State of Hardware Pt. 2

Michelle Santiago Cortés explores the state of hardware in a two-part series. You’re reading part two. Part one is here.

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Your phone might feel like your little house on the internet, but it’s more truthfully described as a single window. For every text message, phone call, email, photo, app, social media post, or transaction you experience through your phone or computer. For every song you stream through your speakers for every game you play on that console, it’s more than likely that a bigger more powerful entity has final say on what you can do with it and for how long, even if you bought it. 

“People have gone from being builders alongside their technology and working with their technology to being kind of subservient to it,” says Raihan Anwar, co-founder of Friends With Benefits. It’s not great to admit, but we truly do not have half the power we’d like to have when it comes to our hardware. We are, as Anwar says, “consumers of [our] technological experiences, not producers.”

This year, New York, Minnesota, and California each passed their own right-to-repair laws, which generally require manufacturers to “make spare parts, tools, and repair information available to independent shops and the public for a set period of time after a device is no longer sold on the market,” according to The Verge. Since the early 2000s, the “right-to-repair” movement has advocated for repairability and longevity for a range of hardware–from cars, to tractors, to medical tech, and smartphones. As hardware becomes more complicated and ubiquitous, the right-to-repair movement gains more steam.

Repairability can help extend the life of so many devices, if not with their first owners than with second and third owners through refurbishing. More importantly, repairability is a crucial strategy to cut down on e-waste, the world’s fastest growing solid waste stream. Recycling is costly and sometimes inaccessible. E-waste piling up in landfills, or seeping into water sources, threatens to poison surrounding populations with toxins like lead and mercury.

The argument for repairability gained even more momentum this year after a new generation of consumers learned what it actually takes to make the devices we too easily toss aside. TikTok was full of teens raising money for Congo and quitting vaping after an influx of news detailing the horrors of cobalt and copper mining reached the West. Cobalt and copper are some of the rare-earth minerals needed to make rechargeable batteries, a key element of so-called clean technology. 

Such is the concern over the hardware supply chain that when Dua Lipa sat down with Apple’s Tim Cook in November, she asked him if the new iPhone 15 contained any cobalt mined by using “child labor.” The CEO assured her it did not by explaining that the company’s ultimate goal is to produce devices without mining anything from the earth and relying exclusively on recycled material and that it keeps a close eye on the supply chain all the way down to the “mine and the smelter.” 

In a similar vein of benevolence, Apple surprised many with its support of the California right-to-repair law earlier this year, undoing decades of anti-repair lobbying. However, the new iPhone 15 has already disappointed fixers by implementing aggressive software locks that severely restrict when, how, and if the new iPhone 15 can be repaired. 

A few links down the supply chain, we have the manufacturing demands spurred by the latest sprints in AI and pushes for the latest iPhone. Russell Brandom, Rest of World’s US Tech Editor and writer of the Exporter Newsletter says Nvidia is “the big B2B story of the year.” Nvidia is a multinational corporation that makes some seriously powerful Graphic Processing Units (GPU’s). Where AI pushes forward, you will find a Nvidia chip. “Anyone trying to make a splash in AI is just snapping up Nvidia modules as fast as they can make,” Brandom told me over the phone. As tech manufacturing moves around the global south in search of cheap labor and lax laws, the state of hardware will be entirely dependent on how big companies and their contractors treat this growing sector of the international workforce–from scavengers to assembly plant workers.

It’s perhaps cruelly ironic that an industry committed to break-neck acceleration in the name of a better future for “everyone,” is also delusionally reliant on irreversible levels of violence against the planet and its people. Despite the ever-present demand for growth and profit, the industry works on another timeline: The past and future both serve as idealized settings for the tech industry’s imagination, but their respective material realities–a past clogged with obsolete devices and a future of exhausted natural resources–are rarely considered. The better days, today’s hardware seems to say, are either behind us or ahead of us. The current state of hardware is a vanishing point for the imagined pasts and futures of technology. In other words, technology is a present-oriented industry with no aesthetic of the present. 

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