A new UN report finds that humanity is generating 137 billion pounds of TVs, smartphones, and other e-waste a year—and recycling less than a quarter of it.
Apple: No no no, it’s fine! Keep buying a brand new phone every 2 years! Oh, you don’t want to? Well, we’ll make them irreparable, lock down the software so that you can’t revive it or reuse it in any way, claim it’s for “security”, and make sure that repairing it costs as much as a new phone.
But believe us, we’re the good guys and are doing our best to be sustainable 😉
Graphics card manufacturers: listen up, that graphics card you bought just a few months ago is already outdated. Never mind that it could be full speed, but we artificially gimped it in hardware and software to sell more units. Responsibility to handle the trash you say? Lol, that’d cost money! Let your government ship them to a third-world country and dump it in a slum.
Btw, we’re sustainable, and don’t you forget it!
appliance manufacturers: Repairability is for chumps. We need those fat stacks! The day your warranty ends, your device breaks 😘 Planned obsolesce baby! Buy a new appliance you bloody consumer.
IoT manufacturers: Who, us? No, we don’t exist. Look over there. Nothing to see here.
And so on and so forth.
#opensourceAfterDeprecation : you deprecate or stop supporting a device? nice, now release all the source code, designs, and schemata to the public
#greenTax : a tax is levied for the estimated impact to the environment your device has
#recycleByDesign : all your devices need to have a planned recycling route and if somebody else has to figure it out, you pay a nice tax
While capitalism is a disease, publicly traded companies are the festering wounds. When the product becomes investor sentiment, the only thing that matters is making more profits at any cost
Apple: No no no, it’s fine! Keep buying a brand new phone every 2 years! Oh, you don’t want to? Well, we’ll make them irreparable, lock down the software so that you can’t revive it or reuse it in any way, claim it’s for “security”, and make sure that repairing it costs as much as a new phone.
But believe us, we’re the good guys and are doing our best to be sustainable 😉
Graphics card manufacturers: listen up, that graphics card you bought just a few months ago is already outdated. Never mind that it could be full speed, but we artificially gimped it in hardware and software to sell more units. Responsibility to handle the trash you say? Lol, that’d cost money! Let your government ship them to a third-world country and dump it in a slum.
Btw, we’re sustainable, and don’t you forget it!
appliance manufacturers: Repairability is for chumps. We need those fat stacks! The day your warranty ends, your device breaks 😘 Planned obsolesce baby! Buy a new appliance you bloody consumer.
IoT manufacturers: Who, us? No, we don’t exist. Look over there. Nothing to see here.
And so on and so forth.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
While capitalism is a disease, publicly traded companies are the festering wounds. When the product becomes investor sentiment, the only thing that matters is making more profits at any cost