Tempted as I am to join the masses that have forked over their hard earned money to acquire the latest tablets or smart-phones, I think I will stay on the sidelines for the upcoming holidays. I’ve learned enough lessons from past experiences not to fall prey again to the never-ending quest to be “cool” or to appear so.
The increasingly shorter cycle of upgrades means that the cool factor lasts only so long and then you are left with yesterday’s hip - a ‘faded rose from days gone by’. It is not the software upgrades that bothers me; it is the obligatory hardware ‘upgrade’ or, to be more exact, ‘wholesale replacement’ that is most worrisome. What we pay for the shiny and new gadgets upfront belies the fact that there is a huge hidden cost when obsolescence is a mere 12 months away.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not a Luddite. To the contrary, I’m quite in tune and at ease with all things digital. I’m not anti consumption either – if you don’t have a cell phone and you need one, go and buy one that you can afford but make sure it will serve your needs (not your vanity) for a good three years at the minimum. And don’t forget to look for one that comes with an easily replaceable battery. The “smarter” they are, the more you’ll drain down the charge, and the more often you have to recharge, the sooner the battery will exhaust its useful life.
Bleeding edge technology carries with it a huge social cost. To keep us on the upgrade path, companies that design the cool gadgets have to increasingly move more and more of their production to low cost countries with weak labor and environmental regulations where more can be extracted at a lower cost. They know that if each new generation of their product were to cost more, the rate of adoption of the new gadgets would be much lower. With a mobile phone market nearing saturation (i.e. nearly everyone who needs a cell phone has one), the phenomenal number of iPhone 4S sold on the first day it was released was heavily influenced by the unchanged price and the continuing subsidies by the carriers. As consumers, we all like the lower prices or more features for the same old price and what we don’t see, such as the loss of blue collar jobs, we can easily ignore. We want decent paying jobs but we also want our toys cheap.
It is easy to turn and point a finger at China for our economic woes but the social ills resulting from our demand for bleeding edge technology do not just stop at our doors. The lower costs extracted by the manufacturers (or their masters here in the US) has forced suppliers in China to keep wages low and they can only do that by making their workers turn in longer hours and demand more output for the same pay. It took multiple suicide attempts at Foxconn in Shenzhen, China, ending with twelve deaths to bring the plight of those Chinese workers to the world’s attention. Yet, if the Chinese were to refuse to continue production under such poor conditions, the manufacturers could easily turn to another country where labor is still plentiful and life is cheap.
The Earth’s population passed the 7 billion figure very recently and, abstract as that number may seem, it points us to the fact that we are ever closer to the possibility of exhausting the natural resources we’ve been endowed with. Apart from the fossil fuels that are used to generate power for the production plants, bleeding edge technology gadgets often require the use of ‘rare earth’ minerals to produce. The mining, refining and recycling of rare earth minerals have serious environmental consequences if not properly managed – toxic acids are required during the refining process and radioactive tailings are the by-products of the processing of certain rare earth ores.
As strange as it may sound, each new iteration of a bleeding edge technology product is proof that the prior model was imperfect and incomplete. Our readiness to gobble them up despite the short lived sense of satisfaction demonstrates a new form of addiction – a need for speed, a need for yet another toy, another app, another cheap thrill, another bragging right. We don’t buy a new TV or a new home stereo every year so why do we need to buy a new smart-phone every year?
We are not more productive as a result of our new toys but we have clearly become more self-absorbed and more remote from one another. Despite the prevalence of more and cheaper means of communicating with one another, we communicate less. We’ve lost the art of being social and connecting with others. We’ve turned to social media as a cheap substitute to meeting with our friends in person or spending the time necessary to get to know another person’s point of view. We plaster our one sentence views on Facebook and we don’t care if others might disagree – we can always delete unfavorable comments. We no longer seek to honestly discuss or debate the issues we face with the objective of finding common ground solutions. We’re given to sound bites and we don’t take the time to fact check claims and wild accusations before we mindlessly pass it on to our friends.
Unfortunately, there are no magic bullets to put an end to the problems that have been slowly building up through decades of a consumption focused economic model.
The introduction of the concept of a Carbon Tax (which is different from Cap and Trade) is possibly a step in the right direction. At a minimum, it will help make the true cost of any product more evident. However, adoption and implementation of such a concept will take more than a herculean effort to bring about.
Some countries have consumption based tax systems known as either VAT [Value Added Tax] or GST [Goods and Services Tax] which are or can be made into progressive tax systems to help account for and offset the hidden social costs of products and level the playing field. Progressive taxes work if it is put to good use. Singapore is an example that comes to mind. It levies multiple layers and forms of taxes on car ownership (see insert) but that has allowed the country to put into place one of the best road network and public transportation systems in the world.
It is great to have the most up-to-date technology but we must not let ourselves be seduced by it and let it turn into an addiction that will bleed away our future or, more accurately put, our children’s future. It is time to press the pause button on upgrades and reflect on the destructive side of our consumption behavior and our addictions.
