Welcome to tech stuff, a production from I heart radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I heart radio, and how the Tech Are you? Recently I was invited to speak on the radio about the fair phone four, which is the latest smartphone from fair phone, and in the process I realized that this company and this line of products really opens up the opportunity to talk about a lot of serious issues in tech, issues that the fair phone looks to try and avoid and to bring attention to. So these are issues like the ethical sourcing of materials and labor, sustainability and e waste and also repair ability. So I figured today we're gonna talk about the fair phone four only a little bit, and how it opens the door to talk about these issues in tech and why they're important and why they're really complicated. And I could have started, you know, anywhere, but I decided to tackle those in order that I mentioned them. So I'M gonna start off with ethical sourcing. It is very easy for us to be reductive in our thinking when we look at any particular electronic device. Consider your typical smartphone. In fact, let's be specific. Let's say that we're talking about an iphone. Now I'm going to add that apple has, on and off, done some serious work to try and make ethical choices when it comes to the manufacturing of its devices, particularly in the wake of scrutiny that was directed toward apple because there were some very high profile tragedies, like worker depths in China related to apple production. Um, the company has not maintained a stellar record like I'll talk about a bit more later, but anyway, apple at least has been in the public eye for this issue and when you look at an Iphone, you might think, oh well, this just this came from apple, but of course the truth of the matter is that it gets far more complex than that. I think there's a great way to kind of illustrate this. There's a song that's called the guns song and it comes from Stephen Sondheim's musical assassins. The musical is about the various people who assassinated or attempted to assassinate a U S president over the course of the history of the United States. Now, the character singing this part of the guns song in question is Leon Frank Chol Gas, who assassinated President Mckinley on September six, N one and Chol Gas sings. Quote. It takes a lot of men to make a gun. Hundreds many men to make a gun. Men in the minds to dig the iron, men in the mills to forge the steel, minute machines to turn the barrel, mold the trigger, shape the wheel. It takes a lot of men to make a gun. One Gun. End. Quote, and Hill Gods is right. He's pointing out that this one thing that someone can hold and they can own and they can use is actually the product of work from hundreds of people. Also, at the end of the song he makes it a point to say that this production, this manufacturing process, can cost many lives before the gun is ever fired. In other words, this gun effectively killed people even though it hadn't even been fully built yet, because people had died in the making of it. Well, the same thing, tragically, is true with our electronics. Our devices don't magically come out of a big building that has computer factory or smartphone manufacturing facility on the side. Our electronics are the product of many, many steps in a complicated and interconnected supply chain. We saw how dangerous the supply chain can be when it was disrupted and continues to be disrupted in the wake of the pandemic, and it brought a lot more attention to it, but it's attention more to how it inconveniences us or how it affects businesses less so about the conditions going on at various points of the supply chain. And there are many points in that chain where there are big, troubling problems. Let's start with raw materials. So our devices rely on some materials that we think of as being pretty scarce. We call them rare earth elements. Sometimes you will hear rare earth minerals or rare earth metals. We frequently will say rare earth elements just to kind of lump them all into one category. Now, that's a bit of a misnomer. Actually, they're not that rare. It's just it's very hard to find a lot of those material eels in a single place. Uh, it's that you know, you you don't find veins of ore of these rare earth elements. You can't just dig and say, Oh, I found a vein of whatever. So instead what you have to do is gather up huge clumps of earth and stone, minerals, and you have to treat it so that you can separate the rare earth elements from that Earth. So you've got to displace a ton, literally literally tons, of earth and then treat it in order to get at the stuff that we need in order to have them incorporated into our electronics and make them work. Now, if we were lied on places in the world that maintained strict controls when it comes to how you can treat workers and how you protect the environment in the process of your operations, that amount of effort and attention would end up translating into higher costs and manufacturing. So, for example, we might identify a region in the United States that could be ideal for mining certain rare earth elements that we would use for electronics. But if we did that, any operation would have to follow these strict rules, because that's the law in the United States, and those rules would cover stuff like the environmental impact of the operations. A lot of mining operations use explosives to blast out deep pits and they also tend to rely on enormous pools filled with toxic chemicals, and those chemicals leach out the stuff you want from everything else and then you dump everything else into a waste pit, or sometimes you might just have the toxic pool become the waste pit over time. So you essentially create enormous amounts of soil and rocks that you dump into these toxic pools. You let the chemicals do their work and extract the stuff that's in these teeny tiny concentrations within this massive earth and then you generate an enormous amount of spoil and this is the product of your mining. Now that toxic pool is obviously hazardous for the environment. We're talking about chemicals that can cause direct harm if you're exposed to them, or long term harm if it gets into things like the water supply. It's also obviously hazardous for the people who are working at these operations. Now a lot of this particular kind of work happens in China, which has a terrible human rights record. There is a mine in the Mongolia region of China where more than of all the rare earth elements mind in the country comes from. So out of all of China, one mind accounts for more than of all rare earth elements taken out of that country. It's called the by an oboe mine. It represents more than the total known earth rare earth elements in the world and almost half of all the rare earth elements that we need come from this one mine. It's been an operation as a rare earth elements mine since nine before that it was an iron mine. Anyway, this extraction process leaves behind lots of waste. There's toxic wastewater which is filled with stuff like heavy metals and radioactive materials and other dangerous stuff. If that water does get into the water supply, then you're looking at a really hazardous situation for all the people within that region who access that water table. It's not unusual in areas around these kinds of operations to see an increase in cancer rates for the populations in that region. Uh, it is possible to mine rare earth elements more responsibly, but that takes more time, takes more effort. Thus it's more expensive, and so you have to first work in a place that takes these things seriously. China is not one of those places and a place that doesn't treat workers as expendable. And for the record, there are rare earth element reserves in other parts of the world, like the United States, really does have some rare earth element deposits, but because of those strict rules about limiting environmental damage and mitigating the risk to human populations, including the workforce, you don't see them. Those operations happen because it would be way more expensive. That would either cut into the profits of the electronics companies or, more likely, result in an increase price to the consumer, or maybe both of those things. Anyway, that's just one part of the supply chain, the mining process that has a dark side. And there are other mining operations that also have a truly disturbing dark side. One of those happens in Africa, specifically in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or the D R C, and Y'all, I'm gonna warn you this gets grim now. The first thing you have to understand is that the D R C has had an incredibly violent and chaotic past due to things like colonialism, civil war, war in nearby nations, rampant government corruption and even more rampant exploitation of the natives of the region, and I do think it's important to understand at least a very quick history of the D R C to get a context for, as you know, as far as how the rest of the world helps perpetuate an ongoing crisis within this country. So let's get a quick rundown of its history, and I stress this is the barest bones. I am not doing any justice to the Democratic Republic of the Congo with this quick history, but I to kind of paint a picture of the plight of the people in this in this country. So much has happened there, but generally speaking, the native peoples of the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been the subject of abuse and exploitation for about a hundred fifty years. At first it was King Leopold of Belgium. He claimed the entire region as his own personal property and he sent agents there to oversee operations that forced locals to work in the rubber trade or they risked losing life and limb. Literally, there was a practice for a while where if someone was resisting the authority of the king, that person might get their arm lopped off, absolutely brutal. Then in the early twentieth century, under intense international pressure, King Leopold would hand over the control of the region to the Belgian parliament. This is where the region became known as the Belgian Congo, and at that point very large companies mostly Belgian companies replaced Leopold's agents, but the people of the region were still oppressed and exploited. It's just now they were exploited by these companies as opposed to the king's representatives. Over time, folks discovered there were other valuable resources besides rubber in the region that would eventually become the D R c. There was copper, for example. Later on they discovered uranium there. So as the atomic age advanced, countries like the then Soviet Union and the United States became very interested in the region, and both the USSR and the USA, as well as several other first world nations, would start to interfere in the region. Some sides would shore up rebel forces UH and some sides would shore up dictators. The United States supported dictators because the so union was funding rebel forces, and it was all in an effort to secure access to those resources. You don't kid yourself in thinking that either the USSR or the United States were really concerned for the people in the region. They were concerned for those resources and they would take whatever means necessary in order to make sure the other side couldn't get it. Meanwhile, the people of the nation continued to Labor under inhumane conditions. Now the region gained independence in nineteen sixty because Belgium realized that it was not going to be able to keep a lid on things much longer. There was a growing sense of independence in the country. Belgium did not have the resources to be able to suppress that, so there was a move to become a democratic, independent nation in nineteen sixty. But this opened up opportunities for other countries to try and install leaders within the Congo that would be more in client to trade with one side versus the other, uh and ultimately it gave a man named Mobutu the chance to declare himself president of the country in nineteen sixty five. Mobutu was incredibly corrupt. You could say he was using a lot of the same tactics as King Leopold and those large companies from decades earlier, and he was embezzling tons of money in order to fund his own private wealth. Things would get even more complicated over the following decades. By the nineteen nineties, there was a civil war in neighboring Rwanda and a genocide in Rwanda, and that ended up leading to conflict in what would be the D R C at this point in history. It was not the DRC yet. They had gone from the Belgian Congo to becoming the Republic of Zaire under Mobutu. And you know, Mo Bout was essentially a dictator who was calling himself a president, someone who was running unopposed an election after election, and the incredible pressure from the civil war forced him to flee the nation. But things did not necessarily get better from there. I'll talk about it more when we come back after this quick break. We're back, all right. We left off with Mobutu fleeing what was then called the Republic of Zaire, and the new leaders of the Congo renamed it the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So that's where we get its current name. This is a nation that has gone under many names over its history, but the corruption within the region at all levels of government and business, ran super deep. It's not like everything magically got better once Mobu too was deposed, essentially. And there were pockets in the DRC where military rebels were relying on forced labor are including child labor, to mine for materials like copper and then later cobalt. Cobalt is incredibly useful in electronics. That's where we're really going to focus for the rest of this conversation. So the armed rebels would sell these raw materials to buyers, essentially manufacturing companies, and then they would use the money they made from selling the raw materials to buy weapons and to try and gain more control over their various territories. All right, it gets worse. The fact that the D R C sits on top of deposits of valuable resources means that there's an ongoing pressure from the rest of the world to get access to those raw materials way of the list. On of those nations is China. In fact, there are a handful of Chinese mining companies that have exclusive rights to specific areas within the DRC to mine for cobalt in particular. So, like I said, cobalts used in a lot of stuff, including many types of lithium batteries, and our electronics rely on batteries. We know that there's an increased dependence upon batteries. In fact, if we want to have a future where electric vehicles replace internal combustion engine vehicles, we're gonna need a lot more batteries. So you've got these areas within the D R C where Chinese companies are overseeing dangerous mining operations and effectively are in control of those regions within the D R C. Like you have Chinese companies that are essentially ruling parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So you've also got these impoverished communities within the D R C that are attempting to get at least a little autonomy to be able to profit from their own resources. People who live on land and that they discover that they have cobalt on their land, they often find themselves forced off and incapable of profiting off their own property. This can actually escalate in to brutal confrontations with armed police and military. There's a twenty one piece in the New Yorker that's titled the Dark Side of Congo's cobalt rush and I urge you to read it. Uh, the piece goes into a lot more detail on the stuff I'm talking about, but essentially, the people of the D R C have had very little agency for multiple generations. There are entire towns that have been uprooted and forced to move, with people scattering all over the place as a Chinese mining operation has swooped in to demolish houses and turn what was once a town into just a bunch of minds. And there's a lack of safety precautions in these mining operations, which means the actual people doing the mining, many of them children, face life threatening situations regularly, and the presence of armed police and military, who are essentially paid off by the Chinese to keep things in line, will often mean that you run the risk of being beaten for any kind of resistance to the normal process of operations. And, like I said, there's this ongoing issue of child labor in the region. It's something that has gained global attention and occasionally you see companies do something about it, like Apple. Apple has now and again attempted to address this problem, though the article in The New Yorker specifically alleges that apple pretty much abandoned any attempts to be serious about that once the heat was off the company. So you know, they made an effort for a while and then, when people stop paying attention, they just went back to the old old way. So the human cost is very high. And keep in mind so far we're only talking about raw materials. Let's also talk about the manufacturing process. See, when we move up the supply chain, then we have to talk about taking raw materials and turning them into components that will later get assembled into finished products. Now, some of these steps happen in places where things aren't too rough, but ultimately it all goes back to places like China. While your major tech companies aren't reliant upon mainland China for microprocessors, because that honor tends to go to Taiwan. Taiwan is off the coast of China and it is independent of the mainland, though mainland China disputes that point. But you know, if you're talking about assembly and packaging, then that's all out of China. In fact, these processes usually take place in different facilities hundreds or thousands of miles apart. So you're shipping stuff all over Asia just for it to become a finished product. You know, it kind of gets back to that song from assassins it takes a lot of men to make a gun. In this case, your iphone has traveled the world in some ways before it ever got to you. Anyway, according to researchers like Henry Young of the National University of Singapore, more than half of the world's electronics are at some point going through a process of manufacturing within China, and the country has a reputation for very harsh working conditions, which includes unreasonable punishments for even minor offenses. And it was so bad that the economic rights institute looked into more than a hundred fifty cases between ten and which workers at these kinds of facilities committed or attempted to commit suicide. The researchers found that low wages, anxiety over job security, a massive turnover problem and harsh punishments, as well as a feeling that no one in the managerial capacity ever even gave a crap about them, all contributed to folks having such despondents that they considered suicide. Now this became global news when there were actually a string of suicides, more than a dozen of them, and a manufacturing company called Fox con in and sadly, the reason the world really took notice is because Fox con is one of Apple's big suppliers. It's part of Apple's supply chain. If it hadn't been for that connection to apple, I would wager that those depths would not have received much coverage outside of China. Probably not that much inside of China, and that is absolutely unthinkable to me, but it's the it's the truth. Now, over the last decade, wages for workers in these facilities has slowly improved. The low wages have gotten better over the last several years, which has raised the cost of doing business in China. So it's a little more expensive to have your manufacturing processes operate in China because they're paying people more, but because China has such a well developed manufacturing infrastructure means it's still the main choice over alternatives like Vietnam and India, where you know the Labor could be a lot cheaper. Again, you get into real problems with all this. But the reason why companies aren't necessarily flocking to Vietnam and India for all of their manufacturing. Some of them are dipping their toe in that, but the reason they're not rushing to it is that these these countries have a lack of infrastructure when you compare it to China. So there's this kind of balancing act that companies are doing, saying well, well, well, we'll continue to operate in China while we start to see manufacturing infrastructure built out in other nations where we might be able to exploit cheaper labor so that our our costs come down. But yeah, that's the main reason that the world turned to China in the first place. It's because the labor costs were so low that it kept the overall cost of manufacturing down, and thus it could mean that, you know, the consumer sees less expensive electronics. You know, they might still be pricey, but they're not as expensive as they would be if, you know, we were being better stewards of the environment and treating people as human beings. So, yeah, it comes at the cost of a lot of lives along the way. Financially it might cost less, but the social cost is and the environmental cost is very high. All right, that's enough. I know that I get on a soapbox and it sounds like I'm preaching. We're gonna switch our thoughts over to sustainability and recycling. Still gonna be a little preachy. Apologized for that. It's just the way it works. So, as we've already covered, getting the raw materials for our electronics includes a lot of practices that are harmful not just to humans but also the environment. And meanwhile the Electronics Industry is built upon a practice of consume and replace. By that I mean we in the developed world our condition to replace our stuff on a regular basis. Um computers are they tend to last five to eight years if you've taken good care of them. That's assuming you don't need to upgrade to a more recent system. You know, frequently, like if you're a pro Gamer or something, you might be upgrading your system until the motherboard can't support anymore and then you swap it all out, and so you might be changing your rig fairly regularly. People like me, where I'm using a work computer to do some pretty light work, I can get away with using the same machine for several years in a row. But then with smartphones there's this push to upgrade every two years or less. You know, we get new models with new features every single year and they're marketed to us as being a big improvement over the stuff that came out the year before. The old contract systems that were with carriers here in the United States meant that you used to have the chance to renew your agreement, your agreement with whatever carrier you use, every two years and you would get a phone for a highly subsidized price. So the actual cost of the phone could be lower, even free, depending upon the plan. That's not as common these days. We don't see those subsidized phones as frequently in the United States as we used to, but it got people into the habit of thinking every two years or so that they needed a new phone. Some people it's even more frequently. They they want to get the newest model as soon as it comes out. But then what happens to all the old phones and computers? Like we've created this culture where we have manufactured the desire for new products. Well, the old products have to go somewhere. Right. Where do we put them? You know, you shouldn't just throw them away, although a lot of people do. Uh. For one thing, you might have some important information stored on there somewhere and you really need to make sure you've gone through and thoroughly, uh, formatted and deleted all that stuff so that someone doesn't come into possession of one of your old pieces of equipment and get access to information they should not be able to access. But for another thing, if the electronics still works, like if you have a smartphone you want to upgrade but your old smartphone still works. Well, you could donate your old smartphone to an organization that can make sure that someone who otherwise would not have that kind of a device can get it. If it's a device that doesn't work, it still contains valuable and, in some cases, toxic materials in it, and you know you don't want the toxic stuff to go into a landfill where it might leach out and contaminate the environment. That's obviously something that no one wants to have happened. And you don't want to waste the valuable stuff that's in your electronics either. Right like there's stuff in there that could be used again, even if the device itself is shot. There are components, there's, you know, copper, there's even gold. There are other things that are dangerous stuff too, like mercury and lead. So you don't go cracking into your old electronics hoping that you're gonna be panning for gold in them, but it would be a great idea to risk cycle the electronics in those cases in order to reclaim those valuable materials and use them again instead of them just going into a landfill. Now I will caution you, because the recycling process is also a complicated one. We've talked about it on this show before. There are some electronics recycling companies that just gather up enormous amounts of electronics. They pack cargo containers full of them, they ship them overseas, often to places like China, and the recycling operations, the reclamation operations, are actually very similar to how rare earth element minds end up separating the materials from Earth in the first place. They often rely on caustic, toxic chemicals to leach that stuff out of the electronics and thus be able to reclaim it, and those operations can put workers at risk. There are entire towns in China that became dangerous to live in due to the chemicals that were being used to pull valuable stuff out of old electronics. So even when you're trying to do the responsible thing with your old devices and recycle them, you can inadvertently participate in a system that exploits people and causes harm. There are ethical electronics recycling programs out there, but it takes some legwork to find them. Once you do, those old electronics can be processed and materials can be reclaimed to be used in future products. That's what the Fair Phone Company strives to do. So rather than source materials that come from places like the D R C, where it's far more likely that they came out of an operation that has a terrible disregard for the safety of its workforce. The stuff is coming from old electronics that no longer have a use. They're relying heavily on recycled materials in order to get access to those, those raw components. Now, reducing our reliance on new material boost sustainability and that's a huge benefit in the long run, at least on the environmental side. On the humanitarian side, things get awfully complicated, because what do you do about taking jobs away, like if you if you remove the demand for cobalt within the D R C and these Chinese companies all pull up stakes, what takes its place? Because you you have a region that has been unstable for generations, largely due to interference from other countries, and the answer to that is complicated and and I'm not sure anyone really has the right one. Like I don't know if there is a right answer. There are probably answers that have different degrees of wrongness to them. Okay, we're gonna take another quick break. When we come back we're going to talk about the third of those big topics that fair phone opens up, and that's repair ability. Now, anyone out there who has had an issue with their electronics, if especially if it's something like a smartphone, less so with computers, because computers, if you know what you're doing, you can frequently swap something out if something goes bad, like if your motherboard goes bad. It might be hard for you to to, you know, figure out that that's the problem, but you can change out a motherboard, assuming you get one that's compatible, that fits in your case and all that kind of stuff. Same thing for a CPU or a GPU or Ram, like all the different components. It's fairly straightforward to swap them out and replace them. In your standard desktop computer. Laptops are a different story. Those get closer into the problems that I'm going to talk about. When it comes to smartphones, it's very rare to come across a smartphone where it's easy, or even potentially possible for you to do a repair job yourself. That's because smartphone companies take great efforts to one cram all the components into as slim a form factor as possible, because that scene as being a value to the industry. Like you want to have a sleek, sexy, thin smartphone, so that ends up causing part of the issue. You might have to use glue, for example, to glue components into place so that it can fit into this very small form factor. Well, that makes it very difficult to access and replace or repair that particular piece if it's been glued to something else. Same thing with the actual case. Like, I don't know about you, but my phone I wouldn't be able to open it up to even access the internals. In the first place. It's essentially sealed shut. You might have to use something like a heat gun to weaken the glue that's holding the case together, but then you have to be super careful because if you you know, if you overheat your smartphone, you might fry the various components inside of it. You might need special pride bars in order to be able to open it up. And then once you get in and you look at the components, some of them might be fastened to the the circuit board or to the case itself using proprietary connectors, proprietary screws, which means you need a special tool to be able to unscrew them. Apple does this all the time, so it makes things much more difficult to do repairs on it's why? One of the reasons why is that companies like apple really like to have a closed ecosystem. So your device stops working, maybe you just end up buying a new device. That would be great for Apple. They would love that. But, failing that, maybe you have to take that device into an apple store where someone, an actual apple employee, will take the device off your hands and the repairs will be done by licensed apple agents who are doing all the work because they actually have the tools to access all these different parts and they have the individual parts as well, which, you know, most companies don't sell those. Most companies don't sell you a replacement for the various pieces that are inside the smartphone. So it makes it very hard to repair these things. Fair phone goes a different way. Fair phone takes a more modular approach and it uses standard screws and it doesn't glue stuff close. So you can open your fair phone phone, you can remove the battery and swap it out for a new one. Let's say that your battery life has started to suffer, that the battery is starting to to no longer hold as much of a charge you can actually with a fair phone. Change the battery out, put a new battery in Um and attach it screwed back into place, and then you're good to go. And maybe you send the old battery off to be recycled so that way it can continue this process Um. In fact, the fair phone, a couple of the fair phones, are the first smartphone devices to receive a ten from I fix it, which is a website that judges the repair ability of various uh electronic devices, and the easier it is to repair, the higher the score. Fair phone is the only smartphone out there that's got a ten, and that really shows you the approach of the company is made saying we want to make sure that our device will last you a long time, that if there is a problem, you can solve it. Check out the beat while the DJ revolves it, you just use the regular tools to access it and swap it out. You can actually buy the replacement components, you know. It's not like it's hidden somewhere where. You know they have complete control over supply chain that they don't allow anyone else to access. So it really does change the game, and higherly as far as reparability. This really falls in line with the philosophy of the right to repair movement, and so it is fundamentally different from the way most companies do their business, where it's it's not as easy, it's not as convenient and it takes away a revenue stream to allow people to make repairs to their own stuff. Now there is a massive trade off for all of these things that fair phone does. You know the fact that fair phone tries very hard to make sure that it is not engaged in operations that contribute to human suffering, that it's not working with companies that are exploiting workers by paying them criminally low wages and making them work ridiculously long hours, that it is a reparable device, that it's not something that's going to put increased strain on the environment because it's using more and more recycled materials. Two build these devices? That trade off? Well, they're two. One is that it's not nearly as advanced as your flagship smartphones on the market. Right if you take the fair phone, for the most recent one, and if you were to compare it to an iphone fourteen, the most recent iphone, the iphone Fourteen's specs blow the fair phone four out of the water. There's no questions, not even close. Now, granted, the fair phone four is cast is. It would cost around six D seventy bucks us if they sold them in the US, which they don't. But if we converted euro to two dollars, would be around six D seventy bucks, whereas an IPHONE, if you're getting a pro model, could be around a thousand thousand two hundred bucks, somewhere around there, depending on which model you're getting. So yes, less expensive than an IPHONE, but also far less powerful. If you actually compare the fair phone four against other smartphones that have a comparable set of capabilities, then the other phones cost, you know, half as much, or us like you might find a phone that costs a hundred, fifty or two hundred dollars that has the equivalent specs of the fair phone four, which costs six. That really shows you that if you want to go about things in an ethically responsible manner, there is a massive cost to that. It does cost a lot more money. It also really pulls back the curtain on how much money, quote unquote, you're saving by depending upon these systems that bring along with it these awful conditions for the people who are are in these operations. So you start asking yourself questions. Is it more valuable to you to be able to say the devices I use, I'm going to use them for as long as I possibly can and I want to make sure that they are ethically sourced and I don't mind paying more for them? Not everyone has that capability to I mean, I fully understand like there are a lot of consumers out there where paying more for the stuff they need is just not an option, particularly as we are on the brink of whatever economic calamity we're in right now, whether it's a recession or not. It's tough. Is a tough ask to go to someone and say hey, that device you want and or need is dependent upon unethical practices, so you need to pay more money for this thing that does less so that you're not contributing to human misery, and the other person says, I can't afford to do that. I mean, that's that's a tough argument to to go against. Right. So there are no easy solutions here, but being aware of the problem, I think, is absolutely important, like having that that knowledge of how this system works and what it is dependent upon is an important component because it might make you pause when you are about to purchase your next electronic gadget, to ask questions about this and to potentially hold companies accountable and to demand changes for people who aren't in a position to be able to argue for themselves. And I think ultimately that's the right thing to do. But it is, you know, a long game. It's very hard and it will come with the cost of things being more expensive over time. So it's not something that I think would ever happen immediately. I'll be amazed if it happens at all. But but I feel like it's something that we need to talk about to be able to at least acknowledge what's going on. To turn a blind eye to it and to pretend like these things aren't happening, I think is a massive injustice and I think we have to reckon with it. And I realized that the reason why a lot of this stuff never really makes the news that frequently is that it's happening in places that are so far away from us, especially I'm talking about here in the United States in particular. It's so far away from where we are that it's easy for us to just not think about it and not pay attention, because that might as well be a different world to a lot of us, and so it's so far away and the people are people we don't know and we have no connection to that it's easier for us to kind of shrug and set it aside and then go after the next shiny thing. But yeah, I love the fair phone for mission because, or the fair phone mission, I should say, just the whole company's mission because, like I said, it really does try to address some massive issues in the technology space, the hardware space, and I think that's commendable. Whether the device is one worth getting or not, I can't say they don't sell them in the US. I have never held one in my hand, but I think the mission is one that I really believe in and I would like to see that kind of extend over time and an effort be made to create a more humane and environmentally conscious approach toward producing our electronics, even if that means they're going to cost a bit more. All right, I know I rambled a lot and I went off on these things and maybe you have a fundamentally different point of view about this. Now. Maybe there are economic factors that you would argue for that. Again, it's hard to argue against them. If, if you argue this literally is the only way it can work, because if it went any other way, the companies would go to a business, then we're in another we're in another crisis. It's just a different kind of one. But that's my own point of view. If you have things that you would like me to talk about in future episodes of tech stuff, whether it's a specific technology, trend in tech, a personality and technology, anything like that, let me know. One Way to do that is to download the I heart radio APP, which is free to download and use, and you can navigate over to tech stuff just, you know, put text stuff in the little search field. It'll pop up you. Once you're over on tech stuff, you'll see that there's a little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. Let me know what you would like me to talk about, or you can always leave me a message on twitter. The handle for the show is tech stuff, hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text stuff is an I heart radio production. For more podcasts from my heart radio, visit the I heart radio, APP apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech stuff, a production from I heart radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I heart radio, and how the Tech Are you? Recently I was invited to speak on the radio about the fair phone four, which is the latest smartphone from fair phone, and in the process I realized that this company and this line of products really opens up the opportunity to talk about a lot of serious issues in tech, issues that the fair phone looks to try and avoid and to bring attention to. So these are issues like the ethical sourcing of materials and labor, sustainability and e waste and also repair ability. So I figured today we're gonna talk about the fair phone four only a little bit, and how it opens the door to talk about these issues in tech and why they're important and why they're really complicated. And I could have started, you know, anywhere, but I decided to tackle those in order that I mentioned them. So I'M gonna start off with ethical sourcing. It is very easy for us to be reductive in our thinking when we look at any particular electronic device. Consider your typical smartphone. In fact, let's be specific. Let's say that we're talking about an iphone. Now I'm going to add that apple has, on and off, done some serious work to try and make ethical choices when it comes to the manufacturing of its devices, particularly in the wake of scrutiny that was directed toward apple because there were some very high profile tragedies, like worker depths in China related to apple production. Um, the company has not maintained a stellar record like I'll talk about a bit more later, but anyway, apple at least has been in the public eye for this issue and when you look at an Iphone, you might think, oh well, this just this came from apple, but of course the truth of the matter is that it gets far more complex than that. I think there's a great way to kind of illustrate this. There's a song that's called the guns song and it comes from Stephen Sondheim's musical assassins. The musical is about the various people who assassinated or attempted to assassinate a U S president over the course of the history of the United States. Now, the character singing this part of the guns song in question is Leon Frank Chol Gas, who assassinated President Mckinley on September six, N one and Chol Gas sings. Quote. It takes a lot of men to make a gun. Hundreds many men to make a gun. Men in the minds to dig the iron, men in the mills to forge the steel, minute machines to turn the barrel, mold the trigger, shape the wheel. It takes a lot of men to make a gun. One Gun. End. Quote, and Hill Gods is right. He's pointing out that this one thing that someone can hold and they can own and they can use is actually the product of work from hundreds of people. Also, at the end of the song he makes it a point to say that this production, this manufacturing process, can cost many lives before the gun is ever fired. In other words, this gun effectively killed people even though it hadn't even been fully built yet, because people had died in the making of it. Well, the same thing, tragically, is true with our electronics. Our devices don't magically come out of a big building that has computer factory or smartphone manufacturing facility on the side. Our electronics are the product of many, many steps in a complicated and interconnected supply chain. We saw how dangerous the supply chain can be when it was disrupted and continues to be disrupted in the wake of the pandemic, and it brought a lot more attention to it, but it's attention more to how it inconveniences us or how it affects businesses less so about the conditions going on at various points of the supply chain. And there are many points in that chain where there are big, troubling problems. Let's start with raw materials. So our devices rely on some materials that we think of as being pretty scarce. We call them rare earth elements. Sometimes you will hear rare earth minerals or rare earth metals. We frequently will say rare earth elements just to kind of lump them all into one category. Now, that's a bit of a misnomer. Actually, they're not that rare. It's just it's very hard to find a lot of those material eels in a single place. Uh, it's that you know, you you don't find veins of ore of these rare earth elements. You can't just dig and say, Oh, I found a vein of whatever. So instead what you have to do is gather up huge clumps of earth and stone, minerals, and you have to treat it so that you can separate the rare earth elements from that Earth. So you've got to displace a ton, literally literally tons, of earth and then treat it in order to get at the stuff that we need in order to have them incorporated into our electronics and make them work. Now, if we were lied on places in the world that maintained strict controls when it comes to how you can treat workers and how you protect the environment in the process of your operations, that amount of effort and attention would end up translating into higher costs and manufacturing. So, for example, we might identify a region in the United States that could be ideal for mining certain rare earth elements that we would use for electronics. But if we did that, any operation would have to follow these strict rules, because that's the law in the United States, and those rules would cover stuff like the environmental impact of the operations. A lot of mining operations use explosives to blast out deep pits and they also tend to rely on enormous pools filled with toxic chemicals, and those chemicals leach out the stuff you want from everything else and then you dump everything else into a waste pit, or sometimes you might just have the toxic pool become the waste pit over time. So you essentially create enormous amounts of soil and rocks that you dump into these toxic pools. You let the chemicals do their work and extract the stuff that's in these teeny tiny concentrations within this massive earth and then you generate an enormous amount of spoil and this is the product of your mining. Now that toxic pool is obviously hazardous for the environment. We're talking about chemicals that can cause direct harm if you're exposed to them, or long term harm if it gets into things like the water supply. It's also obviously hazardous for the people who are working at these operations. Now a lot of this particular kind of work happens in China, which has a terrible human rights record. There is a mine in the Mongolia region of China where more than of all the rare earth elements mind in the country comes from. So out of all of China, one mind accounts for more than of all rare earth elements taken out of that country. It's called the by an oboe mine. It represents more than the total known earth rare earth elements in the world and almost half of all the rare earth elements that we need come from this one mine. It's been an operation as a rare earth elements mine since nine before that it was an iron mine. Anyway, this extraction process leaves behind lots of waste. There's toxic wastewater which is filled with stuff like heavy metals and radioactive materials and other dangerous stuff. If that water does get into the water supply, then you're looking at a really hazardous situation for all the people within that region who access that water table. It's not unusual in areas around these kinds of operations to see an increase in cancer rates for the populations in that region. Uh, it is possible to mine rare earth elements more responsibly, but that takes more time, takes more effort. Thus it's more expensive, and so you have to first work in a place that takes these things seriously. China is not one of those places and a place that doesn't treat workers as expendable. And for the record, there are rare earth element reserves in other parts of the world, like the United States, really does have some rare earth element deposits, but because of those strict rules about limiting environmental damage and mitigating the risk to human populations, including the workforce, you don't see them. Those operations happen because it would be way more expensive. That would either cut into the profits of the electronics companies or, more likely, result in an increase price to the consumer, or maybe both of those things. Anyway, that's just one part of the supply chain, the mining process that has a dark side. And there are other mining operations that also have a truly disturbing dark side. One of those happens in Africa, specifically in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or the D R C, and Y'all, I'm gonna warn you this gets grim now. The first thing you have to understand is that the D R C has had an incredibly violent and chaotic past due to things like colonialism, civil war, war in nearby nations, rampant government corruption and even more rampant exploitation of the natives of the region, and I do think it's important to understand at least a very quick history of the D R C to get a context for, as you know, as far as how the rest of the world helps perpetuate an ongoing crisis within this country. So let's get a quick rundown of its history, and I stress this is the barest bones. I am not doing any justice to the Democratic Republic of the Congo with this quick history, but I to kind of paint a picture of the plight of the people in this in this country. So much has happened there, but generally speaking, the native peoples of the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been the subject of abuse and exploitation for about a hundred fifty years. At first it was King Leopold of Belgium. He claimed the entire region as his own personal property and he sent agents there to oversee operations that forced locals to work in the rubber trade or they risked losing life and limb. Literally, there was a practice for a while where if someone was resisting the authority of the king, that person might get their arm lopped off, absolutely brutal. Then in the early twentieth century, under intense international pressure, King Leopold would hand over the control of the region to the Belgian parliament. This is where the region became known as the Belgian Congo, and at that point very large companies mostly Belgian companies replaced Leopold's agents, but the people of the region were still oppressed and exploited. It's just now they were exploited by these companies as opposed to the king's representatives. Over time, folks discovered there were other valuable resources besides rubber in the region that would eventually become the D R c. There was copper, for example. Later on they discovered uranium there. So as the atomic age advanced, countries like the then Soviet Union and the United States became very interested in the region, and both the USSR and the USA, as well as several other first world nations, would start to interfere in the region. Some sides would shore up rebel forces UH and some sides would shore up dictators. The United States supported dictators because the so union was funding rebel forces, and it was all in an effort to secure access to those resources. You don't kid yourself in thinking that either the USSR or the United States were really concerned for the people in the region. They were concerned for those resources and they would take whatever means necessary in order to make sure the other side couldn't get it. Meanwhile, the people of the nation continued to Labor under inhumane conditions. Now the region gained independence in nineteen sixty because Belgium realized that it was not going to be able to keep a lid on things much longer. There was a growing sense of independence in the country. Belgium did not have the resources to be able to suppress that, so there was a move to become a democratic, independent nation in nineteen sixty. But this opened up opportunities for other countries to try and install leaders within the Congo that would be more in client to trade with one side versus the other, uh and ultimately it gave a man named Mobutu the chance to declare himself president of the country in nineteen sixty five. Mobutu was incredibly corrupt. You could say he was using a lot of the same tactics as King Leopold and those large companies from decades earlier, and he was embezzling tons of money in order to fund his own private wealth. Things would get even more complicated over the following decades. By the nineteen nineties, there was a civil war in neighboring Rwanda and a genocide in Rwanda, and that ended up leading to conflict in what would be the D R C at this point in history. It was not the DRC yet. They had gone from the Belgian Congo to becoming the Republic of Zaire under Mobutu. And you know, Mo Bout was essentially a dictator who was calling himself a president, someone who was running unopposed an election after election, and the incredible pressure from the civil war forced him to flee the nation. But things did not necessarily get better from there. I'll talk about it more when we come back after this quick break. We're back, all right. We left off with Mobutu fleeing what was then called the Republic of Zaire, and the new leaders of the Congo renamed it the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So that's where we get its current name. This is a nation that has gone under many names over its history, but the corruption within the region at all levels of government and business, ran super deep. It's not like everything magically got better once Mobu too was deposed, essentially. And there were pockets in the DRC where military rebels were relying on forced labor are including child labor, to mine for materials like copper and then later cobalt. Cobalt is incredibly useful in electronics. That's where we're really going to focus for the rest of this conversation. So the armed rebels would sell these raw materials to buyers, essentially manufacturing companies, and then they would use the money they made from selling the raw materials to buy weapons and to try and gain more control over their various territories. All right, it gets worse. The fact that the D R C sits on top of deposits of valuable resources means that there's an ongoing pressure from the rest of the world to get access to those raw materials way of the list. On of those nations is China. In fact, there are a handful of Chinese mining companies that have exclusive rights to specific areas within the DRC to mine for cobalt in particular. So, like I said, cobalts used in a lot of stuff, including many types of lithium batteries, and our electronics rely on batteries. We know that there's an increased dependence upon batteries. In fact, if we want to have a future where electric vehicles replace internal combustion engine vehicles, we're gonna need a lot more batteries. So you've got these areas within the D R C where Chinese companies are overseeing dangerous mining operations and effectively are in control of those regions within the D R C. Like you have Chinese companies that are essentially ruling parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So you've also got these impoverished communities within the D R C that are attempting to get at least a little autonomy to be able to profit from their own resources. People who live on land and that they discover that they have cobalt on their land, they often find themselves forced off and incapable of profiting off their own property. This can actually escalate in to brutal confrontations with armed police and military. There's a twenty one piece in the New Yorker that's titled the Dark Side of Congo's cobalt rush and I urge you to read it. Uh, the piece goes into a lot more detail on the stuff I'm talking about, but essentially, the people of the D R C have had very little agency for multiple generations. There are entire towns that have been uprooted and forced to move, with people scattering all over the place as a Chinese mining operation has swooped in to demolish houses and turn what was once a town into just a bunch of minds. And there's a lack of safety precautions in these mining operations, which means the actual people doing the mining, many of them children, face life threatening situations regularly, and the presence of armed police and military, who are essentially paid off by the Chinese to keep things in line, will often mean that you run the risk of being beaten for any kind of resistance to the normal process of operations. And, like I said, there's this ongoing issue of child labor in the region. It's something that has gained global attention and occasionally you see companies do something about it, like Apple. Apple has now and again attempted to address this problem, though the article in The New Yorker specifically alleges that apple pretty much abandoned any attempts to be serious about that once the heat was off the company. So you know, they made an effort for a while and then, when people stop paying attention, they just went back to the old old way. So the human cost is very high. And keep in mind so far we're only talking about raw materials. Let's also talk about the manufacturing process. See, when we move up the supply chain, then we have to talk about taking raw materials and turning them into components that will later get assembled into finished products. Now, some of these steps happen in places where things aren't too rough, but ultimately it all goes back to places like China. While your major tech companies aren't reliant upon mainland China for microprocessors, because that honor tends to go to Taiwan. Taiwan is off the coast of China and it is independent of the mainland, though mainland China disputes that point. But you know, if you're talking about assembly and packaging, then that's all out of China. In fact, these processes usually take place in different facilities hundreds or thousands of miles apart. So you're shipping stuff all over Asia just for it to become a finished product. You know, it kind of gets back to that song from assassins it takes a lot of men to make a gun. In this case, your iphone has traveled the world in some ways before it ever got to you. Anyway, according to researchers like Henry Young of the National University of Singapore, more than half of the world's electronics are at some point going through a process of manufacturing within China, and the country has a reputation for very harsh working conditions, which includes unreasonable punishments for even minor offenses. And it was so bad that the economic rights institute looked into more than a hundred fifty cases between ten and which workers at these kinds of facilities committed or attempted to commit suicide. The researchers found that low wages, anxiety over job security, a massive turnover problem and harsh punishments, as well as a feeling that no one in the managerial capacity ever even gave a crap about them, all contributed to folks having such despondents that they considered suicide. Now this became global news when there were actually a string of suicides, more than a dozen of them, and a manufacturing company called Fox con in and sadly, the reason the world really took notice is because Fox con is one of Apple's big suppliers. It's part of Apple's supply chain. If it hadn't been for that connection to apple, I would wager that those depths would not have received much coverage outside of China. Probably not that much inside of China, and that is absolutely unthinkable to me, but it's the it's the truth. Now, over the last decade, wages for workers in these facilities has slowly improved. The low wages have gotten better over the last several years, which has raised the cost of doing business in China. So it's a little more expensive to have your manufacturing processes operate in China because they're paying people more, but because China has such a well developed manufacturing infrastructure means it's still the main choice over alternatives like Vietnam and India, where you know the Labor could be a lot cheaper. Again, you get into real problems with all this. But the reason why companies aren't necessarily flocking to Vietnam and India for all of their manufacturing. Some of them are dipping their toe in that, but the reason they're not rushing to it is that these these countries have a lack of infrastructure when you compare it to China. So there's this kind of balancing act that companies are doing, saying well, well, well, we'll continue to operate in China while we start to see manufacturing infrastructure built out in other nations where we might be able to exploit cheaper labor so that our our costs come down. But yeah, that's the main reason that the world turned to China in the first place. It's because the labor costs were so low that it kept the overall cost of manufacturing down, and thus it could mean that, you know, the consumer sees less expensive electronics. You know, they might still be pricey, but they're not as expensive as they would be if, you know, we were being better stewards of the environment and treating people as human beings. So, yeah, it comes at the cost of a lot of lives along the way. Financially it might cost less, but the social cost is and the environmental cost is very high. All right, that's enough. I know that I get on a soapbox and it sounds like I'm preaching. We're gonna switch our thoughts over to sustainability and recycling. Still gonna be a little preachy. Apologized for that. It's just the way it works. So, as we've already covered, getting the raw materials for our electronics includes a lot of practices that are harmful not just to humans but also the environment. And meanwhile the Electronics Industry is built upon a practice of consume and replace. By that I mean we in the developed world our condition to replace our stuff on a regular basis. Um computers are they tend to last five to eight years if you've taken good care of them. That's assuming you don't need to upgrade to a more recent system. You know, frequently, like if you're a pro Gamer or something, you might be upgrading your system until the motherboard can't support anymore and then you swap it all out, and so you might be changing your rig fairly regularly. People like me, where I'm using a work computer to do some pretty light work, I can get away with using the same machine for several years in a row. But then with smartphones there's this push to upgrade every two years or less. You know, we get new models with new features every single year and they're marketed to us as being a big improvement over the stuff that came out the year before. The old contract systems that were with carriers here in the United States meant that you used to have the chance to renew your agreement, your agreement with whatever carrier you use, every two years and you would get a phone for a highly subsidized price. So the actual cost of the phone could be lower, even free, depending upon the plan. That's not as common these days. We don't see those subsidized phones as frequently in the United States as we used to, but it got people into the habit of thinking every two years or so that they needed a new phone. Some people it's even more frequently. They they want to get the newest model as soon as it comes out. But then what happens to all the old phones and computers? Like we've created this culture where we have manufactured the desire for new products. Well, the old products have to go somewhere. Right. Where do we put them? You know, you shouldn't just throw them away, although a lot of people do. Uh. For one thing, you might have some important information stored on there somewhere and you really need to make sure you've gone through and thoroughly, uh, formatted and deleted all that stuff so that someone doesn't come into possession of one of your old pieces of equipment and get access to information they should not be able to access. But for another thing, if the electronics still works, like if you have a smartphone you want to upgrade but your old smartphone still works. Well, you could donate your old smartphone to an organization that can make sure that someone who otherwise would not have that kind of a device can get it. If it's a device that doesn't work, it still contains valuable and, in some cases, toxic materials in it, and you know you don't want the toxic stuff to go into a landfill where it might leach out and contaminate the environment. That's obviously something that no one wants to have happened. And you don't want to waste the valuable stuff that's in your electronics either. Right like there's stuff in there that could be used again, even if the device itself is shot. There are components, there's, you know, copper, there's even gold. There are other things that are dangerous stuff too, like mercury and lead. So you don't go cracking into your old electronics hoping that you're gonna be panning for gold in them, but it would be a great idea to risk cycle the electronics in those cases in order to reclaim those valuable materials and use them again instead of them just going into a landfill. Now I will caution you, because the recycling process is also a complicated one. We've talked about it on this show before. There are some electronics recycling companies that just gather up enormous amounts of electronics. They pack cargo containers full of them, they ship them overseas, often to places like China, and the recycling operations, the reclamation operations, are actually very similar to how rare earth element minds end up separating the materials from Earth in the first place. They often rely on caustic, toxic chemicals to leach that stuff out of the electronics and thus be able to reclaim it, and those operations can put workers at risk. There are entire towns in China that became dangerous to live in due to the chemicals that were being used to pull valuable stuff out of old electronics. So even when you're trying to do the responsible thing with your old devices and recycle them, you can inadvertently participate in a system that exploits people and causes harm. There are ethical electronics recycling programs out there, but it takes some legwork to find them. Once you do, those old electronics can be processed and materials can be reclaimed to be used in future products. That's what the Fair Phone Company strives to do. So rather than source materials that come from places like the D R C, where it's far more likely that they came out of an operation that has a terrible disregard for the safety of its workforce. The stuff is coming from old electronics that no longer have a use. They're relying heavily on recycled materials in order to get access to those, those raw components. Now, reducing our reliance on new material boost sustainability and that's a huge benefit in the long run, at least on the environmental side. On the humanitarian side, things get awfully complicated, because what do you do about taking jobs away, like if you if you remove the demand for cobalt within the D R C and these Chinese companies all pull up stakes, what takes its place? Because you you have a region that has been unstable for generations, largely due to interference from other countries, and the answer to that is complicated and and I'm not sure anyone really has the right one. Like I don't know if there is a right answer. There are probably answers that have different degrees of wrongness to them. Okay, we're gonna take another quick break. When we come back we're going to talk about the third of those big topics that fair phone opens up, and that's repair ability. Now, anyone out there who has had an issue with their electronics, if especially if it's something like a smartphone, less so with computers, because computers, if you know what you're doing, you can frequently swap something out if something goes bad, like if your motherboard goes bad. It might be hard for you to to, you know, figure out that that's the problem, but you can change out a motherboard, assuming you get one that's compatible, that fits in your case and all that kind of stuff. Same thing for a CPU or a GPU or Ram, like all the different components. It's fairly straightforward to swap them out and replace them. In your standard desktop computer. Laptops are a different story. Those get closer into the problems that I'm going to talk about. When it comes to smartphones, it's very rare to come across a smartphone where it's easy, or even potentially possible for you to do a repair job yourself. That's because smartphone companies take great efforts to one cram all the components into as slim a form factor as possible, because that scene as being a value to the industry. Like you want to have a sleek, sexy, thin smartphone, so that ends up causing part of the issue. You might have to use glue, for example, to glue components into place so that it can fit into this very small form factor. Well, that makes it very difficult to access and replace or repair that particular piece if it's been glued to something else. Same thing with the actual case. Like, I don't know about you, but my phone I wouldn't be able to open it up to even access the internals. In the first place. It's essentially sealed shut. You might have to use something like a heat gun to weaken the glue that's holding the case together, but then you have to be super careful because if you you know, if you overheat your smartphone, you might fry the various components inside of it. You might need special pride bars in order to be able to open it up. And then once you get in and you look at the components, some of them might be fastened to the the circuit board or to the case itself using proprietary connectors, proprietary screws, which means you need a special tool to be able to unscrew them. Apple does this all the time, so it makes things much more difficult to do repairs on it's why? One of the reasons why is that companies like apple really like to have a closed ecosystem. So your device stops working, maybe you just end up buying a new device. That would be great for Apple. They would love that. But, failing that, maybe you have to take that device into an apple store where someone, an actual apple employee, will take the device off your hands and the repairs will be done by licensed apple agents who are doing all the work because they actually have the tools to access all these different parts and they have the individual parts as well, which, you know, most companies don't sell those. Most companies don't sell you a replacement for the various pieces that are inside the smartphone. So it makes it very hard to repair these things. Fair phone goes a different way. Fair phone takes a more modular approach and it uses standard screws and it doesn't glue stuff close. So you can open your fair phone phone, you can remove the battery and swap it out for a new one. Let's say that your battery life has started to suffer, that the battery is starting to to no longer hold as much of a charge you can actually with a fair phone. Change the battery out, put a new battery in Um and attach it screwed back into place, and then you're good to go. And maybe you send the old battery off to be recycled so that way it can continue this process Um. In fact, the fair phone, a couple of the fair phones, are the first smartphone devices to receive a ten from I fix it, which is a website that judges the repair ability of various uh electronic devices, and the easier it is to repair, the higher the score. Fair phone is the only smartphone out there that's got a ten, and that really shows you the approach of the company is made saying we want to make sure that our device will last you a long time, that if there is a problem, you can solve it. Check out the beat while the DJ revolves it, you just use the regular tools to access it and swap it out. You can actually buy the replacement components, you know. It's not like it's hidden somewhere where. You know they have complete control over supply chain that they don't allow anyone else to access. So it really does change the game, and higherly as far as reparability. This really falls in line with the philosophy of the right to repair movement, and so it is fundamentally different from the way most companies do their business, where it's it's not as easy, it's not as convenient and it takes away a revenue stream to allow people to make repairs to their own stuff. Now there is a massive trade off for all of these things that fair phone does. You know the fact that fair phone tries very hard to make sure that it is not engaged in operations that contribute to human suffering, that it's not working with companies that are exploiting workers by paying them criminally low wages and making them work ridiculously long hours, that it is a reparable device, that it's not something that's going to put increased strain on the environment because it's using more and more recycled materials. Two build these devices? That trade off? Well, they're two. One is that it's not nearly as advanced as your flagship smartphones on the market. Right if you take the fair phone, for the most recent one, and if you were to compare it to an iphone fourteen, the most recent iphone, the iphone Fourteen's specs blow the fair phone four out of the water. There's no questions, not even close. Now, granted, the fair phone four is cast is. It would cost around six D seventy bucks us if they sold them in the US, which they don't. But if we converted euro to two dollars, would be around six D seventy bucks, whereas an IPHONE, if you're getting a pro model, could be around a thousand thousand two hundred bucks, somewhere around there, depending on which model you're getting. So yes, less expensive than an IPHONE, but also far less powerful. If you actually compare the fair phone four against other smartphones that have a comparable set of capabilities, then the other phones cost, you know, half as much, or us like you might find a phone that costs a hundred, fifty or two hundred dollars that has the equivalent specs of the fair phone four, which costs six. That really shows you that if you want to go about things in an ethically responsible manner, there is a massive cost to that. It does cost a lot more money. It also really pulls back the curtain on how much money, quote unquote, you're saving by depending upon these systems that bring along with it these awful conditions for the people who are are in these operations. So you start asking yourself questions. Is it more valuable to you to be able to say the devices I use, I'm going to use them for as long as I possibly can and I want to make sure that they are ethically sourced and I don't mind paying more for them? Not everyone has that capability to I mean, I fully understand like there are a lot of consumers out there where paying more for the stuff they need is just not an option, particularly as we are on the brink of whatever economic calamity we're in right now, whether it's a recession or not. It's tough. Is a tough ask to go to someone and say hey, that device you want and or need is dependent upon unethical practices, so you need to pay more money for this thing that does less so that you're not contributing to human misery, and the other person says, I can't afford to do that. I mean, that's that's a tough argument to to go against. Right. So there are no easy solutions here, but being aware of the problem, I think, is absolutely important, like having that that knowledge of how this system works and what it is dependent upon is an important component because it might make you pause when you are about to purchase your next electronic gadget, to ask questions about this and to potentially hold companies accountable and to demand changes for people who aren't in a position to be able to argue for themselves. And I think ultimately that's the right thing to do. But it is, you know, a long game. It's very hard and it will come with the cost of things being more expensive over time. So it's not something that I think would ever happen immediately. I'll be amazed if it happens at all. But but I feel like it's something that we need to talk about to be able to at least acknowledge what's going on. To turn a blind eye to it and to pretend like these things aren't happening, I think is a massive injustice and I think we have to reckon with it. And I realized that the reason why a lot of this stuff never really makes the news that frequently is that it's happening in places that are so far away from us, especially I'm talking about here in the United States in particular. It's so far away from where we are that it's easy for us to just not think about it and not pay attention, because that might as well be a different world to a lot of us, and so it's so far away and the people are people we don't know and we have no connection to that it's easier for us to kind of shrug and set it aside and then go after the next shiny thing. But yeah, I love the fair phone for mission because, or the fair phone mission, I should say, just the whole company's mission because, like I said, it really does try to address some massive issues in the technology space, the hardware space, and I think that's commendable. Whether the device is one worth getting or not, I can't say they don't sell them in the US. I have never held one in my hand, but I think the mission is one that I really believe in and I would like to see that kind of extend over time and an effort be made to create a more humane and environmentally conscious approach toward producing our electronics, even if that means they're going to cost a bit more. All right, I know I rambled a lot and I went off on these things and maybe you have a fundamentally different point of view about this. Now. Maybe there are economic factors that you would argue for that. Again, it's hard to argue against them. If, if you argue this literally is the only way it can work, because if it went any other way, the companies would go to a business, then we're in another we're in another crisis. It's just a different kind of one. But that's my own point of view. If you have things that you would like me to talk about in future episodes of tech stuff, whether it's a specific technology, trend in tech, a personality and technology, anything like that, let me know. One Way to do that is to download the I heart radio APP, which is free to download and use, and you can navigate over to tech stuff just, you know, put text stuff in the little search field. It'll pop up you. Once you're over on tech stuff, you'll see that there's a little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. Let me know what you would like me to talk about, or you can always leave me a message on twitter. The handle for the show is tech stuff, hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text stuff is an I heart radio production. For more podcasts from my heart radio, visit the I heart radio, APP apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.