I think having the focus be about reducing unnecessary and wasteful production to be a more accurate description, as we don’t want to degrow everything. Sectors of the society providing human and social value/services will need to grow. It is only the wasteful production that needs to be degrown.
kayazere
joined 1 year ago
Even if companies were replacing existing hardware, the existing hardware uses less power. So whether it is additional hardware or not, there will be an increase in energy demand, which is bad for climate change.
I have been enjoying Tech Won’t Save Us. It mainly focuses on the politics and unethical behavior of Big Tech/Silicon Valley. It has been an eye opener.
In capitalism everyone has to exploit their skills/strengths for money. Whether that is your body doing manual labor, sex work, or your mind doing knowledge work, it is at the base the same activity.
Now, the Initiative for a New Social Market Economy (INSM), a market-liberal lobbying organization, has created a pop-up museum designed to turn up the heat on the German government
While funny, the group behind it certainly sounds scary. We don’t need more neo-liberal policies.
I mentioned game consoles as an example of consumer electronics that function without having yearly updates. This is largely due to giving game devs a performance tagtet to hit, but it shows you don’t need marginal updates every year. Mobile app software could probably benefit from not having better hardware every year, forcing devs to write better software.
From a software standpoint, iPhones are locked down like gaming consoles, focused on consumption and not general computing devices. Apple controls what software runs on their devices just like Nintendo.
I think yearly car updates are also wasteful and the car industry has adopted a fashion style model where the changes are mostly atheistic and they try to make people’s cars feel outdated/obsolete and for them to buy a new model. Cars are viewed as a status symbol, so this works.
Apple has been applying the same play book as the auto industry, though they can actually obsolete hardware through their software.
Maybe they can finally stop releasing new phones every year. We don’t have yearly game console releases.
No one says you have to buy a new phone, used iPhones are usually a lot cheaper.
Anyone try it out yet?
They are definitely are starting to trash it with ads for their own services, user hostile behavior/dark patterns (try turning off Bluetooth and applying a software update, it will be magically back on), and have ruined the UI slowly turning it in to iOS.