S6, E1: Noise Cancellation

Series 6: Dark Materials

“Where is My Mind? - Apple AirPods Pro” Apple Corporation (Fair Use Screen Grab)

Where is My Mind?

Picture the scene: a young woman walking in what looks like New York, with a cover of the Pixies classic, ‘Where is My Mind?’, piped into her ears. Then, at a press of a button, all the hubbub of city life is lifted, high into the air,¹ way above the buildings. It is a great subliminal reference to the air in ‘AirPods’.

Noise cancellation is not new of course, but the new AirPods Pros will (in Apple parlance) ‘quiet the noise’ and what’s more, make being oblivious really cool.

Of course there’s a lot of noise to quieten in the Northern hemisphere. We are so connected with the world but luckily, the tap of a touch screen, the click of a mouse or the flick of a switch can make somebody else’s reality go away. Now what price to make our own go away in real time?

It’s perhaps an odd twist, that the spoken word ‘stop’ at the start of the original Pixies track, will disable Google alarms on Pixel phones. An unintentional metaphor for our willingness to put our own alarm permanently on snooze.

The Unwanted Noise of Slave Labour

In places like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) there is no way to turn off reality, because the device for that has not been invented and besides, there could never be enough cobalt for something so ambitious. Yet in remote jungle clearances, the thing the people might most want to shut off is the reality of cobalt, were it not for the fact that beyond it there is nothing for them.

Monica aged Four: Sky News Special Report: Inside the Congo cobalt mines that exploit children by Alex Crawford (Fair Use Screen Grab)

Children, as young as four like Monica (pictured above) are involved in the cobalt mining industry enduring slave conditions soon after they can walk. These pictures come from the Sky News Special Report: Inside the Congo cobalt mines that exploit children by Alex Crawford² that aired in 2017.

I am going back nearly six years because it is foundational for this article series, which will eventually bring you up to date, but for now let me give you some terms of reference for this unfamiliar world.

In the DRC there is forced labour, child labour and forced child labour - please take a moment to think about what that means when the best option out of the three is ‘child labour’.

To simply survive it is necessary to grow up quickly.

Richard, eleven and Dorsen, eight working in the rain carrying cobalt ore: Sky News Special Report: Inside the Congo cobalt mines that exploit children by Alex Crawford (Fair Use Screen Grab)

There are two children working in this picture, the one hidden from view is Richard aged eleven, in the foreground is Dorsen being given a sack of cobalt ore to carry on his head - he is eight years old.

Are the men in the picture exploiting these children, or are they merely teaching them the only thing they know, which is how to get by through hard labour? It is difficult to tell from a screenshot, after all, there are slaving gangs in the DRC. I will let you know a little later.

If you read the

Noah Smith

article on electric vehicles, with it’s smug overly confident title, you might think it’s all figured out.

Now we get to the main leftist critique of EVs, which is that they will lead to the exploitation of poor people in the countries that mine the resources.

“All the arguments against EVs are wrong”, Noahpinion, Noah Smith

I am in favour of EVs in principle but this is a real problem and it should not be just a ‘leftist’ concern. Of course we use cobalt in lots of things and not just for electronics, plus, this is not a situation exclusive to cobalt. Precious metals, rare earths and copper (which I touched on in at least one previous article already³), all come with unethical baggage.

I like some of Mr Smith’s writing, he obviously tries to be factually accurate, but is prone to hyperbolic claims. Plus I don’t happen to agree with many of his conclusions most of which seem to come with unjustified confidence.

First I think we need to decode ‘leftist’ in the sense it is most likely meant here:

In the US this generally means:

• Someone who wants the government to take what is yours and use it without your direct consent (i.e. for non-military purposes)

• A misguided collectivist

• A woke non-realist

• Anybody you disagree with

Increasingly that is also the case in the UK.

The people who deploy the term are often completely unaware that it’s not an argument for anything and I always feel disappointed in any writer when I read it. Yet Mr Smith goes on to state what he sees as a problem with the ‘exploitation’ argument - because apparently, that is the one he thinks is flawed:

… extracting and exporting mineral wealth is the main economic activity that many poor countries do; …

“All the arguments against EVs are wrong”, Noahpinion, Noah Smith

So why are they poor if they are ‘exporting mineral wealth?

Don’t worry I’ll answer. Simply because the miners, many of whom are children, aren’t in the export business any more than slaves on Southern plantations were cotton entrepreneurs.

Amongst all the hateful reasons for slavery the most enduring is the economic one. You see, even when societies have concluded they don’t want it, they are not necessarily persuaded they don’t need it.

Britain sent the Royal Navy out to eradicate globally over a period of sixty years. It took force and was expensive. Things that are important always have a cost be it in lives or coin. I won’t delve into that here, preferring to give the topic more justice in another piece, but I mention it now as a way into a question: why are we more incensed by history than the slavery we are all benefiting from today?

[of minerals]… it is what supports them at more than a subsistence standard of living.

“All the arguments against EVs are wrong”, Noahpinion, Noah Smith

My hunch is that Mr Smith has never seen what ‘subsistence’ looks like in West Africa. I don’t say that to be condescending but because I give him the credit that, should he ever go there, he’ll change his mind. I’m not going list my credentials here.

Demanding that rich countries refuse to buy minerals from poor countries on humanitarian grounds would actually just impoverish those countries, with the blow falling hardest on the poor and marginalized.

“All the arguments against EVs are wrong”, Noahpinion, Noah Smith

It does not have to be all or nothing. The DRC should be a wealthy nation, after all, 70% of the world’s cobalt comes from that one country, yet the whole of Africa only accounts for 2% of global demand.

The Chinese are on the ground mopping up all the resources and setting prices because they are the largest processors of all types of ores globally and control the demand-side. It’s convenient to the West that they keep commodities cheap, so we allow them to dominate market share, failing to see the long-term consequences beyond the price.

Staying with cobalt, it arrives from all over the world in China, where it is comingled and processed. There are no cruelty-free ranges; no low-exploitation options and no ‘I can’t believe it’s not child labour’, product lines.

In fact, in the mid 20th century leftists spent decades arguing that poor countries should get a better price for their mineral exports …

“All the arguments against EVs are wrong”, Noahpinion, Noah Smith

It betrays a poor appreciation of history to think this is an argument that is only decades old. It puzzles me why anyone would think that all the perspectives on major world problems can be split neatly into ‘left’ and ‘right’?

Are we to suppose that opposition to exploitation has become passé for anyone outside a communist commune crocheting their own yoghurt from home-spun hemp? Is the implication that poor countries should not get better prices?

The West must offer an alterative to modern slavery in Africa. If I can’t reach your humanity, empathy or morality, then surely I can engage your self interest. Who benefits if we allow this supply-side dominance? You see, this is not merely a case of supply and demand, because the market is dysfunctional and we need to understand why.

I expand on this theme later in the series, but for now, do you want to live in a world where we are dependent on a commodity market dominated by China, built on slave labour, backed by Middle Eastern money?

Let me further appeal to your sense of independence. If Western society can’t get beyond the lure of short-term low prices, we will be completely out-manoeuvred and ultimately, economically subjugated.

If for sake of argument, it’s agreed that ‘leftists’ want to have more government control over the spending of ‘our’ money, other labels are needed too. To expect our lifestyles to be subsidised by the physical resources, labour and lives of people who have no choice, surely deserves a name. I’ll see if I can come up with something.

It’s a bit like taxing the third world to provide welfare for the first. Seems flakey to me.

Having rich countries refuse to buy those exports would be the exact opposite — a moral blow to Earth’s most vulnerable.

“All the arguments against EVs are wrong”, Noahpinion, Noah Smith

I am touched by the concern - just the right amount of reverence. He is right of course but it’s the question of why are they vulnerable should pique our interest. We need to offer a better deal to African and South American nations where most of the precious metal and mineral resources are. We have to partner with them and give them a better option to what the Chinese (and Russians via the Wagner Group - discussed later in the series) are offering.

They need tools, safety equipment, machinery, housing, schools and utilities. It requires infrastructure and careful planning to mitigate the damage to the delicate ecosystems that most of the worlds valuable materials sit beneath. If we can do that there is a chance.

To accept the race to the bottom for Africa and South America is to head there too. What does it mean to be morally eviscerated, degraded and utterly dependent with no power to change anything? Sounds a lot like slavery.

Returning to the Democratic Republic of the Congo

In a follow up report, Sky News revisits as a charity offers these two boys the opportunity to go away to school, where they will have food, lessons, clothes and a bed. Without hesitation the fathers agree to let them go, first to a halfway house and eventually to a residential school around 100 miles away in Lubumbashi.⁴

They leave their everyone and everything they ever knew; poverty, brutal labour and a place where their lives are so trivialised, that the minerals for our electronics, get to wash in the water they have to drink.

I hope you will manage to look at the videos in the footnotes.

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In this Dark Materials series I hope to explain why insularity, self-interest and short-termism, can only have devastating consequences on Western democracy and ideals, which somewhat unfashionably, I believe we must protect. I see this as the crux of the problem; we are being out-manoeuvred, in no small part, by our failure to export the very values we profess to hold.

If you want to get a sense of the way this is playing out in other countries, take a look at this from

Konstantin Kisin

which includes parts of his original translation of a Putin speech.

[The West]

“… is greedy and seeks to enslave and colonise other nations, like Russia.

… uses the power of finance and technology to enforce its will on other nations. … destabilises countries, creates terrorist enclaves and most of all seeks to deprive other countries of sovereignty.

They colonised, started the global slave trade, genocided native Americans, pillaged India and Africa, forced China to buy opium through war. We, on the other hand, are proud that we "led" the anti-colonial movement that helped countries develop to reduce poverty and inequality.”

Putin: "The End of Western Hegemony is INEVITABLE", Konstantin Kisin

I include it here to prepare you for a future episode where I discuss the activities of the Wagner Group in Africa and the anti-West rhetoric that is being used there. I would recommend the reading of the original post which can be found here. You see it is not just the propaganda that we need to worry about. The far greater danger is that we prove Putin right.

“Dorsen hasn’t eaten for two days now. This is what helpless looks like and he’s one of the children making millions for multinational corporations in America and China whilst they suffer in squalor. For this they'll get maybe eight British pence a day.”

Alex Crawford, Sky Special Correspondent speaking from the DRC

So much for ‘sustenance’.

Dorsen aged eight: Sky News Special Report: Inside the Congo cobalt mines that exploit children by Alex Crawford (Fair Use Screen Grab)

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1. The admittedly beautiful Apple advertisement. 1 minute duration.

2. A report on the mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 6 minutes of your time. Please.

3.

4. The Sky News team return to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to find the boys. A charity has offered them a place at a school about 100 miles away.