Joel Johnson, after he visited a Foxconn factory for Wired: To be soaked in materialism, to directly and indirectly champion it, has also brought guilt.
To be soaked in materialism, to directly and indirectly champion it, has also brought guilt. I don’t know if I have a right to the vast quantities of materials and energy I consume in my daily life. Even if I thought I did, I know the planet cannot bear my lifestyle multiplied by 7 billion individuals. I believe this understanding is shared, if only subconsciously, by almost everyone in the Western world.
I don’t mean to moralise, but it’s perhaps harder than ever to ignore the moral quandaries bound up with so many of the material goods we acquire, especially electronics, and maybe more especially still, ones made for Apple by workers in China, purchased by the hundreds of millions around the world — even if Apple probably does better than most at attempting to assuage the conditions of its supply chain workers.
Which makes today’s featured charity on Philanthroper more pointed than usual, at least for Gizmodo readers — Verite essentially works to make the global labour situation more fair, and they claim to have return $US5-$US6 million to workers in Apple’s supply chain alone. I’m going to drop in a few bucks — a dollar for every Apple product I’ve owned, which seems like a reasonable enough thing to do. [Philanthroper]