Olly Zanetti: iProblem
As people clamber over themselves to get the latest iPhone, there is a bigger issue at stake than just mindless consumerism.
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In the pub last Saturday night, me and a friend raised not (just) our glasses but our iPhones. Not in some celebratory gesture because we had cunningly managed to wangle advanced access to Apple's latest offering. Instead it was a sign of solidarity as one second generation iPhone user to another.
Now I'm no luddite, I love the astonishing leaps that technology has made over the years. Since I was a teenager, the internet has gone from something which existed only in the minds of technicians at American military research centres to a facility which lets me tell the world exactly what I'm thinking when gazing out the window of the bus. As well as a zillion other much more useful things besides!
But as a population, we've begun to lose the plot. A new phone, a novel new device, and the media machine goes into overdrive. People, once rational, descend into a frenzy. They've got to have it. And even if you don't subscribe to that desperate purchasing panic, you're forced to upgrade soon enough anyway because obsolescence is now built-in as standard. I do exactly the same things with my new laptop as I did with my old one: I type, I go online and I watch DVDs. But with all the software updates, the old laptop couldn't keep up. Yet all I seem to have gained for my £800 are some snazzy graphics when I minimise and maximise windows. It's nice but it has hardly changed my life.
This is about more than a few consumer-obsessed suckers getting fleeced by hardware manufacturers. Companies like The Gap have had their day in the public eye about the sweatshop conditions their workers endure to bring us relatively cheap goods. Things may be far from perfect but public pressure has forced their practices to improve. But the electronics industry is only just beginning to get the same treatment, and all is not well. For example, poor conditions at the company Foxconn, which makes parts for Apple and Dell amongst others, have been linked to a rash of suicides amongst its workers and it isn't the only company whose practices are questionable.
What's more, the environmental effect of building ever more complex consumer electronics is pretty dire. As parts get ever smaller and more precise, the need for specific metals that can stand up to such high technical requirements is growing. The name these substances are given – rare earth metals – says it all. There aren't many of these metals about and those that do exist are hard to get at. All over the world, swathes of land are being decimated in order that a few privileged consumers can write status updates with the latest pieces of kit.
The days where people will buy new TV because of a football tournament or a new phone because the CEO of an electronics firm told them to buy one have got to end. We need a bit of balance. After all, when civil strife and environmental collapse fully rear their heads, what are we going to do? Tweet about it?
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iProblem (text) by Olly Zanetti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (3)
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It's like our civilisation is running on steroids and will only be halted by a massive coronary ie. destruction of the ecosystem on which we depend.
The film The Road is looking incredibly prophetic right about now.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....56.html