How Green is Your Smartphone?. Richard Maxwell
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don’t own a smartphone, and over 40 percent of such households lack broadband, a desktop, or a laptop. About 26 percent of low-income Americans with smartphones but no home broadband depend on cellular services for network connectivity. That number has doubled since 2013 (Anderson and Kumar, 2019).
Globally, the smartphone gap between rich and poor regions is shrinking, though inequalities in access and service standards remain (Silver and Johnson, 2018). The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) reports that “[a]lmost the whole world population now lives within range of a mobile-cellular network signal,” and more than half are online (2018a, p. 2). The ITU notes (and promotes) the growing importance of mobile cellular telecommunications for economic growth in Africa, the Arab States, Asia, and Latin America (2018a, p. 4).
But by its own reckoning, there is immense variation within the Global South in smartphone ownership, access to mobile networks, and, perhaps most importantly, affordable, fast, and reliable connections (2018a, pp. 104–6 and 125–30; Alvarez, 2014; Bianchi, 2015). In addition, much of the Global South has a very significant gender gap in access to smartphones (Bhandari, 2019).
Ignoring these obdurate limitations, the ITU, the telecommunications industry, and electronics manufacturers insist that mobile cellular communication will inevitably and beneficially expand from the wealthy countries where they are headquartered. The industry’s hype has an imperious ring: we are heading inexorably toward the next stage of technological and human progress and pleasure. Mobile communication will be foundational.
In the face of such breathless predictions, we should keep in mind that the idea of technological progress has only been around since the nineteenth century, when it was deployed as propaganda “to deny the legitimacy and rationality” of organized opposition to industrial machinery (Noble, 1995). The Luddites, famous for sometimes destroying machines they feared would ruin their livelihoods and the quality of their craft, “did not believe in technological progress, nor could they have; the alien idea was invented after them, to try to prevent their recurrence” (Noble, 1995, p. 2).
They weren’t opposed to new technology per se, only to boosters’ obliviousness to its undemocratic designs and socially destructive deployment. We adhere to that critique in our examination of the smartphone as an emblem of technological progress. The world has been subject to the incessant promotion of smartphone innovations for over a decade. Such rhetoric ignores the central topics of this book: environmental harm, labor exploitation, and the connivance of industry with anti-science propaganda.
It’s ironic that The Economist used an adjective generally applied to the “terror” of running out of petroleum – “peak oil” – to describe super-saturation of the world cellphone market. For both industries have played malevolent roles in our planetary crisis. And both relate to the concept “green” in our title. “Green” can signify displeasure, even disgust. For example, “he turned green” or “it’s indefensible to have green lawns in LA.” But the meaning of the term is more complex than that. It is simultaneously serene, beneficial, disturbing, corrupted, radical, and conservative: green consumption, green certification, new (green) deal, and greenwashing.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the word “pollution” was in vogue to explain environmental hazards. Both a ubiquitous and a local sign, it seemed to be everywhere, yet isolable. The problems it described occurred when particular waterways, neighborhoods, or fields suffered negative externalities from mining, farming, and manufacturing. The issue was how to restore these places to their prior state: pristine, unspoiled, enduring. Pollution was about corporate malfeasance, governmental neglect, and public ignorance, and how to remedy their malign impact. It could be cleaned up if governments compelled companies to do so – and would soon be over, once those involved understood the problem.
But when greenhouse gases, environmental racism, global warming, occupational health, and environmental imperialism appeared on the agenda, pollution reached beyond national boundaries and became ontological, threatening the very Earth that gives and sustains life, and doing so in demographically unequal ways.
A word was found to describe the values and forms of life that encompassed a planetary consciousness to counter this disaster, as per the utopias of world government that had animated transnational imaginations for decades: “green” emerged to displace the more negative and limited term “pollution,” signifying both new possibilities and a greater and more global sense of urgency. Its purview expanded from waterways and work places to populations and the planet.
This beguilingly simple syntagm, “green,” was quickly transformed into a complex polysemic mélange. Today, it can refer to local, devolved, non-corporate empowerment, or international consciousness and institutional action. The term is invoked by both conservatives, who emphasize maintaining the world for future generations, and radicals, who stress anti-capitalist, post-colonial, feminist perspectives. “Green” may highlight the disadvantages of technology, as a primary cause of environmental difficulties, or hail such innovations as future saviors, via devices and processes yet to be invented that will alleviate global warming. It can favor state and international regulation, or be skeptical of public policy. It may encourage individual consumer responsibility, or question localism by contrast with collective action. It can reflect left–right axes of politics, or argue that they should be transcended, because neither statism nor individualism can fix the dangers we confront.
This massive, conflictual expansion in meaning has generated a wide array of instrumental uses. So, green environments are promoted as exercise incentives (Gladwell et al., 2013), encouragements for consumers to use quick-response codes (Atkinson, 2013), ways of studying whether plants communicate through music (Gagliano, 2012), attempts to push criminology toward interrogating planetary harm (Lynch et al., 2013), gimmicks for recruiting desirable employees (Renwick et al., 2012), and techniques for increasing labor productivity (Woo et al., 2013).
In accord with this expansion, Green political parties now address labor conditions, immigration policies, human rights, industrial growth, and climate science (Miller, 2015). That does not mean the origins of the term are lost – simply that the material state of play has required this semantic expansion due to an accretion of meaning over time and space, as the state of our crisis becomes clearer, both to science and to activism. In short, “green” has come to stand for the good life – not merely our own, but that of our fellow animals and our collective descendants yet to be born. It stands for a new solidarity that takes off from climate science to seek a better, more secure future that transcends the usual homilies and shibboleths of individual agency or investor returns.
Climate science leaves little doubt that humans have made the Earth an inhospitable place for life to flourish. The latest, and most urgent, report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that we have about twelve years to make radical changes to our carbon-emitting ways, or disaster awaits (Watts, 2018). The US National Climate Assessment, a project of thirteen Federal departments and agencies, reports that the country faces imminent risks from rising sea levels, wildfires, drought, floods, atmospheric warming, and a weakening of its ecosystems’ ability to absorb carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases (US Global Change Research Program, 2018). Ninetyseven percent of scientists say humans are responsible for global warming and must radically change our behavior to save the planet’s biosphere, ecosystems, and inhabitants. There is a disturbing gap between these urgent warnings from climate scientists and public awareness of the ecological crisis. Equally alarming is the fact that recent surveys show the US population believes only 49 percent of scientists subscribe to the reality of climate change, with over a quarter erroneously discerning “a lot of disagreement” among them (Marlon et al., 2018).
Public uncertainty is a powerful inhibitor of political action and contributes to acceptance of atmospheric warming. But there is hope. Americans are increasingly concerned by global warming, even if most do not understand its causes. Perhaps this anxiety is inevitable as we experience increasingly extreme weather systems, destructive “natural” events, and ecosystem losses associated with climate change (Schwartz, 2019).
There is also a spirited and growing green youth movement around the world