Unplug This Book

Technology is magic. We grew up believing it. Who knows or cares how it works? Plug it in, fill 'er up, and go. Who knows or cares what makes it go--or what happens when we throw it Away-- and what they cost us and the planet and the future in other ways?

We started sobering up on that in the 60s with anti-pollution environmentalism, in the 70s with oil shortages and gas prices, in the 80s with recycling, and more recently with the Climate Crisis and the spectre of Peak Oil. But not entirely.

Here online you'll see alarm and anger over deforestation to feed the McDonalds habit, oil to feed the auto eroticism, coal to feed the air fresheners and the freezer the size of the Ritz. You'll see advice on hybrid cars and cooking oil fuel, on replacing lightbulbs and installing insulation, and all manner of conservation strategies. But generally what you won't see is anything about the medium of the message. Computers. Desktop to laptop, Ipod to cell phone and all those hybrid devices. And not too much about the cable TV either. Because they're still magic.

We're starting to wake up, but slowly, about this as well. George Gilder projects that Internet computing will soon require as much power as the entire U.S. economy did in 2001, and author Hunter Lovins estimates the manufacture of a laptop computer creates 4,000 times its weight in waste, much of it toxic. In his prize-winning book, Made to Break, Giles Slade asserts that at least 90 percent of the 315 million still-functional personal computers discarded in North America in 2004 were trashed (it was 63 million just a year before), and more than 100 million cell phones -- 200,000 tons worth -- were thrown away in 2005. Slade is warning of a massive ewaste crisis as U.S. television is mandated to go High Definition digital. Some attention is being paid to this, but is it enough?

As for how much power we are using for computers and the other electronic objects of our affections, some awareness is growing of the electricity they consume when they are supposedly not "on." Because they are, big time. The latest expose is by Larry Magid in the New York Times, with some work-arounds.

But I'm still waiting to see the connections being made between the need to cut CO2, and to get control of the ewaste problem, and the rapidly expanding use of computers and electronics. Somehow I doubt it's going to stop anybody from lining up for their Iphone later this month.