Hacker News Reader

Comment by zaptheimpaler | Hacker News Reader

Accountability does not work when society as a whole loses its moral compass. The people who were supposed to keep Google/FB accountable were negligent or complicit for a decade.

You may say slave labor is wrong but will you pay $500 more for an iPhone? Most people won't. They will point the finger at Apple while shopping for the cheapest deal on Amazon produced by yet more slave labor in China. Anything to avoid taking on personal responsibility and score a few more $$ for the retirement account. Only widespread personal responsibility works, but it can only arise within a culture that respects and rewards those who take it on and judges people a little more broadly than "success" and $$$.

View on HN

Where is the option for me to spend $500 more for this ethically manufactured iPhone? Or even just one manufactured in the USA?

Fairphone?

Nope they might be better but they're not in the clear either. From their wikipedia page:

> Since version two the Fairphone is produced in Suzhou, China, by Hi-P International Limited.[3]

> Fairphone's founder Bas van Abel acknowledged in 2017 that it was currently impossible to produce a 100% fair phone, suggesting it was more accurate to call his company's phones "fairer"

$500 is a lot of money for most people, but there's definitely a market out there (especially if they give you a unique color so all your friends can see what a good person you are).

Issues of spinning up a new production line aside, I don't think the large mobile phone manufacturers would go for this idea, because it would mean admitting that the majority of their products are produced unethically.

Librem 5 has a variant that is manufactured in the US, and it costs like more than 2 times its non-US variant. I doubt it's a good call financially.

> but will you pay $500 more for an iPhone? Most people won't.

I really enjoy this thought exercise: what if everything was made ethically and cost reflected that. The world would probably be unrecognizable from what it looks like now.

The original iPod would never have been as wide-spread, for example, because the cost would have made it, truly, a luxury. That's if it was even invented at all, because it's pretty obvious that the iPod wasn't the first consumer electronic. Computers might be only affordable by large corporations, universities, and governments, so most of us here would not be working in the tech industry. Etc.

I think that this is important to remember because it really emphasizes that nearly every aspect of modern life is built on the backs of the disenfranchised. It's impossible to live truly ethically in this system. As a sibling post points out: there's no +$500 ethical iPhone option, so the power is literally out of the hands of the consumers (and I'd argue that having some sort of technology is very nearly required to function in our society, at least in the US).

As the saying goes: there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com