Whether it was designed in studios in Cupertino, Seoul or somewhere else, it is highly probable that the smartphone in your hand was assembled and prepared for shipment and sale at facilities within a few dozen kilometers of Shenzhen city, in the gritty conurbation that has sprawled across the Pearl River Delta since the Chinese government opened the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone for business in August 1980. These factories operate under circumstances that are troubling at best. Hours are long; the work is numbingly repetitive, produces injuries at surreal rates, and often involves exposure to toxic chemicals. Wages are low and suicide rates among the workforce are distressingly high. 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. Should Chinese wages begin to approximate Western norms, or local labor win for itself anything in the way of real collective bargaining power, we may be certain that manufacturers will find other, more congenial places to assemble their devices. But for now Shenzhen remains far and away the preeminent global site of smartphone manufacture.
Take a step or two further back in the production process, and the picture gets bleaker still. To function at all, the smartphone—like all electronic devices—requires raw materials that have been wrested from the Earth by ruthlessly extractive industries. The cobalt in its lithium-ion batteries was mined by hand in the Congo, often by children; the tin in the soldered seams that bind it together most likely comes from the Indonesian island of Bangka, where the water table is irreparably fouled, 70 percent of the coral reefs have been destroyed by mine runoff, and on average one miner a week is killed on the job. The damage caused by the processes of extraction fans out across most of a hemisphere, mutilating lives, human communities and natural ecosystems beyond ready numbering. And so the polluted streams, stillborn children and diagnoses of cancer, too, become part of the way in which the smartphone has transformed everyday life, at least for some of us.
Though these facts might give us pause in just about any other context, we don’t appear to be too troubled by them when it comes to the smartphone. The smartphone isn’t like any other product, and in fact ranks among the most rapidly adopted technologies in human history. And so we suppress whatever qualms we may have about the conditions in the mines and factories, the environmental footprint, the energetic cost of the extended supply chain, or the authoritarian governments we ultimately support through our act of purchase. To the degree that we’re even aware of it, we leave this deniable prehistory behind the moment we plunk down our cash and take home our new phone.
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There’s something of an ethical bind here, because if the smartphone is becoming a de facto necessity, it is at the same time impossible to use the device as intended without, in turn, surrendering data to it and the network beyond. In part, this is simply a function of the way mobile telephony works. Most of us know by now that our phones are constantly tracking our location, and in fact have to do so in order to function on the network at all: the same transaction with a cellular base station or WiFi router that establishes connectivity suffices to generate at least a low-resolution map of our whereabouts. But it is also a function of business model.
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Whenever we locate ourselves in this way, whether we’re quite aware of it or not, we are straightforwardly trading our privacy for convenience. For most of us, most of the time, the functionality on offer is so useful that this is a bargain we’re more than happy to strike, yet it remains distressing that its terms are rarely made explicit.
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When we move through the world with a smartphone in hand, then, we generate an enormous amount of data in the course of our ordinary activities, and we do so without noticing or thinking much about it. In turn, that data will be captured and leveraged by any number of parties, including handset and operating system vendors, app developers, cellular service providers, and still others; those parties will be acting in their interests, which may only occasionally intersect our own; and it will be very, very difficult for us to exert any control over any of this.
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Equipped with these devices, we’re both here and somewhere else at the same time, joined to everything at once yet never fully anywhere at all.
The individual networked in this way is no longer the autonomous subject enshrined in liberal theory, not precisely. Our very selfhood is smeared out across a global mesh of nodes and links; all the aspects of our personality we think of as constituting who we are—our tastes, preferences, capabilities, desires—we owe to the fact of our connection with that mesh, and the selves and distant resources to which it binds us.
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It’s easy, too easy, to depict the networked subject as being isolated, in contact with others only at the membrane that divides them. But if anything, the overriding quality of our era is porosity. Far from affording any kind of psychic sanctuary, the walls we mortar around ourselves turn out to be as penetrable a barrier as any other. Work invades our personal time, private leaks into public, the intimate is trivially shared, and the concerns of the wider world seep into what ought to be a space for recuperation and recovery. Above all, horror finds us wherever we are.
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We need to understand ourselves as nervous systems that are virtually continuous with the world beyond the walls, fused to it through the juncture of our smartphones. And what keeps us twitching at our screens, more even than the satisfaction of any practical need, is the continuously renewed opportunity to bathe in the primal rush of communion.
Whether consciously or otherwise, interaction designers have learned to stimulate and leverage this desire: they know full well that every time someone texts you, “likes” your photo or answers your email, it changes you materially, rewiring neurotransmitter pathways, lighting up the reward circuits of your brain, and enhancing the odds that you’ll trigger the whole cycle over again when the dopamine surge subsides in a few seconds. This clever hack exploits our most primal needs for affirmation, generally from the most venal of motivations. But it can also sensitize us to the truth of our own radical incompleteness, if we let it, teaching us that we are only ever ourselves in connection with others. And as we have never been anything but open and multiple and woven of alterity—from the DNA in our cells, to the microbes in our guts, to the self-replicating modules of language and learned ideology that constitute our very selves—in the end maybe the network we’ve wrought is only a clunky way of literalizing the connections that were always already there and waiting to be discovered.
https://longreads.com/2017/06/13/a-sociology-of-the-smartphone
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