Michael Connor interviews Graham Harwood on Rhizome:

What is the Strowger Switch?

The Strowger switch is invented, in 1888 I think, by Alan Strowger. He’s an undertaker, and the wife of his main competitor runs the telephone exchange.

This is a time before dials, and so you ring up, and you say, “someone’s died, can you give me an undertaker?” And, of course, [the wife of the other undertaker] puts everyone through to her husband, rather than Alan Strowger. Alan Strowger gets really fed up with this, so he takes six months off of undertaking, and designs the Strowger Switch, which enables people to do direct dialing for the first time. So it’s the forerunner really of most contemporary networking, because it automatically puts one person in touch with another.

And after about six years, Strowger goes back to being an undertaker again.

What are the coltan wars?

The coltan wars start in about ‘98, and basically they’re wars to control the supply of coltan, of which 90% comes from the Congo. 4.5 million people have been killed in order to try and control the coltan.

Coltan is the ore that’s then refined into tantalum, and tantalum is in every one of these devices [holding up his mobile phone], you know, every mobile phone and computer.

The Tantalum is kinda eerie. Like we see the ghost of something happening, the “tap tap tap” to show that a congolese connection is being made, but no content. And then all the weavings of history and material that make up the story let the imagination take that “tap tap tap” somewhere… It kinda reminds me of that Alfredo Jaar piece in which a light switch in a homeless center lit up a huge govt rotunda in the city.

Kinda