Page 32 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

14 G. MURDOCK AND B. BREVINI

In addition to reinforcing the wastefulness of over-consumption in
general, embedding digital media at the centre of everyday life has had
three other major impacts with consequences for climate crisis.
Firstly, the always there, always on, nature of tablet and smart phone
access to the internet has significantly increased the demand on power
supplies. Use is no longer periodic. It is continuous.
Secondly, smart phones have been in the forefront of efforts to develop
‘frictionless’ purchasing, by-passing cash and cards, and encouraging
consumers to swipe their devices across payment points. The intention is to
increase the volume and rate of consumption by reducing to the absolute
minimum the time for second thoughts (see Justin Lewis’s chapter in this
volume).
Thirdly, digital media, particularly smart phones, have played a major
role in accelerating rates of product obsolescence and disposal by
encouraging users to upgrade on a regular basis. The latest version of the
iPhone is the seventh model to be launched, consigning the previous six to
the scrapheap. The result is a mounting accumulation of electronic waste,
much of it non-biodegradable and some of it toxic. As Xin Tong
demonstrates in her chapter, in a variant of offshore activity, China has
been a major recipient of discarded machines, where their salvage and
re-use supports a thriving microeconomy with complex and uneasy
relations to urban expansion and city planning. This case forcibly reminds
us that behind the glossy ads promoting the latest laptops and smart
phones lies an extended chain of production, use and disposal that links us
as end-users to the miners extracting the minerals required for manufac-
ture, the assembly workers labouring under exploitative conditions, seamen
flying flags of convenience in the container ships that transport the finished
machines, the staff in the coal and oil-fired power stations that produce the
energy we consume in use, and the rural migrants newly arrived in the cities
searching the piles of our discarded waste for anything of value. Retrieving
these lives and exploring their role in the reproduction of contemporary
capitalism is essential to any full analysis of the present climate crisis and
ways it might be addressed.
Additionally, the digital machines we buy, use and discard come in
packages that create pollution. Plastics are a particular problem. A recent
review of available research by the World Economic Forum estimated that
there are currently over 150 million tonnes of plastic in the world’s oceans
and that if business as usual continues by 2050 these will contain more
plastics than fish (by weight) and that production of plastics will account