The podcast in the url below covers an array of topics related to capitalism, but includes an interview with Bas van Abel. Bas is an entrepreneur who founded a company, Fairphone, with the goal of designing an "ethical phone." He recently gave up on this goal due to the compromised supply chains that are as inescapable part of the hi-tech industry:
"Van Abel's experiment of building a 'fair' phone has taken him around the world to witness first-hand the lives made invisible in the digital supply chain. [In the podcast, Bas talks] about how putting people first requires both a redesign of economic systems and a reshaping of our individual perspectives as consumers in an age of hyper-materialism."
There is more information about the Fairphone, here, and there is a video documentary about how it is made, here. According to the phone's website, the Fairphone's developers have:
"… created the world's first ethical, modular smartphone. You shouldn't have to choose between a great phone and a fair supply chain."
Beyond an ethical phone, van Abel had the grander vision of all technology that "should be built without exploiting human laborers and destroying the planet." Rather than this vision being realized, however, van Abel apparently now refers to the phones he makes as "fairer," rather than "fair." As the article in the second url below puts it:
"… the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment and the global poor. The manufacture of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave labor. … Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers."
Take care
David
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Fingerprints on the Touchscreen
By Douglas Rushkoff
March 29, 2017
Team Human
How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse
By Douglas Rushkoff
July 24, 2018
The Guardian
