Читать книгу How Green is Your Smartphone? - Richard Maxwell - Страница 10

Like the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries, telecommunications firms have no compunction about using public relations to “war-game science” via campaigns that spread doubt and confusion about ecological problems, from climate change to radiofrequency radiation. The trick involves discrediting researchers who report evidence of harm, while backing scholarship that reports reassuring findings. That scam worked for tobacco corporations for decades, with disastrous results for public health.

But by the time we get to Chapter 3, we’ll be smarter than our phones. We’ll have figured out how to make them greener, and be ready to take on industry scoundrels and gullible journalists. With the air cleared of polluting propaganda, our brief conclusion can offer ideas about what should happen next.

We take these matters very seriously, not only because we are concerned consumers of this technology, but because we have been unknowing stakeholders in its development. Click wheels, multi-touch screens, global-positioning systems, lithium-ion batteries, signal compression, hyper-text markup language, liquid-crystal displays, and a number of other innovations were the result of government funding from publicly funded entities such as the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the US Department of Energy, the CIA, the National Science Foundation, the US Navy, the US Army Research Office, the National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Defense – and research universities (Mazzucato, 2015). We paid taxes that made smartphones and their immediate predecessors possible – that’s right, taxes – and private corporations profited.

So, it’s important to acknowledge that we have a responsibility to encourage smartphone owners such as ourselves to go beyond an appreciation of these devices’ utility and understand our relation to the harm they cause. As well as holding onto our phones for as long as possible, we should endeavor to keep up with the related knowledge on technology’s medical, cultural, social, and environmental impact, from media effects to corporate swindles.

We researched and wrote much of this book on mobile devices – that’s the paradox of a project that aims to make smartphones greener from within as well as beyond the boundaries of their guileful promises. Our hope is that How Green Is Your Smartphone? will enable readers who don’t have the time to delve into the relevant studies to contribute to public debate about these gadgets. It’s urgently needed.

1 1. https://www.apple.com/iphone-xr/only-iphone/

2 2. https://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/galaxy-s10/

3 3. https://store.google.com/us/product/pixel_3?hl=en-US

4 4. http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/bell-labs/GWATT

5 5. https://rebellion.earth

6 6. https://www.apple.com/legal/rfexposure/

7 7. https://www.sehn.org/precautionary-principle-understanding-science-in-regulation

8 8. http://www.step-initiative.org/