this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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I think the point is, why avoid buying a more mainstream phone like a pixel if even fairphone can't avoid slave labour? The two big reasons why people go for fairphones is ethicality of the manufacturing process (labour and environmental impact) and modularity/fixability. If their labour is unethical then that means they lose one of their most important appeals. The horrific treatment of miners in the global south is easily one of if not the most significant issue with modern phone manufacture.
That's not a point. This is not a case of all or nothing. You seem to have been raised with some kind of Disney fantasy land ideals about good and bad but the reality is that nothing is perfect including ethical consumerism. We simply look for the better or best alternative and that is currently Fairphone. That's an objective fact.
Where did I say it was all or nothing. I don't think you're reading anything me or the other person is saying
You acknowledged yourself that Fairphone is also environmentally superior to its competitors, such as Google, yet apparently this doesn't matter to you when it comes time to purchase. Your logic seems to assume that because Fairphone is not perfect, it is therefore no better ethically than a company like Google. That is an all or nothing mentality.
I didn't say it didn't matter.
Other phones have advantages over Fairphone. Nobody buys a Fairphone because they think it has the most cutting-edge features. They buy it because they believe it's more ethical. So any way in which Fairphone fails to be significantly more ethical than mainstream phones, is a reason to go for mainstream phones instead, as Fairphone loses its main advantage.
I didn't say this. I said that believing Fairphone is more environmentally friendly is a reason why people go for Fairphone. For the record I do believe its emissions are lower but I don't believe it to be environmentally friendly because I don't think there's any eco-friendly way to make modern smartphones, but that's besides the point, I never commented either way on what I think of Fairphone's environmental policies, only its labour policies.
Only one of these is undermined by your supposed slave labour argument (you're yet to share any evidence that suggests Fairphone is worse than its competitors in this regard). Discounting the other reasons you listed because of this is an all or nothing mentality.
You haven't proven or argued this, though. You've only argued that Fairphone uses "slave labour" (again, no comparison here with competitors). That doesn't mean that Fairphone loses ALL its ethical advantages.
I never said Fairphone was more unethical than its competitors, only that it claims to be more ethical and its main marketability is on the basis of this claim. If you didn't care about ethics in phone production, would you still buy a Fairphone over any other phone? I don't think so. Aside from their claims about ethics, the only thing that sets them apart is the modularity, which I do think is a positive and possibly that's enough for some people, but I'm personally more concerned about the ethics of phones. If Fairphone is not substantially more ethical than its competitors then a lot of their customers would buy other phones, because other phones may have features that Fairphones don't have.
And for the record I don't think any ethical phone exists nor do I think it's possible to ethically make a modern smartphone. There's no ethical way to mine cobalt, and if you dispute that I challenge you to go work in a cobalt mine. Phone production is evidentially terrible for the environment and many of the natural resources required to make phones cannot be extracted without incredibly unpleasant and frequently deadly labour, which nobody would voluntarily do. I think it's good enough that Fairphone is supposedly making an effort to mitigate this, and if you need a smartphone I don't think there's anything wrong with buying a Fairphone. But I think it's quite obvious that the reasons to buy one are undermined significantly if Fairphone is engaging in much of the worst of industry standards.
It seems like an incredibly disingenuous representation of criticism of a tech company to say that it's "all or nothing" to be swayed away from a company that specifically markets itself as an ethical alternative (which Google, Apple, Samsung, Huawei, etc do not market themselves as) when they could be getting something they may consider to be a better product from another company with similar working conditions etc.