Before coming to Otago, I was a computer technician, and as such I build my own computers. I remember the thrill of unboxing my new motherboard for my last build: an Asus Z170 Deluxe. I marveled at its specs, the quality of its build, how stunning the design is. A thing of pure beauty!
Except that it’s not…
Just like my coffee, chocolate, clothes, my use of the internet for social and commercial purposes, and technologies that support the manufacture, sales, and transportation of these commodities, there is a dark side. My whims and their satiety are not innocent.
I didn’t really build my own computer. I chose the parts, and assembled them to my own customised demands, but I didn’t make the motherboard that excited me so much. As Sy Taffel discusses in Invisible Bodies and Forgotten Spaces, it was built by misery and exploitation, and “there have been instances where toxic materials involved in microelectronics manufacturing have caused serious injury and illness to factory workers”. My motherboard was expensive. I didn’t realise it was THAT expensive. When it finally fails, as motherboards eventually do, the price will rise again – not immediately for me, but for those who must deal with the e-waste it’ll generate.
I fetishised that ‘board. I justified my need for high-specs because I’m also a photographer, and post-processing needs power. We all do it over something or other: I’m cameras and computers, you might be fashion or cars, perhaps. We like to feel contemporary, tricked up with the latest gear… and it’s so good for the economy!
Our culture is a covetous one, and for the right price, we will ignore what we really need to do: make things last longer, repair and recycle, and demand better labour conditions for those who produce these goods we’re convinced we need.
“[W]ithout harnessing the affordance of the attention economy and raising awareness of these issues there will not be widespread demand for collective action redressing these issues”, states Taffel. We need to “bring about positive changes for the often invisible human and nonhuman bodies which exist outside of the privileged spaces of communicative capitalism”, he says. The most powerless people on the planet, who often are forced by necessity into producing what our modernity depends on, need us to stop trying to force products into cheaper and cheaper high rotate throw-away ‘crap’. Demand goods that last, and pay a fair price, so conditions can be lifted for those we’ve kept out of view.
