RICHARD MAXWELL and TOBY MILLER
Oxford University Press, 2012, 246 pages, $44.80 (pb)
There is a reason why the typical electronic product
warranty lasts only 12 months, say Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller in Greening
the Media. Most digital devices are
designed to “break or become uncool”
after just a year, requiring regular product replacements or upgrades. The profits of the big electronic brand names
(Apple, Nintendo, Sony, Amazon, Microsoft, e-Bay, Motorola, Philips, Samsung,
Toshiba, etc.) depend on this business model of “rapid and planned cycles of
innovation and obsolescence”.
In the process, this swiftly-changing technological fashion
season “consumes, despoils and wastes natural resources”, with attendant toxic
risks for the makers, users and disposers of this allegedly green,
post-industrial technology, on a scale that rivals the old smokestack factories
of industrial capitalism. The ‘clean and
green’ façade of today’s information and communication technologies and
consumer electronics hides their insidious ecological impact.
Computers, printers, mobile phones, data servers,
televisions and other screen-based gadgets account for 3% of global greenhouse
gases throughout their lifecycle, as large a climate footprint as carbon-dirty
global aviation. Google’s data server in
Oregon, for example, uses the same amount of electricity as a city of 200,000,
and total global data server electricity consumption doubles every five years,
billowing carbon at massive, but invisible, rates.
Digital flat screen televisions, with their higher
resolution and slim profile, can use three times the electricity of their
cathode ray tube forebears. Reading
on-line for half an hour has the same environmental cost of the printing of one
newspaper. At current growth rates,
electricity consumption by all electronic equipment is projected to rise to
almost half of total global electricity demand by 2030.
Microchip production also exacts a poisonous toll, through
gases, acids, solvents and other chemicals (a mobile phone contains two hundred
chemical compounds), on the planet’s people.
Behind the stylish First World brand name lie the poisoned Third World
workers of the off-shore totalitarian manufacturers contracted to gain
competitive advantage by seeking out low-cost countries where “state
incentives, weak labour organisation and protection, minimal environmental
regulation, favourable exchange rates, low wages and sparse human rights
enforcement” make for fatter First World profits.
Additional injury results from e-waste disposal, fifty
million tons of it every year, mostly via discarded mobile phones (130 million
trashed annually in the US alone), televisions and computers. To avoid the profit-harming higher costs and
regulatory oversight of recycling in wealthier countries, over 80% of e-waste
is exported to Asian, African and Latin American sites, dumping regions where
pre-teen girls recycle the junked goods, although ‘recycle’ is a misnomer as
just the valuable metals like copper are salvaged whilst the electronic carcass
is dumped in landfill with toxic chemicals and heavy metals contaminating
agricultural land and saturating the food chain.
Although the authors’ diagnosis is acute - profit
maximisation through unremitting growth in consumption is the engine of
capitalism, both post-industrial and industrial, which rides roughshod over the
human and natural world - their prescription (not assisted in its
persuasiveness by an overdose of academic ‘media studies’ theory) veers towards
the chimerical fantasy of how a “radically reconfigured notion of environmental
accountancy and auditing … can imagine a transformative role for markets in a
future of environmentally sustainable media industries”.
Their vanguard of green but market-constrained accountants
are valiant but doomed in their quest to fit
the square peg of ecological sustainability into the round hole of
capitalist growth. The authors’
sincerity, however, for examining media technology “with an approach predicated
on a deep regard for workers and the Earth and an equally profound disregard
for technological hype” remains undimmed but, if the capitalist market can’t
honour these values, then the vital industry of information and communication
should be socialised and put in the hands of the world’s digital citizens.
