February 25, 2024
RE: Basel Convention And OECD Superiority
Dear Emerging Market Tech Sector Buyers:
The purpose of this letter is to explain to you why international laws are drafted by privileged societies purporting to protect and "save" your society, which we have labelled "informal" and "primitive", in order to achieve certain goals which you may not relate to.
1. Protect ourselves from perception of liability for responsibility
2. Shift the burden of proof onto you, the buyer, that what you seek is not stupid externalization of our environmental burdens
3. Protect investments into high-investment machinery and labor-saving shreddiing equipment
4. Retain in our national interests in raw material values.
The first endeavor places a value on our reputation among other WhiteMan Press and Publicity industries which is greater than the value you could ever achieve for creating a critical mass of users necessary to support investments in mass communications in your developing countries. We understand, remotely, that your Nollywood (Nigerian Hollywood) industry and television stations and satellite infrastructure depends greatly upon the affordability of televisions and phones and other communications devicds. However, the potential for the perception of an allegation that we, as whitemandsplainers, might be externalizing an environmental cost poses risk to our much larger value of ownership, real estate, and control over the system of trade. It is better for us that you stay in your place.
https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/17220-spain-nabs-europe-africa-electronic-waste-smugglers
The second "burden of proof shift" is to create rules that sound like a reasonable response to that risk, but which are actually contrary to normal "buyer beware" free rrade. Most trade relies on the expertise of consumers to determine what they, the "market", needs. We are creating a narrative around your primitiveness and informality which will create resistance to your economic potential as world consumers. You must prove you are good enough not to primitively destroy things you seek to buy, and you must buy them only from registered white "e-Stewards" and R2-Certified companies which pay a lot of money to test goods for you, paying more expensive white labor. You cannot be allowed to test and select what you know about, we must do it for you, otherwise you will be labelled as a criminal.
Due to the narrative our wealthy nations have created about our own liability for "externalizing" our environmental costs via "free trade" (letting you decide for example whether to pay for used and repairable solid state equipment or affordable but cheaply made "fast fashion" electronics), we have raised a system of taxes and EPR laws which have financed hundreds of millions of dollars in destruction machines to scrap our secondhand goods. The investors now have a vested interest in not competing with your tech sector reuse markets, which obviously are in a position to recognize far more economic value for the same kilo of cherry-picked electronics than they can produce from pieces of scrap metal at the back ends of the shredding machines. These investors (Big Shred) have a hand-in-glove relationship with Original Equipment Manufacturers who also see your reuse networks as a potential unwanted competition for their fast fasion products. Academics here describe this as a form of Planned Obsolescence, with the "plan" actually being retrospective rather than forward-thinking. Let's just say that there is a lot of money behind the narrative we have created in our countries describing your tech sector workers as informal and primitive, and this makes your burden of proof irretractible. This sums up explanating nunber three.
The fourth narrative, the "strategic mineral value" is a way of putting our nations insecurities about national defense on the table. If you find repurposing chips valuable, that might make goods more affordable, and some of those goods we imagine might be weapons which could be built to kill us. We are perfectly fine with your role mining "cobalt red" with your bloody childrens hands, or assembling goods that we manufacture out of those critical metals and minerals, but the capital invested in chip making and other critical expensive devices, needless to say, is far more important to us than your society's need for affordable mass communication.
We have turned these four principles into a narrative about "protecting the environment", and have sponsored Interpol's "Project Eden" to arrest anyone smart enough to perform circuit-board level repairs on devices we would otherwise feed to our shredders to retain raw materials to recycle. The "recycling" is a mantra we feed the press which requires "formality". "Informal" means white people didn't enter a number into a spreadsheet and don't know why you were able to find more value in the secondhand good than our society could produce by running it through a shredder.
We have posted officers at our secondhand collection depots in places like Bergen, Norway, who are paid by taxpayers to chase away Africans, Asians, and "Roma" who try to acquire the goods. We have built a narrative that our liability for "dumping" trumps your markets demand. We have created a narrative that replacing a video chip to make a laptop work is less "formal" than running the non-working laptop through a shredder which might otherwise be idle in a second shift. We have aligned the interests of China which produces fast fashion appliances for your poor societies to afford, and China has voted to keep "non-OECD" countries trade between them and most of the people on the planet. This is not in our own economic interest, but we've created a narrative around short term interests listed above, and have now painted ourselves into a corner of "liability" for any potential inability or stupidity we imagine if you pay a lot of money for reuse, transport, custorms, etc. which we have not entered into our white spreadsheets.
We also fund some incredibily good stuff, like Patrick Dykstra's Sperm Whale documentary on Nature. Mr. Dykstra actuall spent time getting to know the sperm whales and explains them to us, and we think its really cool and makes us feel good about our societies as environmental justice proponents. To those in our wealthy society who make similar efforts to document your Tech Sector skills and intelligence, who would shift the burden of proof for your market demand back to the center of the trade, we label them as "apologists".
Sincerely
White Man Splainer
cc: Basel Convention Secretariat, Interpol, Basel Action Network, Greenpeace
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/befriending-a-sperm-whale/29837/
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