It’s time we technology consumers began demanding something different from our manufacturers: longevity. That’s a big ask. Even when our phones don’t wear out, they are nonetheless obsolesced by OS upgrades and network changes that seem designed to do little more than force new hardware purchases.

Now that Apple has disappointed early adopters with a mere incremental iPhone upgrade, and Samsung has done even worse by releasing exploding Galaxy Note 7s, the preposterous futility of the smartphone wars should be coming apparent. Those people who are trading in perfectly usable phones for the latest models are the suckers.

A brand new smartphone is anything but a status symbol. It simply means you’ve been fooled into valuing a shiny new object over its impact on labor, the environment, or even your own time. And it’s not entirely your own fault.

After all, our Twitter streams are filled with comments about Apple’s latest product launch and links to Medium posts and unboxing videos by those delighted or vanquished by their new purchases. It’s hard not to want the button, the two-lens camera, or iris-recognition security. Such innovations make a single lens or thumbprint security feel, well, so last quarter.

Yet the gadgets truly in need of glorification in our Instagram feeds are those battered, bruised, and still-ticking devices that don’t demand their own replacement every 365 days.

The less-told stories here, and the ones deserving our attention, are the human and climate cost of all these new and unnecessary devices – costs brilliantly externalized by the aesthetic and marketing of tech products.

The Bauhaus elegance of an iPhone, for example, makes it feel as if the device’s primary functions are really occurring inside its new, water-resistant case. The battery is for your screen, and little else. The lion’s share of processing activity – and energy consumption – is actually occurring on servers streaming all those videos and making all the harder calculations and analyses. Siri is not in your phone, she’s on a bunch of HP servers in the cloud. That energy consumption is immense, particularly in comparison with that of recharging our phones every night.

And all that electricity only accounts for around 20 percent of the electricity a smart phone will use in its lifetime, once you factor in the energy used for production and distribution of the phone itself. If the phone materials were actually recycled, there would be additional energy costs – but at least those would have been well spent. As it is, most e-waste is just dumped in huge piles in developing nations, forming small mountains of toxic trash on which impoverished families scavenge for sellable parts. is estimated to reach 60 million tons next year.

Finally, every new smartphone contains several grams of rare earth metals and “conflict” minerals including gold, tin, tungsten, and tantalum. These are mined for, at gunpoint, by child slaves in the Congo. That’s right: Your purchase of a new smartphone requires a kid to go into a cave for minerals, and empowers the people and companies who are exploiting him. (To be fair, most smartphone manufacturers feel really bad about this, and wish they could come up with a way of supplying you with a new phone every year that didn’t depend on raping and killing children.)

Companies have an excuse. Corporate activity has almost always depended on slave labor and environmental destruction. Meanwhile, shareholders demand quarter-over-quarter growth from the companies they own – particularly when they’re technology companies. When Apple sells fewer iPhones than it did the year before, the company’s valuation decreases by billions of dollars.

What’s our excuse? Is a wireless headphone port or wraparound screen really worth the social and environmental cost? How many socially conscious tweets would it take to compensate for the damage caused by a single smartphone purchase?

No, the only real response – the true techie’s response – is to learn how to make one’s phone last as many years as possible. Instead of buying our way out of obsolescence, we program, adapt, and workaround. What makes a phone great is not how new it is, but how long it lasts.

That’s why the person who wins my admiration at a party or conference is not the guy with the latest model smartphone or laptop, but the woman sporting an iPhone 3 and a 2009 MacBook Pro. And not because she’s a luddite, but because she’s the one with user mojo capable of participating at high efficiency in any essential digital activity with the same technology that less savvy consumers would have to consider obsolete.

I once had a guitar teacher who tried to make me feel better about the fact that all the other kids in the music school had expensive Martins while I had a used no-name. He said that in his experience, people’s ability to play was inversely proportional to the cost of their instruments. Willie Nelson’s guitar – holes and all – is testament to the sort of materialism that values the world’s existing objects more than those that have yet to be sourced and assembled.

It’s time we technology consumers began demanding something different from our manufacturers: longevity. That’s a big ask. Even when our phones don’t wear out, they are nonetheless obsolesced by OS upgrades and network changes that seem designed to do little more than force new hardware purchases. App developers can be wiped out by a single iPhone update, and are often forced to choose between serving those on the “old” OS or those who have moved to the new one.

And the more of us stick with the phones we have, the more pressure we will exert on developers to maintain true backwards compatibility – the same way committed Windows 3.1 users forced Netscape and Internet Explorer to remain compatible with them if they wanted to gain market share in the browser wars of the late ‘90s.

Our numbers matter. If we flocked to the new phones, we support a technology landscape that favors change for change’s sake over stability, ease of use, open development, environmental sustainability, and basic human rights.

Love the phone you’re with.

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The “big problem,” it seems, “isn’t inequality —  it’s poverty.” Freund breaks the global list of billionaires down into two categories: “Those who inherited their wealth, and those who made it themselves.” In the latter category, she argues, company founders and executives like Bill Gates of Microsoft or Jack Ma of Alibaba “have helped create the most jobs and economic growth for those further down the income ladder.” The self-made billionaires who got rich from finance and real estate are more questionable, although some of them are innovators as well. Those in the “made” category who make money off privatization deals and natural resources are the least productive.

Today, Freund says, the majority of developing world billionaires are of the “made” kind, and of them company founders and executives are the single biggest segment.

First, I should give Freund credit for acknowledging the problematic nature of wealth acquired by natural resource extraction and crony capitalist privatization, both of which have close historical associations either with colonial conquest, robbery, enslavement and genocide, or  with neoliberal “Disaster Capitalism.”

So what are the problems? Just off the bat, distinguishing between billionaires located in the global North and South confuses the issue. It’s a global economy, and a major share of the wealth that made U.S., European or Japanese billionaires what they are was extracted by TNCs operating in the Third World.

Beyond that, Freund’s argument (at least as summarized by Swanson) is neither very original nor very significant. First of all, the argument that it’s not inequality that’s the problem, but absolute levels of poverty — and inequality does no harm so long as those at the bottom have a minimum acceptable standard of living and the wealthy didn’t get rich in a zero zum game — has long been  boilerplate at mainstream right-libertarian periodicals and think tanks and conservative institutions like Heritage and AEI. It’s the theme of about three hundred Thomas Sowell columns, for crying out loud.

Second, and more importantly, Freund seems to argue by definition. Made billionaires who are company founders or executives are entrepreneurs, and by definition therefore job and wealth creators.

But founding a company or managing one isn’t inherently productive — the majority of wealth going to company founders and executives arguably comes, not from their productive activity, but from the surrounding structure of privileges, monopolies, artificial property rights and artificial scarcities that enable the company to extract rents on the services they perform.

It’s helpful in this regard to look at what French liberal economist called “the unseen.” We see the companies, we see the services they perform, and we see the number of people they employ. But what’s the proper baseline to compare them to? Even when new companies are doing something useful and productive, that doesn’t tell us whether it’s the most efficient way of arriving at that good. What we don’t see is other, more efficient ways of providing the same good, that may have been crowded out by the companies we do see performing the function.

And in fact actually inventing or producing things is at best the path to small-time wealth. The really big fortunes — the billionaire kind — instead come from controlling the circumstances under which other people are allowed to produce things. Henry George Jr. called it getting rich by “controlling access to natural opportunities.” Thorstein Veblen called it “capitalized disserviceability” —  charging for the “productive service” of not obstructing production by others.

Microsoft is a classic illustration of this. Bill Gates didn’t get to be a billionaire because the Windows operating system has a nice user interface. He’s a billionaire because his copyrights and patents on the software prevent anyone else from copying it and selling it cheaper, or giving it away free. The overwhelming majority of Gates’ fortune comes from a state-enforced monopoly.

And Gates has tended to spend his personal fortune in ways that either directly profit him or promote his vision of the ideal world in which people like him can keep extracting billions. The Gates Foundation’s main “charitable” activities are all things like pushing proprietary GMO seeds and increasing corporate agribusiness’s control of the global food chain, giving away Microsoft software to the public schools (and thereby locking them into a legacy system whose upgrades won’t be free in the future), and lobbying behind closed doors to charterize public schools, insulate them from public control, and incorporate them into the supply chains serving corporate HR departments.

Alibaba isn’t as bad as Microsoft. It isn’t even as bad as Amazon:  rather than charging a commission on transactions made through its marketplace, it makes all its money off advertising. But it is a proprietary platform — something it has in common with all the other “New Economy” ventures like Uber, Lyft and AirBNB that have made people billionaires.

Such platforms basically preempt the venues for a particular type of cooperative behavior, and then rely on a combination of first-mover advantage, path dependency and “intellectual property” to crowd out other — and less socially pathological — ways of doing things.

As for manufacturing in the Third World, much of it is for the supply chains of global corporations like Nike and Apple that use “intellectual property” to retain a monopoly on disposal of the product, so they can simultaneously pay the companies that produce them almost nothing and mark up the sales price thousands of percent in global retail chains.

So here “the unseen” is open-source software, sharing apps that are not only open-source and genuinely peer-to-peer but cooperatively controlled by providers and users rather than a corporation, and open-source garage micromanufacturing cooperatively controlled by its workers and producing affordable goods for the local market.

Finally, “wealth” and “jobs” are by no means self-evident goods. GDP simply measures the sum total of everything that anybody gets paid for. So the more inefficiently stuff is produced, the more it costs in labor and material inputs to produce it, the more quickly it has to be replaced because of planned obsolescence, the more costly it is to repair because of bad design and proprietary parts, and the higher the embedded monopoly rents in the price, the more it adds to GDP. And the more stuff people are forced to do in the cash nexus, that they were previously able to do for themselves through direct production for use or in the social economy without corporate intermediation, the higher GDP.

And if direct production for use or production in the social economy is replaced by working for wages to buy the same goods previously acquired outside the cash nexus — against the will of those subject to the change — then that “job” isn’t a good thing.

In the case of food alone, the mass enclosures of land and evictions of tens of millions of peasants who were previously feeding themselves off their own land, coupled with the influx of evicted peasants into the cities to work in sweatshops to earn the money to buy cash crops produced on the stolen land, has no doubt swelled both the amount of monetized GDP and the number of “jobs.” That’s not a good thing.

So in response to the claim that most billionaires are “made,” all I can say is: So was Don Corleone.

Photo by quinn.anya

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