By Colby Lenz and Dean Spade
This article originally appeared on the http://www.communitychange.org/our-projects/movementvisionlab/blog/can-you-hear-me-now-the-trouble-with-cell-phones/view website.
Many of us share a set of concerns or complaints about cell phones. You hear them all the time. Nobody makes plan anymore ahead of time. People talk on cell phones everywhere instead of looking around and being present. The constant noise of cell phone use is annoying and often rude and inappropriate. Cell phones (including those with email) encourage people to work more, losing any sense of work-life balance.
These are solid, important complaints and we have more concerns about cell phones that we want to add to the list. We hope to re-frame the conversation about this suddenly ubiquitous technology in a broader and more urgent context. Here are six problems to consider:
- Cell phones are just a new consumer luxury item masquerading as a need. A little over a decade ago we all lived life without them. We survived flat tires, street protests, non-profit jobs, family illness and our social lives without Blackberries and Razrs. Cell phones represent a new level of privatization of phone service. Along with other ways we have punished the poor, pay phones are now on the decline, making access to phones more difficult for people without cash or credit. We have moved from sharing phones (party-lines), to household lines, to individual lines. This means more money for big business. What does it mean that so many people committed to a more socialized politics are giving so much money to the telecommunications industry? What else might we do with that money if we let go of these private status symbols and shared phones like we used to?
- If everyone else held a piece of plastic filled with cancer-causing chips next to their head all day long would you? Our friends who use cell phones tell us their ears hurt. Studies worldwide suggest cell phones are linked to brain cancer, research that the phone industry works its magic to quiet or stop. We know very well that we cannot trust big business with our health and the health of our loved ones. What’s convenient now might be very painful later. We want you to live and be well.
- Cell phones don’t grow on trees. They are made of plastic, are “disposable†(meaning made to break and be lost) and millions of them are thrown into landfills every week. Coltan, a key material that makes them work, is mined in the Congo under horrendous conditions, resulting in an estimated 3.2 million deaths since 1998, deforestation of the region and birth defects from water contamination. Like all other consumer goods, the people who use and enjoy this luxury are mostly clueless about the extreme exploitation and violence required to create them.
- Bees are the key to our food and our survival. Recent studies found that commercial bee populations suddenly declined 60-70% in the US and scientists theorize cell phone signals as a very possible cause. Scientists have proven that power lines can affect bee behavior and destroy hives and the sudden increase in hive death from cell phone signals may seriously endanger plant life and food sources for bees. While mass-produced crops like wheat and corn are pollinated by wind, some 90 cultivated flowering crops rely mostly on honeybees. According to a Cornell University study, honeybees pollinate every third bite of food ingested by Americans.
- Cell phones are recording devices used to criminalize people. Buying and using cell phones supports surveillance culture and promotes state violence. Not only can every one of your conversations (whether your phone is next to your ear or off in your bag) be heard and recorded by the telecommunications industry and the state, it can also be used as evidence against you and anyone you speak to. And even if you personally are not targeted, your cell phone dollars support policing, surveillance and imprisonment of criminalized classes of poor people and people of color.
- Scarcity and insecurity starts at home. The emotional economy of cell phones also concerns us. Capitalism makes us feel insecure and competitive for seemingly scarce resources. The same drive to consumerism and buying cell phones is the same emotional context of fear that drives war. This national-personal insecurity matrix is visible when people buy cell phones because they’re afraid of getting in an accident or being a crime victim and needing to reach the police. It is visible when people feel they have to have a cell phone for their job, to feel professionally important. It is visible when people fear that if they don’t have one, then their friends will stop calling them and they will be disconnected from social life. It feeds capitalist imperatives: every desire must be met immediately and we must always be working and striving and climbing (socially, professionally, etc.) without rest. The mindset of the cell phone is part of our brutal economy.
But why single out cell phones for these concerns? Many other products harm the environment and mobilize our minds, bodies and social connections in the interest capital. So many products have negative health impacts and so many can be used as tools of state terror. Cell phones are not unique these ways. But what concerns us is the uncritical embrace of cell phones, especially by people on the left and self-proclaimed anti-capitalist activists. While we have an ongoing critique of cars and real estate and sweatshop-produced clothing and many other things, this gigantic, new and extremely pervasive shift in consumption goes almost un-critiqued in terms of these ramifications.
This is a call for an analysis of the operation of this technology and the telecommunications market, using all the critical skills that radical activists have developed. This is an invitation to join us and get rid of your cell phone — or don’t get one in the first place. Help us resist the allures of this technology and support each other in remembering other ways to communicate, organize and connect with one another. Like all of our other endeavors to create a better world, this is not about perfection. We are all caught in this economy, engaging in consumer practices that are harmful, but we can still identify and act on the concentrations. It is more than possible to live without a cell phone – some of us find life way better without them.
I’ve been thinking of getting rid of my cellphone now that I’m not spending so much time on a bus anymore. Thanks for the reminder/call-to-action.
Two comments, though:
Regarding reason #4, I don’t think any serious science supports a link between cell phones and the beepocolypse (aka colony collapse disorder). From the USDA Q&A page (http://www.ars.usda.gov/News/docs.htm?docid=15572):
*What about cell phones—do they have anything to do with CCD?*
The short answer is no.
There was a very small study done in Germany that looked at whether a particular type of base station for cordless phones could affect honey bee homing systems. But, despite all the attention that this study has received, it has nothing to do with CCD. Stefan Kimmel, the researcher who conducted the study and wrote the paper, recently e-mailed The Associated Press to say that there is “no link between our tiny little study and the CCD-phenomenon … anything else said or written is a lie.”
On the other hand, I think that reason #5 is for real, in a big way. In fact, even _not_ having a phone is a reason for governmental accusation. The FBI report on the Auburn 3 (some kids arrested and charged as “environmental extremists” in 2006), one piece of evidence specifically mentioned was that the suspects did not own cell phones. Similarly, influential evidence against Andrej Holm, a sociologist arrested as a terrorism suspect in 2007, was his presence at two meetings which took place under “highly conspiratorial circumstances”, according to the German government. Why were the circumstances highly conspiratorial? The meetings were arranged using emails that did not match the legal names of the meetees, during the meeting – a walk outside – they turned around several times, and most conspiratorial of all, _no mobile phones were taken along_.
Isn’t it amazing how prevalent cell phones have become in only a few years? Or iPhones in a few months? I see what you’re saying when you named this site: Enough!
Oh, I meant to say, CCD is scary! What is causing it? I think that this Christian Science Montior article describes the situation well:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0404/p13s01-sten.html?page=1
Thanks for these thoughts, Abie. I have no idea what the real story is with the bees but maybe Colby will come on and contribute some thoughts–that’s more her area of expertise than mine. The surveillance stuff is terrifying! There is some writing about that in the intro to Christian Parenti’s book The Soft Cage that is worth looking at.
Sabina just sent me this link to a short animated film about waste from electronics being exported to poison poor people all over the world. http://www.mediathatmattersfest.org/8/
Thought it might be interesting to everyone reading this article.
It was interesting to post this article on Enough because when Colby and I first published it on Movement Vision Blog we both admitted to each other that we didn’t tell our friends to go read it. We both have had conversations about cell phones and why we don’t have them so many times, and so often experienced people being defensive and angry at us (some of this even came up on the Movement Vision Blog comments). I wrote a different article about not liking cell phones about 8 years ago on makezine.org and got more angry email for that article than anything else I have ever written. It is interesting what a touchy topic this is, and I think it has to do with some of the themes of this site–fear of judgment, scarcity, taboo around talking about money and spending practices. As cell phone culture continues to progress and people find it more and more absurd that I don’t have one (often accusing me of being irresponsible and selfish too) this conversation gets harder to have and sometimes I find myself feeling a bit afraid of it. What a testament to the times, right? Anyway, here it is on Enough for another stab. I still lovingly hope everyone will cancel those contracts and recycle those things.
Wow.
The authors should spend some time hanging out at a Radio Shack in the middle of a city to see some of the people who are paying their cell bills or buying more time on their cell phones.
These days, you don’t need a credit check or a down payment to get a cell phone. You can just slap a ten down and get another 100 minutes talking. You can get calls from potential employers, even if you’re homeless. You can call the cops if your ex threatens to beat you up again.
Sure, hound middle and owning class folks about their cell phone use, but please don’t take that diatribe to your cross-class organizing meetings because it’s this kind of self-righteousness that keeps cross-class organizing from being very effective.
people actually sent you angry emails? that’s awful. i remember reading something written on make that was more specifically talking about how the cell phone “imperative” in middle-class activist communities basically makes “activism” the property of only people who can afford it. that article really got me thinking, and was (shockingly perhaps) the first time i had ever heard the subject brought up in those terms. so if it’s not on here already you should post that too!
i’m interested in your thoughts about internet/email use and where that fits into this analysis. a lot of activists i know would be hard pressed to do anything without internet, as it’s become an important organizing tool, especially for coordinating people and movements across great distances. at the same time, this is making it more and more “necessary” for people to sign up for home internet with those same telecommunications companies. i went a year without home internet and found that people’s expectations about my internet access (similar to expectations about cell phone access) really pressured me to feel like i “needed” home internet in order to catch up with everything. maybe the key to this is to have more collective, rather than individual, internet hook-up locations (like libraries)?
then of course there’s the argument that i’m sure always comes up, which is that if we want to “fight fire with fire,” how can we go up against the state/the police/etc., if we don’t have technology comparable to theirs?
i can think of several important rebuttals to this – namely: 1) if we’re buying our technology from corporate monoliths, then we’re already not fighting them – we’re fueling them; 2) they are always going to have more “advanced” technology than movements; 3) maybe we just need to be more creative with our tactics. (note: who “they” and “we” are here is fuzzy, as usual.)
i’d be interested in hearing other people’s takes on all of this. thanks for the stimulating ideas!
You totally lost me here. A cell phone is a tool, it doesn’t have some evil controlling mind of its own.
Projecting how people use tools badly onto the tools is a covert way to absolve them from guilt. The power of tools comes with responsibilities, no doubt about it, but that responsibility is ours to take, not to ignore and blame on the tool when we face the consequences.
People are already locking themselves into their golden palaces too much to promote throwing out a powerful tool of communication.
The internet is a lot worse when it comes to environmental friendliness and making people care less about the real world, and here you are running a website, wasting much more money (and energy) than a cell phone!
It’s better to subvert the technology and use tools for good instead of evil. Offer some constructive advice on how to get the most out of second hand technology. Or encourage people to create and buy products that are not designed for obsolesence.
Attack bottled water, SUVs, meat eating, newspapers, art subsidies, fast food, anything that doesn’t offer a substantial qualitative advance over the alternatives.
This isn’t to say that the waste associated with cell phones is atrocious. Just that they shouldn’t be discounted because of how people use them.
I have abstained from getting a cell phone for a really long time and am now considering getting one, in part because the activist org that I work for is willing to put me on a family plan, and so the cost is way less. I just moved to a new area and will need to get a phone of some sort anyhow – so why not a cell?
But it’s true that cell phone technology has pervaded our culture in a way that there has been no system of ethics developed around it. This is something we need to be really intentional about creating; the community I just moved to has way more signs asking customers in stores to go outside to talk, and I can tell that this small step alone cuts down on annoying cell phone chatter. I think this is true for any new tool or technology – if we aren’t intentional about shaping our use, negative use patterns will get established.
And I do think that some of the worst examples of those poor cell phone behavior patterns are found among folks involved in activism – often answering when in the middle of a conversation with others, for instance. And I’ve shown up to meetings where I had to wait around outside until someone else arrived, because there was no bell but a note telling me to call! Furthermore, the whole conference calling phenomenon seems to be getting out of hand, and a lot of one’s ability to participate in that depends on being able to make calls whenever and wherever you are – via having a cell.
But I disagree with the logic that says tools are just tools, and it depends on how we use them. Tools are frequently designed with more democratic or less democratic ends in mind; they often shape the user as much as the user shapes the tool. If we think about the types of machines that are put in workplaces and factories, for instance, we can often see that the clear intent of the machine is to take autonomy away from a worker, say through the pace set by the machine, the fact that a worker is plugged into only one part of the process rather than controlling the entire process, etc. This is in part because there’s another user involved – the employer – who has helped design those machines in a way to take away worker power. And I do think it’s true that cell phones, in as much as they’re currently dependent on large telecommunications companies who decide what features they have, and how they’re hooked into global systems, how disposable they are, etc., might be similar – they might be shaping us, taking power away from us in ways we don’t realize.
What I would like to see is for some radical tech collectives to re-think the cell phone and the way we gain access to wireless networks. I think email services like that provided by riseup.net or mutualaid are a good example of how a tool we’ve learned is really useful (email) but potentially really damaging (can easily be infiltrated and used to spy on activists) can be transformed, at least somewhat, to be less damaging. Is there a way for us to develop alternative ways of creating wireless networks? Of building cell phones? I’m not really a techie, so I don’t know, but I bet there has to be.
Something you seem to have missed is that cell phones are far cheaper than landlines. The only reason it might seem otherwise to Americans is that we can take for granted the existence of thousands of miles of copper wiring laid over a century, not only between cities but throughout the innards of those cities, connecting millions of homes and offices to switchboards. If it hadn’t been the best option at the time regardless, such lines would not have been laid, and if we were faced with the option today of building a landline system or a cell phone system to grant telecommunications access to individuals, the landline solution would be so laughably expensive as to hardly warrant consideration.
That is exactly the situation facing many “middle world” nations who are well into the process of industrialization but who were not, like us, wealthy when landlines where chic. So, many parts of the world with demand for personal telecommunications are skipping straight to cell phone networks, a process with profound social ramifications.
“One element of poverty is the lack of information,” Prahalad said. “The cellphone gives poor people as much information as the middleman.” ~For India’s Traditional Fishermen, Cellphones Deliver a Sea Change, by Kevin Sullivan
Of course, the technology that drove the creation of cell phones wasn’t developed for the sake of poor Indian fishers, but that’s the way technology usually works. I’m sure most people saw telecommunications of any type as a luxury when it was first developed, and while I try to keep my own gadget spending down, I’m glad from a humanitarian perspective that many others don’t. People who bought early cell phones yesterday were financing the development of the cells phones that are proving to be such a boon to many of the world’s poor today.
They are made of plastic, are “disposable†(meaning made to break and be lost) and millions of them are thrown into landfills every week.
I don’t think so. The two off-the-shelf phones I’ve owned have all been extremely durable, surviving falls onto hard floors, immersion in water, and, in the case of the first one, being slammed into a car door without losing functionality. Indeed, the only reason I’ve even had two phones is because I accidentally slammed the first one into the same car door again, which actually still didn’t even render the phone nonfunctional! It just finished the job of destroying the screen that the first door incident started, but I could still place and receive calls with it.
While I can relate to most of the above concerns about cell phones I wonder if they might have made some women’s lives a bit safer. About the only time I use mine (purchased at 6 years ago now) is on long, lonely road trips.
Also, the disposability of cells is an unnecessary choice of manufacturers, retailers & consumers. There are design options allowing people to swap out or insert or change phone components that would cut back on a lot of the waste but they aren’t being marketed. Why sell a mere component when you can make more money selling a whole new phone + contract?
Good thoughtful article – and I agree that cell phones have crept up on us without ethical considerations being considered. But, and I am with two of the women who have commented on this thread, having a cell phone means that you can contact people if you are attacked (this is a major possibly for women all the time); also for me it was a lifeline between myself – as a single parent – and my son when i was working – he knew he could contact me at any time, and I could contact him. Therefore, there seems to be a gender issue here that was not dealt with in the original article. Perhaps you could include a woman (or two) as part of your team?