Blemished Smartphone Screens - Exported To Smarter People than You

Was reading a certification program's "rules" about "ready for reuse, ready for repair", and the great white bosses who are ready to save Dark Techies from buying something they want.

The ad above (from Mobile Centrix) links to a video explaining "Grade A, B, and C" of "Blemish Screens".  Grade A has just some bad pixels (like you'd take your phone back to the shop you bought it from yesterday, dissatisfied, for replacement).  Grade B has "bleed" discoloration at the edges. Grade C has visible chip-out black spots on the edges and corners.

A Rich Person's Broken Thing (Chapter of Adam Minter's Secondhand, after an explanation from my Grandpa Clarence Fisher) is the smartest thing a poor person can buy.  I've seen absolutely cake-smashed screens in everyday use in Africa.... no one is without a smart phone, but no one is paying $250 for screen repair, either. Instead, they buy these from their cousins who run the kiosk for phone repairs out of your local shopping mall.




Another example I use is a niche Chinese factory in Foshan which likes to buy laptops with damaged keyboards, missing keys, etc. Try to sell them a laptop with a fine working keyboard.... they will explain to you that what they MAKE is a laptop for Arabic, Persian or Farsi alphabet users. If you give them a laptop in excellent condition, you want to be paid more, but they don't want to pay you more for it because they are going to replace that English QWERTY keyboard anyway.

Structural racism in the E-Waste economy.  Rules are written by white men who don't know how to fix electronics, to govern what is legal for dark skinned people to buy and fix and work on. 

It starts with the implicit racism that an orphan or teenager at an Accra or Lagos or Guangdong city dump is the equivalent of the tech sector buyer / broker who assembled $20,000 to buy your containerload of damaged keyboard laptops and blemish-screens.

Greenpeace took pictures of Benson's container

And told Lord Chris Smith that Benson was shipping this.

#FreeJoeBenson is trending again, as people realize that the UK environmental agency called him "Primitive" and threatened him with a 5 year prison sentence.   This happened because Greenpeace took the infamous 2007 film of Benson's UK Hotel TV Upgrade container being unloaded (every CRT television was the same size and brand, not exactly "e-waste" looking) and declared - Like a Donald Trump Anti-Vaccination Clown Show - that eighty percent of the newly imported TVs would be dumped.  Benson, they explained, had spent $20,000 in order to avoid $3,000 of UK disposal fees (which would have been paid by the UK hotel, not by Joe Benson).

Being an environmentalist does not guarantee you won't be a racist or waste colonialist. Shut up and listen, please.