Richard Maxwell - How Green is Your Smartphone?

1 Cover

2 Front Matter How Green is Your Smartphone? RICHARD MAXWELL AND TOBY MILLER polity

3 Introduction The Book You Hold in Your Hands Outsmart Your Smartphone The Greenest Smartphone is the One You Already Own Calling Bullshit on Anti-Science Propaganda

4 1 Outsmart Your Smartphone The Allure Are We Addicted? Distracted in Traffic What? I Wasn’t Paying Attention Buzzing Through Us and Messing with Our Natural Vibe The Cancer Question 5G and the Internet of Things – The Smog of Radiation Precautionary Principle

5 2 The Greenest Smartphone is the One You Already Own Energy Consumption and Carbon Emissions The Labor Process Part 1: Mining Hazards and Conflict Minerals The Labor Process Part 2: Manufacturing and Assembly The Labor Process Part 3: The Business Model The Labor Process Part 4: Our Global E-Waste Problem

6 3 Calling Bullshit on Anti-Science Propaganda Forewarned, Forearmed War-Gaming Science Shareholder Activism

7 Conclusion: What Next?End Dependence Break the Bonds of the Supply Chain: The Idea of the Fairphone Imbue Supply Chains with Compassion – 164 Years Later Optimism of the Intelligence, Optimism of the Will

8 References

9 Index

10 End User License Agreement

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Axel Bruns, Are Filter Bubbles Real?

Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, How Green is Your Smartphone?

Milton Mueller, Will the Internet Fragment?

Neil Selwyn, Should Robots Replace Teachers?

Neil Selwyn, Is Technology Good for Education?

RICHARD MAXWELL AND TOBY MILLER

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Copyright © Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller 2020

The right of Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2020 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3473-9

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The Economist identified 2019 as “peak smartphone.” The “most successful consumer product in history” had reached four billion of the world’s five and half billion adults. Over 95 percent of Americans owned a cellphone, and smartphones comprised 77 percent of that total. The highest concentration was among educated 19 to 49-year-old city dwellers (Pew Research Center, 2018). South Korea topped the world’s list with 94 percent smartphone ownership, and the trend was similar throughout developed economies, with Japan, Germany, Italy, France, and the UK slowly catching up to US levels (Poushter, Bishop, and Chwe, 2018).

Cultural, social, economic, health, and ecological corollaries of peak smartphone have accompanied this expansion. Umberto Eco reimagines David Lean’s Dr Zhivago (1965) for our own times, recalling: “the tragedy of Zhivago, who after years sees Lara from the tram (remember the final scene of the film?), doesn’t manage to get off in time, and dies. Had they both had a mobile phone, would we have had a happy ending?” (2014, p. viii). The smartphone is a reassuring talisman: we may find ourselves one day on unfamiliar terrain, but can find our way out through its mapping functions. We may wander into a “dodgy” part of town, but can rely on it to communicate our whereabouts to loved ones or the state apparatus (Morley, 2017).

Meanwhile, the companies concerned revel in cell-phone saturation of the world’s ears, eyes, and fingers. Apple says “We believe everyone should be able to do what they love with iPhone.” 1Samsung invites customers to “meet our latest and greatest innovation” – its Galaxy S10. 2Google boasts that the Pixel 3 is “Everything you wish your phone could do.” 3That all sounds rather grand – stylish new phones that give us what we want. Trust Apple, trust Samsung, trust Google. But a 2019 report on the Mobile World Congress announced in a letter to “Dear Visionaries” that the industry was “suffering from a combination of split personality disorder and ADHD” (ABI Research for Visionaries/MWC 19 Barcelona, 2019). That diagnosis derived from the differing interests of two fractions of capital – phone manufacturers versus carriers. And there was no room in this world of visionaries for either party to consider whether their phones were green.