[amosbatto]

A Better Upgrade, Not a Faster Throw-Away
An activist's guide to minimizing the social and environmental
impact of computers and reforming the industry

Contents:

Living in a World of Planned Obsolescence and Over-Consumption
Environmental and Social Impact of Computers
The Hazardous Disposal and Recycling of Computers
Minimizing the Harm of your Computer
Buying Products Certified with an Eco-Label
Software to Save your old Computer and the Environment
Free Formats to Liberate Information
Recent Movements to Reform the Computer Hardware Industry
The Importance of Government in Mandating Change
Why Extended Producer Responsibility is Needed
Now is the Time to Get Involved
Suggested Reading
Appendix A: Growth in Personal Computers
Endnotes 1-88

web:
http://www.ciber-runa.net/guide/Bett...vistGuide.html
print:
http://www.ciber-runa.net/guide/Bett...ivistGuide.pdf

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I wrote this activist guide because I was disturbed by the fact that nobody seems to question the environmental and social costs of computers. I would appreciate feedback, especially on my section about software and rejuvinating old computers. I talk a lot about free software and free formats, so I think you guys would be interested in how an environmentalist might see Linux.

cheers,
Amos Batto.
----------------------------------------------------------------

Here is the introduction in case you want to decide whether it is worth reading or not.

More than any other technology of recent date, the computer has become the quintessence of modern society. Computers have transformed how we work, communicate, and entertain ourselves. Computers fill our homes, our workplaces, and our imaginations in a way that few technologies do. We spend much of our lives in constant contact with computers. If we are not in front of a monitor screen, we are likely to be found with cars, stereos, TVs, and toys which have computer chips embedded inside. Perhaps the very ubiquity of the computer in our lives causes us to loose sight of the social and environmental impacts of our beloved technology. In our minds, computers are the stuff of modernity--the clean and efficient purveyors of information and entertainment which makes our lives rich. We rarely question the costs of this technology, even when we reach into our pocketbooks to buy another. With increasing voraciousness we consume new computers and junk them just as rapidly.

When confronted with your suddenly outmoded PC, the first question you should ask yourself is not what type of new computer to buy next, but why do we live in a world where the technology which was so shiny and new a couple years ago is now the junk poisoning our planet. We should be asking ourselves if we truly need a new computer every couple years and what will each new computer allow us to do that we can't already do. More importantly, what can we do to change our world so that we don't need to consume and junk a PC every couple years? This guide provides suggestions for what you can do to minimize the social and environmental costs of using computing technology and how you can help reform the computer industry so it does burden the world with such costs.

Living in a World of Planned Obsolescence and Over-Consumption

If we lived in a world more driven by true needs rather than the dictates of capitalistic over-consumption, we would admit that most of the processing power in today’s PC is utterly excessive for the vast majority of users. The 80386 of last decade was perfectly capable of the word processing, spread sheet calculations, internet surfing, and email reading which forms the bulk of our computing needs. The problem is that technology companies only make a profit when they can convince an already saturated market to upgrade to their newest gee-whiz gizmos. The only area of the market where growth is truly necessary is in the low-end commodity sector for low-income consumers. Bringing computing technology to the poor is a truly worthy goal, but it brings only marginal profits and most US technology companies focus their efforts on developing products with a surfeit of power and frill to tickle our consumptive desires. If the market only responded to unmet needs, MIT Media Lab’s $100 laptop for the rest of the world have been designed a long time ago. Over-consumption and market pressures lead us to continually upgrade to increasingly profligate technologies. Most consumption of new computers in America is the replacement of a perfectly functioning old computer which then becomes toxic waste relegated to the dump.

Unfortunately, the modern tech economy is based on the premise that hardware should be made obsolescent every couple years. Using modern computing technology becomes an cycle of wasteful upgrades every 2 or 3 years. Tech companies driven by overblown stock values and the need for continual growth are finding it increasingly difficult to sell to an already saturated market. To induce us to continually consume anew, they are forced to produce more and more powerful computers that will throw last year’s upgrade into sudden obsolescence. As Intel’s Andrew Grove candidly admitted, “We eat our own children, and we do it faster and faster ... That’s how we keep our lead.”i The needless quest to antiquate last year's processor drives chip makers to plan dual and quadruple core processors now that they have reached the practical limits of forcing more clock cycles per second through a tiny sliver of silicon. Meanwhile, harddrive makers draw up plans for terabyte drives, since the billions of bytes of storage in todays drives aren't enough space to hold all the data that will be coursing through these multiple processor cores. ATI and nVidia in turn churn out power gobbling behemoths to transform all that data into 3-D fantasylands on our screens that will induce us to open our wallets. As if one GPU isn't enough, now they are devising schemes to sell us two and even four graphics cards to process in parallel the billions of pixels per second required to create the latest first-person shooter mayhem. The folly of trying to endlessly "eat our own children" with more and more powerful chips becomes apparent as we survey the roundup of 700 watt power supplies which are being devised to make all this excessive processing possible.ii When the relentless quest for more power doesn't induce enough consumption, the industry turns computers into statements of style with incompatible case designs and colors. They dream up a plethora of embedded gadgetry and techno chic fashion like iPods so there is always something novel on the market to tickle our consuming desires.

Meanwhile, the software companies realize that they will only be able to endlessly sell us more software, if they produce buggy bloatware which forces us into upgrade cycles. If we aren’t coerced to buy the upgrade to fix the bugs in the last version, we will be forced to buy the latest software because we can’t interchange data with our peers who are using the latest formats which last year’s software can’t read. Computers have revolutionized the production and dissemination of information, but we can only access that information if we continually upgrade to the latest technology capable of reading it. Each upgrade of the latest bloatware consumes so much more memory and processor time that we are forced to upgrade our hardware at the same time. Once a number of our peers upgrades, we can not risk being left incommunicado and must upgrade just to keep up with the frenetic herd. Each new computer packs millions more transistors, sucks more current, and requires more cooling fans just to function, yet we rarely pause to question the insanity of riding this technological whirlwind.

Each upgrade is regarded as an advancement to be hailed as progress in our society, but we must ask ourselves what have we really done except consume more resources to do the same job as before. MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte observes: “Today's laptops have become obese. Two-thirds of their software is used to manage the other third, which mostly does the same functions nine different ways.”iii Undoubtedly, it is a technological wonder that today’s desktop computer can pump 2.5 Gb/s of visual eye-candy down a single PCI Express line so we can edit movies at home and play the latest first person shooter from Id Software. Titillated by the latest novelty, we often forget to ask ourselves what is the purpose of our technology.

Without retreating into Luddism, asceticism, or anachronistic views of a rosy pretechnological past, we need to pause and ponder our real needs and ask how computers help us fulfill those needs. Technology pundits hailed the fact that last year Americans bought 62.3 million personal computers–one for every 5 Americansiv-- yet they failed to ask what real benefit all those computer purchases brought. The Computer Industry Almanac notes that roughly 75% of computer purchases in America are replacements of an existing unit. The strongest growth is in notebook sales, which are sold mainly to people who already own a desktop computer.v

[Roxoff]

Originally Posted by amosbatto

...
The 80386 of last decade was perfectly capable of the word processing, spread sheet calculations, internet surfing, and email reading which forms the bulk of our computing needs.
...
The only area of the market where growth is truly necessary is in the low-end commodity sector for low-income consumers.
...

Nope, sorry, I'm going to disagree with this.

I work for a company that produces thermal and emc analysis software, the products we make have been largely crippled until recently when processing power has slowly caught up with our goals.

You see, it can take days to run the EMC analysis of modern circuit board on a complex model. And this time falls not because we still use 386's, but because we now have 64bit computers. A model that would take a week on a 33Mhz 386 can be complete in maybe half an hour now.

And to what end? Well it means the manufacturers of EMC producing equipment no longer have to build dozens of prototypes to test, we cut down waste.

The point I'm making is that just because you can word process quite happily on a 386, I'm not happy to play Neverwinter Nights at 1 frame every 12 seconds.

And even when I upgrade my computers I never throw any bits away. I only do that if the parts break.

[amosbatto]

Originally Posted by Roxoff

I work for a company that produces thermal and emc analysis software, the products we make have been largely crippled until recently when processing power has slowly caught up with our goals.

Roxoff, I'm not sure if what you are saying is really disagreeing with my argument. I'm saying that "the bulk" of computer use is non-specialized and doesn't require the latest hardware. I used to work at a firm which did a lot of verilog programming and I can vouch for the importance of fast hardware, but that is a very specialized application. Of the millions of computers in use, how many do applications which demand that sort of processing power?

Your argument about it being more environmental to run 1 fast new computer rather than a couple old computers makes sense to me, although I suspect it that it isn't always a clear case. When comparing an 386 that takes a week versus an Athalon 64 dual core that takes 30 minutes, it is definitely more environmental to go with the Athalon. But consider the fact that 80% of the total energy cost of a computer comes from the original manufacturing, so the most environmental choice is often to not purchase a new computer, or to delay that purchase as long as possible. In the case of distributed computing, it is often more environmental to keep two or three old computers running in the place of one new computer.

Your argument about games I think is more appropriate, since I think games are driving a lot of advances in the hardware. I'm asking people to pause and think about what is important. Is playing the latest game more important to you than the environmental and social costs of that new computer? Read the rest of the article and ask yourself. It is never pleasant to realize that we are contributing to global warming, helping to exploit others, and poisoning the planet. It an ethical question, which most people never think about and they should.

Also I argue that people should reuse their old hardware, or give it to others so it gets reused. If you do, good for you. The vast majority don't if we can believe the statistics about the amount of electronic waste being thrown away every year.

[Roxoff]

There are two issues you've raised directly by this latest post.

1. You seem to be advocating a halt to the technological improvement to the hardware platforms on the grounds of it being environmentally unsound.

As a species we human beings must progress, we are geared up for it, we have the intellectual capacity to do it. It is as though we were made to push the envelope as far as we can.

2. Global warming is only a danger to the species, not the planet. If we're converting energy from one form to another, then it releases 'exhaust' gasses. But think on that for a minute. We burn trees, they release carbon dioxide. Errr... thats exactly the same carbon that was taken from the atmosphere when the tree grew. We burn fossil fuels in the same way - releasing carbon and other chemicals that were taken from the atmosphere millions of years ago by the earth's then stable ecosystem. It doesn't really matter how much we shuffle the carbon around, whether stored underground as coal/oil/etc or in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, this planet will pretty much cope with anything of that nature we throw at it - the so called 'greenhouse gasses' were here to start with, we didn't make them and we cannot store them. All we can do is shuffle their constituent parts around.

The real solution for the human race is complex, but should focus on finding energy sources that do not release carbon back into the atmosphere (and not nasty fission power which releases radioactive particles into the atmosphere), and pushing our intellectual powers to the maximum, to give us a chance to either manage our environment to be safe for us or to find other environments which are safe. These aims could never be achieved by limiting our progress in technological advancement.

[amosbatto]

Please read my Activist Guide. I'm not arguing that computer technology should stop advancing altogether. Rather, I'm saying that we need to change the incentives of the computer industry, so their profits are dependent upon producing longer-lasting, easily upgradeable computers which are readily recyclable. We need to build Extended Producer Responsibility into the business model, so computer companies will stop thinking that profits lie in producing toxic products which are based upon planned obsolescence.

Until the computer industry reorients itself in this way, however, we should do what we can to minimize the environmental impact of our computers. The way to do that is to not buy new computers as often and try upgrading your existing computer rather than replacing it. If you don't think that your computer does harm to people and the environment, you should rethink your position.

As for global warming, you can take a Giaea (sp?) Theory approach as you are doing, but I happen to worry about what happens to the human species in the process. Some of the climatologists' predictions are truly horrifying. Consider the fact that almost all climatologists believe that Africa will become a dessicated land of drought and the Himalaya glaciers will melt, so that the water source for most of the rivers in Southern China and Northern India will dry up or only flow irregularly. This means famine on a massive scale. Consider the fact that all the coral reefs are dying because of global warming. Plankton, the basis of many of the ocean's food chains, is very sensitive to temperature and will probably dissappear if the temperature rises too much. That means that millions of ocean's species that depend on plankton will also dissappear and millions of people who depend on the oceans for food will go hungry. Consider the fact that tests on grain-producing plants in a global warming atmosphere have shown a 20% reduction in yield and an increase in weeds. That means less food. Yes, the Earth will eventually recover in a few hundred thousand years, but there is an awful lot of human death and famine in the process and a lot of extinction of species. 5 times in the Earth's history, there have been massive species die-offs caused by global warming. The worse case was 450 million years ago when 90% of the Earth's species vanished. Not exactly a pleasant prospect to contemplate. We can blissfully ignore it and stick our heads in the sand, or we can be practical and try to transform our industries and our lifestyles today rather than face this bleak future.

[carlosponti]

got a question did you say check email on a 386? that is comepletly bogus if that what you are suggesting. besides recylcling would be nice but not using ancient ass technology. the more we move forward with cpu clock cycles the more raw data that can be crunched and processed. plus all that is an incentive for companies is profit change that and our economy will crumble. maybe you should try to find a more profitable way of saving the environment?

[fingal]

I read your article and I partly agree, but with one or two caveats. When I became a student in 1997 I took an old 386 with me hoping that this would help me complete my assignments. In fact, I was forced to submit work completed in MS Word (that being the only WP my academic department recognised). My 386 couldn't cope with that, so I had to scrap the old machine (which was in any case dying bit by bit).

Sometimes you have no choice but to upgrade, and no new parts were available for the 386. Even if there had been, I didn't then know how to upgrade: something which is no longer a problem. I agree that this isn't a good situation, but I was forced into it because of limited resources (at that time) and I really wanted my degree - and the narrow mindedness of the academic department I studied in. I could have written my work in a text editor, but that would have actually lost me marks! Even using the 'wrong' font could lose marks for me.

I agree that we are eating the planet and destroying ourselves, but a lot of people are very stupid and don't realise this. To them I sound arrogant and opinionated. They think I'm a lefty, a hippy and an eccentric. They are partially right, but where does that leave them? Climate change is in front of our noses, but we live in a complex world. People are addicted to their cars, their comforts and their technology ... There is no reason why a lot of old technology shouldn't be recycled and you make another interesting point about obsolescence ...

My computer - which I built myself - is over two years old. The specs aren't top flight but it does everything I want. Do I really need a 200GB hdd, a massive video card and 4GB of RAM. No! I only want to run my machine, learn from this and have fun. I have no idea where this leaves me, but I have a feeling that things won't change until large corporations and international capitalism realises that things must change. By this time we'll be lucky if it isn't too late. And that's all I have to say.

[cayalee]

your not simply talking about the computer industry here, your talking about changing the international economy. as much as it needs to happen, it cant.
the system simply cant change, you get rid of capitalism and the economy crashes, governments will soon crash with it, as people dont get fed, as workers dont get paid. lots of human life lost there.
i dont know what the solution is, but changing the way the computer industry works wont change much on a global scale. you've gotta change the way the global society works without breaking it.

[fingal]

Originally Posted by cayalee

your not simply talking about the computer industry here, your talking about changing the international economy. as much as it needs to happen, it cant.
the system simply cant change, you get rid of capitalism and the economy crashes, governments will soon crash with it, as people dont get fed, as workers dont get paid. lots of human life lost there.
i dont know what the solution is, but changing the way the computer industry works wont change much on a global scale. you've gotta change the way the global society works without breaking it.

If you don't mind me making a few comments, I'm very interested in this subject. I notice you mention about loss of human life, but if you read amosbatto's post he suggests that this is what will happen anyway! I agree you can't just dismantle whole societies, but actually I don't think you have to ... I just think things need to be done in an ethical, sustainable and sane manner. IMHO this ain't happening. In the West we tend to think, "I'm nice and safe. I'm comfortable, prosperous and I will continue to become even more comfortable and prosperous until I achieve economic Nirvana and live for all eternity in the land of eternal Creamo" ... But many people mature and wake up from this ... rather rudely in my (hippy, lefty, deluded etc.) experience.

I also don't think just focusing on the computer industry would change much. Probably, we would have to completely reassess the way we all live. More recycling, more energy efficient buildings and power generation etc. etc.... blah. In other words we would have to 'make an effort'; fat chance of that while we're all out lining our pockets and striving for eternal betterment (or is that butterment?)

One thing to bear in mind is how poor about 50% of the planet really is. I'm no expert on this, but really I think that the way most people live is actually keeping half the planet economically in the doldrums. Our solution? They need to be more like us! Then they will all end up just as divorced, depressed and alcoholic as many of the people in the city I inhabit. Great idea ... and now to the bit that really got to me ...

Originally Posted by cayalee

as much as it needs to happen, it cant. the system simply cant change

In the 1960s - which spawned the civil rights movement, women's lib and the peace movement people said, 'Let's change the world!' Yes, they were naive stupid and wide eyed with hopeless idealism, but I swear to God that if I ever have children and I hear them say that, I will drown them.

- Love and Peace ... fingal
-----------------------------------------------
http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Facts.asp

[LondoJowo]

I hate to tell you but there's very little you can say that will change computer euthusiasts.

When I upgrade I either resell the parts or donate the computer to location (special need schools, old folks home) where they have the need.