In the not too distant past, Apple was getting a lot of flak about their resistance to implementing a recycling program for their products. While I am not surprised that Apple is bad about recycling, there is one very important thing that is not talked about much in the world of electronics: building devices to be repairable and upgradable. Apple builds their computers to be solid and upgradeable. They have one of the best repair records in the industry for laptops, and more importantly, Apple owners use their computers much longer than any other computer maker.

Also, Apple generally makes it easy to upgrade and fix them yourselves, and there is a real market for it. (http://ifixit.com) Compare that to any other maker. I just sold my 5 year old, 800Mhz PowerBook with a broken screen for $200. Compare that to a refurbished, 2-3 year old 1.4 GHz Dell laptop with a 90 day warranty for $300. It’s hard to even find Dell laptops for sale older than 3 years.

To be clear, in no way do I support Apple’s resistance to implementing computer recycling, that’s a important effort to keep all that toxic material out of the ground. But I think that the debate over recycling is coming at the expense of the more important issue of building devices to last. The making of electronic devices generates a lot of pollution and requires a lot of energy and resources during the manufacture. Yet people treat them as disposable. Apple is fully complicit in this when you look at iPods and other devices. If there was a small effort put into making electronics repairable and upgradeable, we’d save a lot of money, energy, and pollution.

Call me sentimental, but I got quite attached to my old powerbook, and had it been possible to fix, I would have. Instead it is going to be an organ donor and I bought another one which I hope to have for longer than 5 years.

In prehistoric times, “high-art” meant the equivalent of the most basic storytelling today. When most humans would have been slogging all day just to make sure that they had food for the day and weren’t going to be eaten by some bigger animal, it would have been the rare individual who had the time to remember and recall stories to tell people. After a while, the human economy had progressed enough that this high art had become accessible to basically all humans.

You can follow this pattern again and again thruout human history. 10,000 years ago, painting was a rare skill, now every child in school in the U.S. learns to paint on a level pretty close to prehistoric paintings. 150 years ago, photography was very expensive and it took substantial technical training to become a photographer. Now, anyone who can point-n-shoot is a photographer. And many of those point-n-shooters are actually taking very accomplished photographs.

We’ve reached a point where the majority of people in a developed world are very highly educated and functioning. In the U.S., about 85% of people graduate from high school. [1] A number of other countries are well above 90%. That means that all those people spent at least 13 years in school. Even compared to a century ago, this is a dramatic difference. As people become more educated, the bar is raised for “high-art”.

Now many people have this idea that “high-art” must be separate from more widespread art, but now the education difference between the “high-artist” and the average person has become quite narrow. The original impulse for high-art was for highly developed art, which meant choosing a person and devoting extra resources so that person could spend time developing their art.

Now it seems that since the difference in education and resources between “high-artists” and the average person is becoming ever more minimal, this “high-art” impulse has shifted to focusing on obscurity. It is rare that an artist is actually working in a medium that just about anyone could learn in their spare time after work. So in order to maintain the cache of “high-art”, the art world has become focused on making things about obscure insider references to a very insular world that really has nothing to do with
the original idea of having someone who works beyond what the average person is capable.

This means to me that “high-art” is becoming increasingly irrelevant. And you can see this in the flurry of artistic output that is available on the internet. I say we are all the better for it.

We blame so many of the world’s ills on “corporations” or multinationals. It is true that they hold vast power. But the question that is not asked often enough is: where do they derive that power from? The answer almost all of the time is from the people who buy from them. If people did not buy their products, they would go out of business. And a corporation without any business has no power.

This is the question that many people willingly ignore. Think of the fair trade activist who wears Nike shoes. Yes, it’s an iconic image, but I think that it illustrates quite well the point I am trying to make. We like the things that corporations sell, obviously, because we buy them. If we believe that a corporation is destroying our world, then quite simply, we should not give that corporation our money.

To me the real way to change is to vote with your dollars. Support the people you believe in directly, by giving them your business. I do not mean to say that we should not regulate businesses, I definitely believe that regulation is an essential part of the whole mix. But what really irks me is that so many self-proclaimed environmentalists continue to drive cars, buy lots of electronics, fly on airplanes, etc.

On a similar note, many people complain about locally owned stores being replaced by chain stores. If you think chain stores are bad, don’t shop at them. Yes, it is usually true that you will hand them less cash for a product than you would at a small mom-n-pop store. But you will pay in indirect ways as your town falls apart because everyone goes to the mall now, and your culture falls apart as you give up local control over the landscape of your town to all those chain stores.

I guess it can all be summed up in the old adage, “practice what you preach”. That’s easy to say. Now I encourage people to look at the practices of the people or organizations you give your money to. If you don’t like things that they do, don’t give them your money.