Bring up the subject of “waste” at an evening with friends. Some will immediately mention bins full of unnecessary packaging, others will condemn the planned obsolescence of our everyday objects, and still others will confess in a low voice that their wardrobe is full of clothes and shoes they never wear. But one mode of consumption seems to escape all questioning: digital goods.
For a very long time, cars were called upon to bear witness to the importance of their owner. The bigger and more powerful they were, the more important one was thought to be. For some years now, it is high-tech objects, and notably ultra-sophisticated smartphones, that play this role. Few buyers use all their possibilities, but social and technical innovation today allows billions of people to believe they belong to the affluent classes because they buy products presented as exceptional. When they look at them, they feel valued in their own eyes and hope to be just as valued in the eyes of others. At the same time, the rapid obsolescence of these objects feeds our propensity to replace them. Our parents’ telephone was used for fifty years; our children’s is programmed to become obsolete in two.
The problem is that the materials essential for manufacturing mobile phones, computers, virtual reality headsets and digital infrastructure are rare and costly to extract and manufacture. What is more, every click we make, every bit that crosses space, consumes energy. Some of it comes from nuclear power stations, but a large share is supplied by coal burned in thermal power stations. The digital economy generates immense waste, even though not everyone benefits from its services, unlike food.
This waste is fuelled by the ideology of entering a new world, a sign of modernity and elitist belonging. So it is with game consoles and smartphones, whose first-time buyers, surveys show, are mostly modest families. These tools also promise to develop ever greater power, but their constantly increasing performance creates new needs as they claim to satisfy the previous ones.
The attention economy, created and maintained by the makers of social networks, is well known, but virtual reality, very costly in terms of materials and infrastructure, brings new waste. Thousands of people are mobilised to make us buy ever more products whose obsolescence is faster and faster, to the detriment of both the quality of our lives and the global environment.
So let us learn today to use our technological devices in a targeted way, for specific activities and not out of boredom. We will be all the better for it, and so will the planet.
S.T.
Serge Tisseron is a psychiatrist, doctor of psychology accredited to supervise research, member of the Académie des technologies, and associate researcher at Université de Paris (CRPMS).
