Bummed out about technology

Editorial

By Simon Eskow, Auckland | Thursday, 10 November 2011
People living near a factory in Suzhou, China have been suffering.

The plant, owned by Catcher Technology, makes aluminium cases for Apple laptops.

Two kilometres away, in Fenghuang City, a woman recently complained to IDG News Service of an odour keeping her awake at night. She described it as a mix of chemical fertiliser and burning plastic.

She, along with many of the 7,000 people in her town, is scared for her health. Hope that something will change any time soon has diminished.

The problem has been going on since 2008. Despite the company fixing a faulty exhaust system, and a recent temporary factory closure, the odour remains.

When I read this story I was faced with a thought the has recurrently troubled me for many years. What is the true price of the things that I have and who (or what) has to pay it?

I find no comforting answer to the idea that my desire for a Macbook — as useful as I’ve found it to be; as handsome as it is — is, perhaps, somewhat responsible for someone else’s suffering.

This is not to single-out Apple as a particularly malevolent perpetrator of this or that evil on the world. I own a Macbook, and I love my iPad.

This isn’t even to single-out hardware vendors in general, either. There are myriad products that I admit to taking for granted, that represent some potentially negative consequence to man or nature that is never calculated into the price I pay at the pump, at the supermarket, anywhere, really.

But as the editor of a publication about the business of technology, hardware does press heavily on my mind in this matter.

When mobile devices started proliferating in the States, I resisted the trend. I was happy with an answering machine on my POTS. But this was really about the vanity of being a nonconformist, a hipper-than-thou pose for which I found justification in a New York Times article. The article described how the mining of Columbite-tantalite, or coltan (a mineral used in mobile handset screens) was fuelling violence and misery in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

But I finally gave in and purchased a cellphone a couple years later, conveniently setting aside my former moral outrage.

My point, I guess, aside from my being a hypocrite, is how easy it is to allow certain aspects of reality to become abstractions when they don’t have a direct impact on us. Even if that self-interest is the convenience of looking at Facebook on iPad while sitting on the sofa because you don’t feel like walking five feet to do it on your MacBook, or checking email during a particularly long sojourn in the bathroom.

A participant in a recent debate coined the term ‘cloud washing’ to describe how any service can be called such if it’s delivered over the internet. He compared this to the green washing of a few years before.

This parallel troubled me as well. You’d like to think that the natural degradation and questionable labour practices associated with the selling of technology could be mitigated, at least to some degree, free of the suspicion that some vendor’s green claim is just another bit of marketing, in this case to assuage latent guilt.

The rare earth minerals that are used to create devices that make business and life easier are running out. It’s difficult and expensive to reclaim them. The plastics involved in certain form factors are based on oil, which has probably reached its production peak. It seems obvious that business as usual cannot continue indefinitely, forcing us to adapt. Whether we like that adaptation or not is another question. Some day, the suffering that seems too abstract for us to pay for now, could be ours to contend with as well.