7 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2019
    1. No electricity or running water, no paving on the roads, and good luck if you needed a doctor, but incredibly I had a signal. “This is why I am here,” I thought, “I can’t live without my phone, and people here are dying because of it.”

      A real juxtaposition. Who would assume in the middle of the African jungle you would have a cell phone signal?

    2. the enemy at the gates.

      a comparison to the old war movie? A literal explanation of the environment which these materials come from?

    3. slaves tend to work with primitive tools, saws, shovels, and picks, or their own bare hands

      Arguments have been made that we, as a society, are becoming obsessed with our phones. I think it's possible that a parallel could be drawn between slavery and the necessity of people in the modern world to have our phones on us every second of the day. We have become slaves to technology.

    4. an extraction that we never actually see.

      A fact that most of the smart phone user base is blind to as it is seen as the dirty little secret of the industry. It has become more exposed in recent years due to the efforts of such projects as the game we played for this class but has been hushed up by Apple banning it from their app store.

    5. Our lives are full of ways that we connect with other people—the food we serve and share, the rings and gifts we exchange

      a clear effort at the juxtaposition that people whom receive and use smartphones from those who make them.

    6. We know that, even though it comes all the way from India, slave-produced granite is cheap. We also know that, while some polishing and skillful carving of names and dates is needed,

      While some people do know the origins of their phones and the parts within them (the negative sides). It is commonly disregarded as people view a smartphone as a necessary evil in this modern world - everything is online these days and nobody wants to be behind the curve.

    7. Our view of cemetery monuments is normally restricted to what we see when we bury our loved ones or visit their graves. If we think about where the markers come from at all,

      Similar to how we view our smart phones coming out of the box. New and shiny and instead of being hand crafted by an elderly gentleman, it came to life on a assembly belt somewhere in the world built by some robot when in fact up until that point it had caused nothing but pain in the lives of the people whom created it and made profits for their bosses.