To the producers of TLC’s Hoarders: Here’s a season finale for ya. According to the multibillion, multinational networking firm from the south side of the Bay, Cisco Systems, this year mobile devices will actually outnumber those who consider mobiles’ prices. There will be more number-padded, data-drinking fully charged smartphones and flips than shoulder-padded, martini-drinking, hard-charging smarties to operate them. By 2016, Cisco uses its phone to prophesize, there will be 10 billion phones in the world, lying all over the place, crowding doorways, spilling out of your closet. They’ll be, like, everywhere, but have you seen mine anywhere?
What does the number 10 billion mean, really? It’s basically incomprehensible, like a googol, like Google. Supposedly in your mouth there are 10 billion bacteria, but my jaw gets sore every time I try to count in the mirror. The number of observable galaxies is apparently numerable in the 10s of billions, but I can’t really notice them when I’m looking for the Big Dipper. In his Running the Numbers series, photographer Chris Jordan attempted to visually represent this kind of unimaginable mass production, but he could only fathom images of a few million cigarette butts, packing peanuts and bottle caps. Ten billion is a few million million, and I shiver at the thought of that many devices held by hands with access to “Axel F” by Crazy Frog, the ringtone-turned-song that Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren called “the death knell of the traditional music industry.”
Where do all these cellphones come from? Are they coming out of the woodwork, like the termites of lore? Are they dropped from the sky by a nickel-poisoned stork? As any Berkeley student who carries as much weight on their conscience as in their backpack knows, the wondrous gleaming square of data congeals in one of Foxconn’s fluorescent factories, each bit tended by an assembly-cubicle Chinese man or woman dressed similarly to a milkman. The phone’s input materials are metals of the pencil and coin variety — lead, copper, zinc — along with metals of the Beyonce variety — gold and silver — and the final PVC component is donated with bug-eyed insanity from the Blue Man Group. With the cellphone recycling rate estimated at about 10 percent by the EPA, the phone likely ceases its vibrations and chimes in a plastic garbage can: The embarrassing old RAZR or Chocolate is soon covered with Gillette and Toblerone. If you turn out to be one of the elect few who toss their mobiles into the recycling, either by choice or divine accident, as per Jobist theology your cellphone will join the e-waste current, floating in a container on one of Charon’s trans-Pacific barges (the purgatorial phones riding the Mobro 4000), ending up in a land of burning waste — the 10G of hell, Guiyu, China.
Been taking my bandwidth? I’ll see you in Guiyu. I’ll watch your wretched device torn apart and melted by 5,500 ravenous enterprises just waiting to line their pocketbooks with your uncharged remains. Don’t think it hasn’t happened before: 1.5 million pounds of computer castings, keyboards, phone cases and the like pass through this barren land every year. The air swims with record levels of cancer-causing dioxins, the water oozes black with ash like one of the La Brea tar pits and the children have lead poisoning like chicken pox: Shantou University professor Huo Xia blood-tested 167 children under age six from the town in 2010, and it turned out 88 percent of them were lead poisoned. And for those Guiyu children whose IQ’s and central nervous systems remain “four bars” strong, headaches, skin damage, gastritis and ulcers await — the body’s complaints against breathing an atmosphere of sublimated rubber and paint. This is the graveyard of globalization, the anomalous blight on techno-capitalism’s shiny surface, a bizarre and altogether new phenomenon: a city of, by and for garbage.
Guiyu residents undoubtedly perform e-waste breakdown because the business is more profitable and thus luxurious than their former daily routine of waking up with a backache, working all day with a backache, and going to sleep next to a sweaty water buffalo, itself nursing a nasty backache that keeps it up all night, bleating. A “standard of living” is, after all, an inherently relative concept. Nevertheless, if Guiyu exists in its toxic state at our current level of electronic mass production, what further toxic villages are yet to be realized? Is there not some imperative to rethink the first principle of the Information Age — that new is improved and therefore we must determine what is obsolete as soon as it is feasible to do so? What I’m really asking here is: What are we doing with 10 billion phones?
The phones get manufactured, of course — but then they get sold. And they get sold through outstanding marketing campaigns from the telecommunications giants. What truly surprises me is the tone that these advertisements sometimes take — while attempting to sell a cellphone, they often sardonically portray the cellphone user himself. When Samsung, itself a propagator of the Celltaceous era, derides Apple users in its “The Next Big Thing is Already Here” TV commercial as the type who would see the release of the next iPhone as our generation’s Woodstock, does it indict just the Apple users or, actually, our whole generation? When I see Apple’s iPhone ad campaign depicting a happy 4S owner lying in her car asking her Siri app about the night sky, am I supposed to take this as an example of the many valuable uses of the device or as a mockery of the type of person who would be in a car by themselves talking to their phone — in other words, the prospective Apple customer? And when in the same commercial, the chick sitting in the diner asks her phone, not her friend, where exactly they are, I’m a little curious myself.
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