WHO MAKES OUR SMARTPHONES? FOUR MOMENTS IN THEIR LIFECYCLE

Abstract

Firms like Apple promote themselves as designers. This creates a fetishized view of their merchandise, as if corporations dreamt it up and then delivered it to us. But our cellphones don’t appear by magic in online and physical stores, and corporate propaganda must not blind us to the real political economy of electronic devices: slavery, serfdom, dangerous mining, inhumane factory life, and electronic waste. These are constituent components of smartphones, from their inception to their disposal. Activists, workers, artists, and scholars, notably from the Global South, have sought to counter the misleading fetish of cellphones. We follow their example, drawing attention to the way in which corporate taste for stimulating demand increases not simply consumer desire for these gadgets, but augments what is already immense pressure on the supply chain: those involved require more and more of their workers, be they little children enslaved in mines, young women required to live in oppressive factories, or recyclers in the informal sector.