Following the blog policy to keep video to a minimum (it consumes a lot of bandwidth for readers in "good enough" internet bandwidth markets, even if their CRTs actually display better video quality than LCDs...) I will not embed the trailer to Peter Sellers' 1979 Film, but encourage you to follow the link.
BEING THERE. (link to trailer on youtube, plot summary from wikipedia below fold)
The analogy/allusion?
We meet someone who gets all his information from TV... cannot read or write. Someone else, involved in something really important (economic policy) bestows their faith to the someone who just repeats things he saw on TV. They become "insiders", powerful people with lots of influence.
Someone (Jim Puckett) took a picture of mixed electronics in the USA, then took a picture of sorted/single unit electronics unloaded from a sea container in Africa, then took a picture of (decades old) junk TVs generated in Africa at dumps. He announced that the Africans are buying the unsorted junk from the USA and burning it in fires in Africa.
Some of us who really were "being there" in Africa decades ago know that the technicians who import the goods are the best darn hopes their nations have, the Ben Franklins of their emerging democracies, used computer displays filling the role of the used printing equipment Franklin brought to Philadelphia.
BAN and Greenpeace's story... It's mathematically and economically impossible, its disproven by looking closely at the second photo (sorted, stretch-wrapped black hotel-upgrade quality TVs). There's no interview with the Africa buyer. Then, when the gobs and loads and piles of shredded TV glass appear here in the USA, our friend Jim shows up with a camera, saying "Tsk, Tsk" to the New York Times.
CBS 60 Minutes, NPR Fresh Air, PBS Frontline... the list of media consuming the images and reporting the "conclusion" makes Sellers movie seem more than possible/plausible in the Sustainability community. How will college PIRG "E-Stewards" activists look international students in the eye when the simple hoax becomes apparent? It's a hatchet job on the reuse market, planned obsolescence and big shred, playing us for fools.
BEING THERE. (link to trailer on youtube, plot summary from wikipedia below fold)
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| Ewaste advocates think they walk on water |
We meet someone who gets all his information from TV... cannot read or write. Someone else, involved in something really important (economic policy) bestows their faith to the someone who just repeats things he saw on TV. They become "insiders", powerful people with lots of influence.
Someone (Jim Puckett) took a picture of mixed electronics in the USA, then took a picture of sorted/single unit electronics unloaded from a sea container in Africa, then took a picture of (decades old) junk TVs generated in Africa at dumps. He announced that the Africans are buying the unsorted junk from the USA and burning it in fires in Africa.
Some of us who really were "being there" in Africa decades ago know that the technicians who import the goods are the best darn hopes their nations have, the Ben Franklins of their emerging democracies, used computer displays filling the role of the used printing equipment Franklin brought to Philadelphia.
BAN and Greenpeace's story... It's mathematically and economically impossible, its disproven by looking closely at the second photo (sorted, stretch-wrapped black hotel-upgrade quality TVs). There's no interview with the Africa buyer. Then, when the gobs and loads and piles of shredded TV glass appear here in the USA, our friend Jim shows up with a camera, saying "Tsk, Tsk" to the New York Times.
CBS 60 Minutes, NPR Fresh Air, PBS Frontline... the list of media consuming the images and reporting the "conclusion" makes Sellers movie seem more than possible/plausible in the Sustainability community. How will college PIRG "E-Stewards" activists look international students in the eye when the simple hoax becomes apparent? It's a hatchet job on the reuse market, planned obsolescence and big shred, playing us for fools.
