My phone was made by slaves and I need to decide what I’m going to do about that

I’m going to need a new phone soon and I’ve been thinking about what the replacement will be. I typically buy the cheapest, decent phone I can find and replace the standard version of Android with an open source operating system. Over the last 5+ years that’s meant two consecutive Xiaomi handsets running LineageOS, and I’ve been pretty happy with that arrangement.

But I’m busy reading Radical technologies by Adam Greenfield^[1] and I recently finished the chapter on smartphones. Some parts of it have stuck in my mind a bit, like an irritant that gets between your clothes and skin, and it’s been bothering me.

The low cost of Chinese labor, coupled to workers’ relative lack of ability to contest these conditions, is critical to the industry’s ability to assemble the components called for in each model’s bill of materials, apply a healthy markup and still bring it to market at an acceptable price point.

…behind every handset is another story: that of the labor arrangements, supply chains and flows of capital that we implicate ourselves in from the moment we purchase one, even before switching it on for the first time.

Greenfield, A. (2017). Radical technologies: The design of everyday life.

It’s fair to say that I’ve been aware of these issues for a while but for some reason I haven’t given them much thought. But lately I’ve been feeling uncomfortable with what I’m starting to see as my complicity in an ecosystem that is exploitative in some quite extreme ways.^[2]

…to make our phones we needed other minerals, like tin and coltan. And while silicon is found everywhere, tin and coltan are concentrated in only a few parts of the world. The frictionless genius of our creative class, which we see every day in our lives and in advertising, leads us to support environmental destruction and human enslavement that we never see. We want our clever phones, the market needs resources to make them, and getting those resources creates and feeds conflict. It turns out that the foundations of our ingenious new economy rest on the forceful extraction of minerals in places where laws do not work and criminals control everything.

So I started looking around to see if I could find a smartphone that might help me feel better about myself. And I was surprised to fine one. Fairphone is a smartphone manufacturer based in Amsterdam with a commitment to develop an environmentally friendly, sustainable, ethically sourced smartphone. Their latest version – the Fairphone 4 – looks like a decent phone. But it costs 579 EUR, which is a lot for a phone that can, at best, be described as a mid-range device (in comparison, an iPhone 13 costs about 640 EUR).

I tried the argument that it’s too expensive to buy a phone that’s almost as expensive as an iPhone but lacks the same high-end finishes and, while this may turn out to be a compelling position to hold in the end, I’m not convinced that it’s reasonable. In the same way that Tesla sold expensive electric cars to early adopters, and in doing so put pressure on every other car manufacturer in the world, Fairphone may be opening up a different way of thinking about smartphones.

The Fairphone is good enough for almost everything that I use a phone for. And even if I end up a little disappointed (for example, the camera doesn’t perform well in low-light scenarios), because it’s designed to be upgradeable I can install new hardware, like the camera, when better versions are available. And it’s electronic waste neutral, ensures that workers producing the phone get paid a fair wage, and uses recycled rare materials.

Here’s a review of the Fairphone by MKBHD. where he makes the the point that a “cutting edge” phone in 2022 could be the one that puts the welfare of the planet and production line workers ahead of the desire to shave a millimetre off the thickness of the chassis. There’s something to reflect on there.

I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to get the Fairphone but I’ve seen enough to know that it’s a viable option, that it’ll do 90% of what I need a phone to do, and that it’s relatively affordable (if not cheap). Now I guess I need to decide if I’m the kind of person who buys an environmentally friendly, sustainable, and ethically sourced smartphone.

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1. As a side note, Radical technologies has been described as an “…intelligent and stylish book on the colonization of everyday life by information processing…”.↩︎
2. I also found this article uncomfortable to read: Bales, K. (2016, March 8). Your Phone Was Made By Slaves: A Primer on the Secret Economy. Longreads. https://longreads.com/2016/03/08/your-phone-was-made-by-slaves-a-primer-on-the-secret-economy/↩︎