When the New Luddites aren’t hectoring us about our debilitating addiction to our phones, the loss of our ability to read maps or do arithmetic, or the extreme disservice we’re doing to our children by allowing them to use smartphones, they fall back on the technique most favored by all reformers: guilt. They tell us that our crack-addled-monkey-like addiction to smartphones and other technology is stripping the earth bare of its resources. Our smartphone addiction is killing Gaia.
Except it isn’t so. According to a very interesting article in Wired, electricity use has been flat for the last decade and plastic use has gone from growing faster than the economy to lagging it by 15 per cent. In fact, they say, consumption for most natural resources has gone negative. How can this be?
While it’s true that significant resources are consumed to build those smartphones, even more resources are saved by no longer building other devices to do the things that smartphones do. The Wired article has a revealing vignette of someone seeing a Radio Shack (remember them?) ad from 1991 that showed 15 electronic “gadgets” for sale and realizing that he carried 13 of those gadgets in his pocket everyday. Actually, smartphones replace far more than 13 other devices. Take a look at your phone’s screen and look at all the functions it provides. That’s why, among other things, the camera market is collapsing, it’s hard to find a standalone GPS unit, and no one buys general purpose calculators anymore. They’re all built into our phones.
None of this will have the slightest impact on the New Luddites, of course. They’ll go right on detailing our many shortcomings and predicting the end of the world but the Wired article shows us what we’ve always known: they’re full of malarkey.