate surprisingly closely. Data mining has developed for some time well outside of public perception, in the labs of Yahoo!, Google, and other Internet giants of the second and third generation; but where it has risen to public attention it is increasingly seen as an uncontrolled and highly aggressive industry undergoing what may turn out to be unsustainable growth. Some of its leading exponents are criticised for dealing with their data sources with little concern for the privacy or ownership rights of those whom those data concern; and a picture of data miners as Mark Zuckerberg-style computer geeks with high skills and low morals persists and is part reality, part caricature. In all its forms, ‘minin