How Green is Your Smartphone?

Richard Maxwell, Toby Miller

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509534739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Every day we are inundated by propaganda that claims life will be better once we are connected to digital technology. Poverty, famine, and injustice will end, and the economy will be "green." All anyone needs is the latest smartphone.

In this succinct and lively book, Maxwell and Miller take a critical look at contemporary gadgets and the systems that connect them, shedding light on environmental risks. Contrary to widespread claims, consumer electronics and other digital technologies are made in ways that cause some of the worst environmental disasters of our time – conflict-minerals extraction, fatal and life-threatening occupational hazards, toxic pollution of ecosystems, rising energy consumption linked to increased carbon emissions, and e-waste. Nonetheless, a greener future is possible, in which technology meets its emancipatory and progressive potential.

How Green is Your Smartphone? encourages us to look at our phones in a wholly new way, and is important reading for anyone concerned by the impact of everyday technologies on our environment.

ONE
Outsmart Your Smartphone

Set your smartphone to Airplane Mode and find a spot without WiFi transmitters nearby. If possible, read under natural light. We’ll explain why these precautions can outsmart your cellphone.

The Allure

Our love for smartphones is more durable than the phones themselves. They are fragile, so we encase them in protective plastic. Their batteries fade just when we need them. And as they age, they stop learning and growing – their younger siblings are deemed more knowledgeable and powerful. Everything about them should question our faith. Yet we remain true believers that cellphones’ DNA is wonderful, and new generations necessarily bring major improvements. We have embraced wireless mobile technology so fully that many of us feel adrift without it. By some estimates, Americans touch their cellphones 2,617 times a day (Naftulin, 2016). Twenty-six percent of all users are constantly online, and 39 percent of 18 to 29 year-olds (Perrin and Jiang, 2018). We depend on cellphones for dates, phone numbers, and meeting times. We assign mental chores to them and trust they’ll remember what we cannot (Wegner and Ward, 2013). Users even focus on “Battling a Monster of a Location-Based Augmented-Reality Game While Descending Stairs” (Ma et al., 2019), so touching is their faith that phones will protect them while enabling stupid conduct.

Social scientists have mixed feelings about the social impact of smartphones. On the one hand, they can broaden channels of communication, enhance personal safety, integrate family life, strengthen peer groups, facilitate rendezvous, and allow users to produce content, create their own languages, and add special features like customized cases and ring tones – all of which makes us feel unique and important (Castells et al., 2007). Bourgeois economists see these benefits spreading worldwide, with effects that allegedly include energized markets in the Global South, “the complete elimination of waste,” and massive reductions in poverty and corruption (Jensen, 2007).

This utopian alchemy of truth and beauty endows mobile telephony with magical powers that allow users to transcend geography, sovereignty, and poverty (Ogan et al., 2009). This magic is said to make consumers into producers, free the disabled from confinement, encourage new subjectivities, reward intellect and competitiveness, link people across cultures, and allow billions of flowers to bloom. In a post-political cornucopia, consumption is privileged while labor and the environment are forgotten.

On the flip side, phones may deepen rather than diminish social fragmentation and cause a novel form of inequality, because without them, you lack access to the new sociality of the twenty-first century – constant connection (Castells et al., 2007). Some studies suggest that the frenzy to stay connected negatively affects relations between friends and lovers, increasing insecurity and dissatisfaction (Lapierre and Lewis, 2018) and diminishing interest in sex (Chang, 2016). We might love cellphones more than we love each other.

It’s significant that the world’s leading media ratings company, Nielsen, celebrated the fact that: “Africa is in the midst of a technological revolution, and nothing illustrates that fact [more] than the proliferation of mobile phones.” Then it casually noted that “more Africans have access to mobile phones than to clean drinking water” (Hutton, 2011). This vision of technological progress cannot conceal the environmental racism (or environmental neo-colonialism) at its roots. When roughly half the population of Africa lacks potable water, the celebration of mobile communication at the expense of public health is appalling.¹

As we discuss below, this bias runs deep in the telecommunications industry. It characterizes the imperious industry hype noted in our Introduction. Challenging such attitudes is central to outsmarting our smartphones.

Are We Addicted?

How often have we left home patting our pockets or rifling through our purses to confirm we have our phones? It’s not unusual for people to say they feel naked without their smartphones: they have digitally disappeared (McSpadden, 2019). No searches, no maps, no social media – no them. Forty-six percent of Americans in 2017 avowed they could not survive without their cellphones (Beren, 2018). Forty percent of US consumers worry that they overuse phones (60 percent of people aged between 18 and 34), while 63 percent seek to cut down phone time (Deloitte, 2018). Many suffer from “phantom vibration syndrome,” wrongly believing they can feel their phones vibrating with messages (Drouin et al., 2012). Fear of being disconnected has been linked to the regret, depression, and anxiety that accompany the loss of putative internet pleasures, from gaming, gossiping, and gambling to pornography, photography, and philandery. Such effects signify internet businesses’ successful use of algorithmic addiction, much as nicotine addiction works for the tobacco industry.

Smartphones have also created a new nightmare for public-health professionals, because sex workers at risk of sexually transmitted diseases increasingly communicate with clients by phone and travel to a widening variety of places to ply their trade. This makes them less easy to advise and assist than when they work at known material sites. Illegal gambling is also facilitated, putting chronic users at risk (Mahapatra et al., 2012; Agur, 2015).

In addition to such woes, new opportunities of course present themselves. Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab promises students “insight into how computing products … can be designed to change what people believe and what they do.”² The program instructs individuals to manipulate others (and avoid being manipulated) through “captology” – the study of how humans get trapped in technology through algorithms like those that make slot machines addictive (Fogg, 2003; Rushkoff, 2016, p. 91; Rushkoff, 2019, pp. 65–7).

Nomophobia – short for “no mobile phobia” – has been invented to characterize our mental dependence on these things. A concept coined by the UK Post Office, it is now part of widespread investigations into the isolation and even fear induced by being without a cellphone – to the point where there is agitation for nomophobia to be a formal diagnostic instrument of mental illnesses (Yildirim and Correia, 2015; Bragazzi and Del Puente, 2014; Valdesolo, 2015). Hence also the development of a psychological “Young Adult Attachment to Phone Scale,” complete with the wonderful acronym, “YAPS” (Trub and Barbot, 2016) and an “Internet Addiction Scale” (Kwon et al., 2013). Neuroscientists merrily refer to “Smartphone Addiction” as the “Psychopathology of Everyday Life in the 21st Century” (Lin et al., 2017). Mobile addiction has sparked the greatest public curiosity in wealthy countries and among affluent consumers in the Global South (Howard, 2017). The malady is often associated with US-style hyper-consumerism (Prideaux, 2015).³ The unique quality of electronic technology to stimulate addictive behavior can also be traced to ideas of progress associated with the “technological sublime,” the quasi-sacred power that industrial societies have bestowed upon modern high-tech machinery and feats of engineering, whose awesome, hypnotic, and scary qualities are said to draw us inescapably toward them, once they are beautified by seductive design and marketing (Nye, 1994 and 2006).

Hence the noted media theorist Paul Virilio’s lament:

[I]t is now necessary to impose silence in restaurants and places of worship or concert halls. One day, following the example of the campaign to combat nicotine addiction, it may well be necessary to put up signs of the “Silence Hospital” variety at the entrance to museums and exhibition halls to get all those “communication machines” to shut up and put an end to the all too numerous cultural exercises in SOUND and LIGHT. (2004: 76)

The spreading belief that internet addiction more generally is a malady has inspired new forms of treatment (Aguayo, 2015). In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) identified an internet gaming disorder and Britain’s National Health Service created a Centre for Internet Disorders (Marsh, 2018). Many pioneers of our wireless world worry about their children’s exposure to glowing screens. Tim Cook banned his nephew from social media, Bill and Melinda Gates made cellphones off-limits to their pre-teens, and Steve Jobs wouldn’t let his children near an iPad. John Lilly, former head of Mozilla, explained to his teenage son that “somebody wrote code to make you feel this way.” Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, calls screen addiction “closer to crack cocaine” than a sugar habit. He summed up the regret that has led to tech-free homes across Silicon Valley: “We glimpsed into the chasm of addiction, and there were some lost years, which we feel bad about” (quoted in Bowles, 2018).

Madonna made headlines with a lament that giving her teenagers cellphones “ended my relationship with them … They became too inundated with imagery and started to compare themselves to other people. And that’s really bad for self-growth” (quoted in Aitkenhead, 2019); and renowned sex therapist Dr Ruth expresses concern that “You walk into a restaurant these days, and what you see is everyone with their phone next to them … Instead of concentrating on the relationship … they are constantly looking at their phone” (quoted in Hicklin, 2019).

Tech moguls, divas, and popular therapists alike assume smartphone addiction is an individual pathology that savvy parents can address through family-centered remedies and time away from screens. We might wish to be smart like them and engage our children with non-digital substitutes. But what if we are hampered by opportunity costs that render such substitutes unaffordable once we’ve used up our money – on digital devices?

Individualized solutions for smartphone addiction are available to wealthy families because of their educational, informational, and cultural resources (Greenberg, 2018). Remedies come in a range of settings, from the militarized regimen of the Internet Addiction Treatment Centre in Daxing, China to a breezy tech-free weekend at Camp Grounded in Mendocino, California (West, 2015).⁴ Camp Grounded illustrates its wares rather alarmingly, with a photograph of a man shooting a bow and arrow, followed by a description of itself as “Pure, Unadulterated Camp For Grown-Ups.” We can’t wait. But if we really can’t wait, there’s always the “7-Day Phone Breakup Challenge,” which promises “a relationship with your phone that actually feels good” – and by the way, don’t forget to buy the book that tells you how.⁵

The basic business models are similar: teach exercise routines and non-electronic forms of communication until patients aching to touch smartphones and tablets are disciplined, calmed, and ready to return to the world as steadier, and somewhat fitter, consumers. Moderation in all things – apart from phone purchase, of course. Nokia,⁶ F(x)tec,⁷ and Punkt⁸ are onto the possibilities presented by the movement towards a “digital detox.” They offer “companion phones” and “entry-level smartphones” with few bells and whistles.

Silicon Valley hegemons’ regret at creating addictive technologies reflects an inward-l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• 1 Outsmart Your Smartphone
• 2 The Greenest Smartphone is the One You Already Own
• 3 Calling Bullshit on Anti-Science Propaganda
• Conclusion: What Next?
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement