Citizen Reporter

Police in Spain Terrorize Protesters

As I travel around the Northeast of the United States, I am also struggling to keep up with events unfolding in Spain. Disturbing events as protesters throughout the country suffer the wrath of a police force out of control. While millions throughout the country assemble in city squares demanding political and social reform, their story goes mostly unreported and downplayed by many international media outlets. What is going on in Spain? On today’s podcast I talk about the situation, while also giving an update to several themes from recent podcasts.

EU Sanctioned Torture in Libya

While people continue to die in Libya as part of the battle to oust Gaddafi, NATO continues to drop bombs on what are known as “strategic targets”. While their governments talk tough about liberating the people of Libya from tyranny, up in Europe, France and Italy are panicing about the increase in migrants arriving from Africa on their shores. Despite long being part of the Schengen treaty that ensures free travel between EU states, they have now openly taken action to check and limit such travelling. A decision that is causing alot of concern and frustration to those that believe in respecting agreements and free travel within the EU.

But in fact, long before the uprising in Libya or the adoption of the no-fly zone, a far greater crime was being committed on Libyan soil with the help of European Union money. For more than a decade, Italy has funded and equipped immigrant detention centers hosted and run by the Libyan government. Detention centers where migrants from all over Africa were held, extorted and tortured. While humanitarian and legal limits prevented Italy from running such centers on their own soil, nothing and no one prevented them from doing so.. including the EU which was completely aware of their existence.

After years of living under the most horrific circumstances, the Libyan state seems to be falling apart and migrants are making the dangerous journey towards Europe in search of work and a better life. EU states cry foul and claim they have no choice but to tighten border controls and turn migrants away. They act as victims after having long been engaged in the inhumane and torturous detention of migrants.

Electronic Ecosystems

As a designer, at some point David Kousemaker became interested in finding where our old phones and electronics in general end up once we in the western world throw them away. His interest took him to parts of Indonesia, China, Brazil and Thailand, among other places. There he observed not only how things like mobile phones are broken down, recycled, rebuilt etc, he also saw how entire industries and ecosystems form around these practices.

Through his photos and blog entries you can follow his travels and see some of the highlights. David Kousemaker met up with me here in Amsterdam to talk about how he got into this subject and what he learned from the journey about just how big an impact our love of gadgets is having on this world.

Our Gadgets, Our Planet

This week I will meet up with David Kousemaker of TechTravels to interview him about his work on the issue of where our old gadgets end up. More specifically we will delve into a topic that the mainstream world only occasionally alludes to when they mention how “somewhere in China” our old computers and phones are painstakingly recycled in the most horrendous of conditions. Amazingly such an alarming statement is taken as almost cliché when you look at how rarely media outlets get deeper into this issue.

But over the past few years, David Kousemaker has done just that. In fact, he has gone beyond what most any other newspaper or reporter has ever uncovered in places like China, Indonesia, and Brazil, delving into not only what gets recycled but who does the recycling, how they live, where different phases of the process take place and so on. His findings have been documented in text and photos on his website, Techtravels.

The idea behind meeting David, besides learning first hand details about these people, places, and activities, is to also get a better picture of the global game of electronics disposal. With all the devices we have gone through and will go through as we upgrade, replace, and go for the next thing, what happens to all these gadgets? What impact are we who buy these devices and later get rid of them, having on society and the planet? This week, we get more answers to these and other questions…

Judge Rules for Plesner, For art!

My work on this site is not normally focused on breaking news, but this one just came out an hour ago and it involves the Plesner v. Louis Vuitton case we’ve been discussing over the past weeks. The judge in the Hague ruled today in favor of Plesner’s right to continue to show her painting, Darfurnica, and that her use of the image of a Louis Vuitton bag is both “functional and proportional.”

No word yet from either Nadia or the Vuitton side, but as a newfound voice for Darfur and freedom of expression, she will surely return to the podcast in the future. Click here for the initial report by Radio Netherlands regarding the court ruling.

Getting to know Fairphone

Showing copper — Showing Copper after cleaning

For the past few months I have been watching online and listening to conversations offline about the initiative by a group of people here in Amsterdam which looks at how mobile phones are made and how their production effects people and the environment around the world. It is one of those difficult to address issues, because we are talking about a device that is so essential and so present in everyone’s life in almost every corner of the planet. And while we can be critical, perhaps, of the companies that produce them, we still need the device so sometimes the questions aren’t asked and the practices aren’t closely scrutinized.

Until now.

The concerned group of people involved in Fairphone have decided to build the world’s first ethically produced phone, as they explain it:

Our aim of fairness is simple: to not harm man or nature in creating our phone. Not in transporting or producing it. And not in acquiring the raw materials for it.

As their first step in researching and beginning on the production process of the phone, they recently went to Congo (DRC) to meet with artisanal miners and learn about their working conditions, as well as what they would want in terms of fair treatment and payment as the source of the raw materials that eventually make the devices function. In the process they also purchased raw cobalt and brought it back to the Netherlands to be used in their first prototype phones. Thus completing the very basic but very little known step one of building our mobile phones, the mining of raw materials.

After having learned all about their initial efforts to both build a phone and shed light on an issue with global impact, I decided to get involved as a journalist and a concerned citizen/phone user. My aim is to follow this process and pass on information to the public, to stimulate conversations that could help on the road to more ethical production of the devices we love and use so much.

More information and reporting to come. This was only my own journalistic step 1 towards getting to know fairphone and an industry that could use a good kick in the pants.