Golden Futures

In the region of Abitibi, in Northern Quebec, lies the Malartic gold mine. The largest open-pit gold mine in Canada, it is a vast expanse of land. The pit itself is approximately four kilometres wide, and the entire mining field is twenty-three square kilometres. Standing at its edge, one can envision what it might mean to inhabit another planet—for this is an inorganic environment. We may speak of the Earth in metaphors of care, life, and love, but in reality almost all the Earth, beneath the very thin strata of top-soil upon which the biosphere rests, is violently antipathetic to carbon-based life forms. Metals and minerals quickly turn acidic and poisonous when they enter the biosphere. Life-sustaining substances like water and air are the very reagents that facilitate oxidation, turning rocks into agents of acidification and destruction of the biological environment.

We have not, however, like the Greek myth of King Midas, yet learned to curse these gifts borne from this most valuable metal. It is said that Midas turned his own nourishment into gold, realizing that it was a curse. But in contemporary mining what might appear as something to choke on, mainly the toxicity of mining to life, is eternally deflected through chemistry, logistics, and derivation.

The concept of the chokepoint here takes numerous valences. First, there is the literal choking of life through the accumulation of materials that are toxic to the ecology within which the mine exists, terminally threatening the surrounding ecosystems and potentially inducing a literal stoppage point to life itself, or at least certain forms of life. The second form is the limit to the resource itself, as the gold will inevitably run out. The mine is therefore a mortal creature, and one whose life expectancy is short. The third chokepoint lies in value, and capitalist accumulation. The end of gold induces particular concerns for markets and for speculation, creating an ongoing hunt for new reserves and a drive to hoard existing resources. Fourth, exploration and extraction are themselves constant chokepoints in the productivity and profitability of the mine. Exploration costs the most, guarantees nothing, and takes time. All these locations of stoppage, slow-down, and accumulation—of life, economy, and resources—gesture to the future present tense of the mine. The mine has many temporalities—geological, technical, financial, and organic—and extraction industries mitigate and use these multiple temporalities, and even jams, to evade the ultimate endpoint: resource depletion and extinction. The mine is thus an assemblage of chokepoints—limits to resources, to sustainability and environmental health, and to logistics—that are averted through a series of technical tricks that manage time and flow to avoid choking on all the waste that mines continually produce.

In the course of this brief essay, I will lay out the different yet deeply entangled strategies by which encounters with terminal market failures and catastrophic environmental events are deferred through a new logic of ubiquitous computing merged with algorithmic capital. Zones. Logistics. Optimization. Datafication. Derivation. These are the steps by which extraction infrastructures avoid choking on their own accumulated detritus of heavy metals and toxins by turning it into leveraged futures and credit-debt swaps. Data and Derivation have become global computational strategies to avoid terminal failures of security, ecology, and economy, while also turning the future into a hedged bet on life on Earth orchestrated through our machine systems. In the face of Earthly finitude we turn to informatics overload.

“Quebec is for mining, what Switzerland is for banking… a free trade zone,” the Malartic geo-engineer in charge of dealing with monitoring hydrology, water acidity, and environmental toxicity confessed to me. There are, indeed, many mines along the Canadian shield, a vast expanse that stretches across Canada up to the Arctic. Millions of years ago a glacier swept out the top levels of the earth, leaving the previously deposited minerals and metals exposed and ripe for the picking. But the picking is no longer quite so ripe. “There is no more easy mining on Earth,” the lead mine reclamation geologist at the site, Dr. Mostafa Benzaazoua, informed me. All metals and energy sources on Earth will be depleted, he predicted, by 2155—even if we account for envisioned improvements in technology. As a result, mining has become about chemistry and derivation. Mining literally uses chemical processes to bind with the ore and remove it from the waste rock. The same is true for most other metals, using different agents—in the case of gold, cyanide—to extract the metal from the rock. When ore deposits were better, other processes such as heat could be used. But in today’s world, all extraction has turned to chemistry. In turn, there is a massive and increasing number of tailings ponds, which are not only toxic but also sites of further “mining” through new chemical and technical processes that might derive more ore or recover other valuable metals and minerals in the waste. All of this must happen within the relatively short time that the concessions last, driving a constant effort to derive more value from the site. The mine works 24/7 every day. No stoppage allowed. At the same time, gold is literally used to ground many credit derivative markets, literally becoming a derivative itself. In the face of potentially destabilizing shortages, we turn to logistics.11I partook of this experience as part of a research studio course I organized this past August through Concordia University in Montreal, with Pierre-Louis Patoine from Sorbonne Nouvelle 3. This material is taken from visits to Malartic from 2–5 August 2017. Dr. Mostafa Benzaazoua, a mine reclamation expert from the University of Quebec at Abitibi in the Research Institute in Mining and Environment, was our guide and collaborator. I am grateful to his assistance and that of his colleagues in doing this research. On 4 August we were given a tour by the mine staff, whose names are being withheld as a matter of privacy.

Despite the barren terrain, this mine is also lively. And in our technical age, there are many forms of life. The mine is constantly in action, moving in rhythms that Marx might have labeled “metabolic.” Operating without stop, the mine extracts 55,000 tons of rock per day. This rock is moved, tested, and then separated into ore rock and waste rock. The rock with ore will go to a processing plant that will remove the gold, while the rest is immediately laid to rest in the some twenty square kilometres of tailing ponds that lie behind the installation. The mine is a logistical masterpiece. Vast machines lumber through the space carrying their rocks in stately, well-timed rhythms. These large behemoths are perfectly syncopated through the Caterpillar software platform that tracks their movement, load, and speed, while monitoring their loading, unloading, and maintenance times. Each truck costs three million dollars, each tire is eleven feet high and costs $42,000 to replace—and each tire lasts only about eight hours of driving. The entire mine has a short life. It is anticipated to only last another fifteen or so years (its entire life will have been twenty-seven years), as the concessions cannot be extended and the ore is running out. It is therefore necessary to optimize every operation. These time scales seem paltry in comparison to the geological formations the mine has unearthed, and the vast new territory it has produced in both time and space.22All these numbers were recounted by mine employees on 4 August 2017.

Mines, I was informed, are no longer seen as stable sites, but rather as time-bound organisms, with life spans and afterlives. Since the 1980s when Canada began requiring some efforts at mine reclamation and environmental clean-up (that ironically timed with the moment that major mining corporations benefited from structural readjustment, neo-liberalism, and expanded operations in the Global South), the design of mines has changed radically.33The holding companies at Malartic Mines are Agnico Eagle and YamanaGold. YamanaGold is a Toronto-based company that dates from 1980 and has holdings in Brazil, Canada, Honduras, Nicaragua, Chile, and Mexico. Agnico Eagle is an older Canadian firm founded in 1957 that expanded in the 2000s into Finland and Mexico. Both do not trade directly in futures markets, as a result of a market collapse in the early 2000s, but they do sell to banks that then directly use this gold to hedge debt in both central banks and investment banks. See https://www.agnicoeagle.com and http://www.canadianmalartic.com. Mine design must now take into account both the global supply chain and markets, in real-time, and the life cycles of their localities. As Dr. Benzaazoua explained, mines now must submit proposals for reclamation, and plan for their clean-up when filing their request for a concession in Quebec. Their engineering and design plans from the start already assume their impending death and resurrection, and in this there might arguably be an opportunity—for good or ill—as we can begin to imagine what it means to inhabit a toxic and damaged planet.

Mining companies today thus seek to do everything they can to prolong the lifespan of mines, from turning tailing ponds into new resources for construction materials, to figuring out if waste rock might not yet offer a different mineral or metal that might be extracted. There is a constant search through mining detritus in the hope of turning “waste” into a resource. The process must be constantly optimized in the present and into the future. As a result, the mine, Benzaazoua tells us, is a space “of flows”—of capital, machinery, information, and materials. It is also a space of transformation, about chemically extracting the ore from rock. The process of extracting gold using cyanide leaves its own dangerous residues that must be carefully managed. This chemistry is literally alchemical, transforming rock into gold—and thereby producing markets.

Over ninety percent of what is mined at Malartic, and globally, will be (re)placed underground, into bank vaults. These standing reserves of unused gold will serve as a hedge bet against more volatile derivative and futures markets. Circulation seemingly capable of subverting or diverting this terminal chokepoint, the finitude of gold in the Earth, to mining activity through speed.

The biosphere may be in grave trouble, but it seems we are hedging our bets. The conduct of the mine mirrors the very logic of gold, which has historically always been used to hedge a bet. Even long after the demise of the gold standard and the Bretton Woods accords, gold remains the standard benchmark for security in producing value; gold markets as of 2010 were among the largest debt-hedging markets in the world. It is estimated that the derivative markets are betting on over ten times the annual new mine supply, and by now far more than official reserves. The markets exponentially exceed the reality of production, setting prices and making bets far into the future.44The difficulty in pricing metals (and oil) as a result of derivatives markets has even led to mines owned by Agnico Eagle to advertise that they do not sell futures. However, while the mine may “guarantee” the price of its gold, the owners clearly do not—as evidenced by the size of gold derivative and futures markets. As of 2015, gold markets were considered an extremely important portion of the sovereign debt markets. As the 2008 market crash made evident, there are markets where debts and credit are swapped, betting on futures, potential returns, or even default. Gold markets overshadowed national debt markets, such as the Spanish debt market of the time and that of most nations, and far overshadowed even equity investments and other “hedge” entities like Exxon Mobile and Apple.55Dickson Buchanan, “Just How Big is the Gold Market?” 5 August 2015, https://schiffgold.com/commentaries/just-how-big-is-the-gold-market. See also Henry Sanderson, “Traders Warn on Gold Liquidity,” Financial Times, 18 May 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/0b68ba36-f3f3-11e4-a9f3-00144feab7de.

To achieve this seemingly Sisyphean hedge-bet, we transform space into logistical movements grounded in a quite literal connection between data mining and metal mining. The mine is covered by a network of information-gathering sensors that monitor water, humidity, temperature, winds, atmospheric conditions, geological stability, and topology. The datafication of this space represents the effort to monitor the location of ore, to secure the mine’s structural integrity, and to guard the city within which the mine is located, as well as the boreal forests and many aquifers that are always at risk of coming in contact with the materials, metals, and minerals being removed from the Earth with such speed. The mine’s floor is lined with coring stations that attempt to detect those locations where gold is in abundance—in this case being one ppm, which is to say one ton of rock is dug for one gram of gold. Such low amounts of ore demand constant blasting and excavation to produce anything worth selling. By the end of the mine’s life it will produce 580,000 ounces of gold, and 700,000,000 tons of waste rock.

All the gold, I was told by the mining operatives, that has ever been mined in the world could fill two Olympic swimming pools. There is a constant search for new veins of ore, a search that occurs through the air as well as through core sampling. First airplanes and satellites provide initial information on rock formations, structures, and features that might identify resource fields through electromagnetic surveying, ground-penetrating radar surveys, and often satellite imagery. There are also sensors on the site that monitor and assess every movement and shift of the Earth. So much digging and blasting demands an extensive array of sprinklers that constantly keep the site damp in an effort to control particles and dust from contaminating the air. The mine is unusual for being located within a city, and therefore its immediate impact on human health is of paramount concern. The mine also boasts research stations where geo-engineers attempt, perhaps futilely, to figure out how to guard all this waste rock from water, which will subsequently turn the sulfides and other minerals and metals in the rock into acid. This would have lethal consequences for the surrounding boreal ecosystem.

Among the geo-engineers with whom I spoke, the discourse is medical, and the practices are surgical. The skin of the Earth that has been peeled back is to be covered by a new molt of electronic information, which literally evaluates and manages the membranes between the mine and its world. The mine is a contaminating entity, whose worst effects will simply be contained through the speculations of geo-surveying, the imaginaries of mine reclamation, and the omni-presence of capital.

Facing the limits to planetary resources—and maybe life itself—we have turned to ubiquitous computing, geo-sensing, and algorithmic trading. To avoid these terminal chokepoints of resources and toxins, the mine must conquer the limits of space by deriving value from the future. Derivatives are financial instruments that allow for a certain amount of something (mortgages, minerals, oil, anything) to be traded at some point in the future at an agreed upon price. One can also, for example, bet on the cancellation of an order, or some other event changing the future price of some commodity or security.66The result is that the size of the derivatives markets far overshadows the actual world’s gross domestic product, now exceeding it by twenty times. These markets have grown exponentially, by twenty-five percent annually over the last twenty-five years. Randy Martin, “What Difference do Derivatives Make? From the Technical to the Political Conjuncture,” Culture Unbound 6 (2014): 189–210. Futures derivative markets make a double move. They bet on the change in value of some entity (you can even bet on the weather) between the present to some future point against another change in value of some other entity. But what makes the market interesting is that you can sell your bet before the event happens. In doing so, one “hedges” the future. And gold is the longest standing hedge bet. You can pull out when you make money irrespective of what the future might hold.77Melinda Cooper, “Turbulent Worlds: Financial Markets and Environmental Crisis,” Theory, Culture & Society 27, no. 2–3 (2010): 167–90. Time no longer equals money, but rather money derives from bets on relations between times. One can swap the debt, for example, on a package of mortgages, or of entire countries, for gold futures, without the homes being sold, or nations paying or defaulting on their loans. You are betting on temporalities of two different markets, looking to bet on fluctuations in price between the two markets. The forms of time here are speculative, not predictive. One does not need to calculate the final risk of the action of investment, but only manage the time of the action. Calculable risk has now become just a raw uncertain factor to be managed through algorithmic financial logics that mirror the big data infrastructures of the extraction industries themselves.

Such understandings of time, of course, demand that we inquire about the relationship between derivation and extraction. This logic takes its built form in a discourse of reclamation, optimization, and “sustainability” that now dominates mining and energy industries. The value of the mine is constantly being transformed through changes in the mine’s function and extractions of value from what before was waste. We are constantly sifting through the detritus of our destruction of the environment in search of increments of changing future values to bet on. What is true of gold, is also true of most other extraction industries, especially oil markets.88Already by 2002 oil markets were the second-largest futures market and one of the largest derivatives markets in the world. “Derivatives and Risk Management in the Petroleum, Natural Gas, and Electricity Industries,” Energy Information Administration, U.S. Department of Energy, Washington, DC, October 2002, https://sites.hks.harvard.edu/hepg/Papers/DOE_Derivatives.risk.manage.electric_10-02.pdf. We are turning the planet into a derivatives machine.

As future risk transforms into uncertainty through derivation, high technology—and particularly “smart” and “ubiquitous” computing infrastructure—has become the language and practice by which to imagine our future. Instead of looking for utopian answers to our questions regarding the future, we focus on quantitative and algorithmic methods, logistics, and how to move things, not where they end up or measuring the impacts of these actions. We have turned data into gold, and vice versa, not metaphorically, but in practice. The result is the development of forms of financial instrumentation and accounting that no longer (need to) engage with, alienate, or translate extraction from a historical, geological, or biological framework of value. Our planet is now a hedged bet, where finitude in life is converted to surplus information for future speculation.

This situation may not be hopeful, but it should not lead to despair. We must simply find forms that do not match the vacant speculations of our present. Environmentalists and Indigenous land protectors and human rights activists in Canada right now, for example, are also seeking transformation by attempting to change risk valuations on pipelines and other infrastructure projects by insurance companies, in order to increase the interest rates, and therefore the price of the project to more accurately reflect reality. Increasingly, many of us recognize that transforming the nature, time, and regulation of the bet is the source of a difficult, but possible, alternative future. Despite being seemingly abstract and uncoupled from the present, derivatives also drive human actions.99Shiri Pasternak, “Infrastructure and Grounded Authority,” unpublished talk, Concordia University, 11 October 2017. People build homes, take mortgages, build pipelines, and mines, and subsequently suffer when these markets move. By tying together disparate actions and objects into a single assembled bundle of reallocated risks to trade, derivatives make us more indebted both to each other and to the planet itself, which is often the literal matter of such exchanges.1010Martin, “What Difference do Derivatives Make?” 193. The political and ethical question thus becomes how we might activate this increased indebtedness in new ways that are less amenable to the strict market logic of neo-liberal—and perhaps now neo-extractionary—economics, all of which is algorithmically driven. All futures are bets, and our task now is to open those risk assessments and extractionary hedge bets to the uncertainty that faces all life on Earth.