ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two interconnected topics. It discusses the Persian carpets as a signifier of a diasporic ethnicity, elaborating further on the "net" and the "work" involved in the production, circulation, and consumption of rugs in cyberspace beyond Iranian territorial borders. The chapter explores the mediation of technologies of weaving and its disconnection from the modern invention of computers through two occurrences: the militarization of the carpet industry and its techniques of production, and the separation of weaving from the networks of knowledge and power. It deals with the carpet to diasporic spaces as well as online homepages to illustrate how new meanings are invested in the carpet as it becomes a site of ethnicity further removed from the labor. Reconnecting carpets and computers is a move away from the separation between the commodity, the labor, and the technology toward uncovering the convergence between productive labor and digital labor in their power to create, communicate, and transform.
