Oxpecker Bird 2 Blog: Appearing this week in E-Scrap News (In My Opinion)

Part 2 of the essay on the RERA-is-SEERA-is-AmericaCompetesAct has been picked up by E-Scrap News, "IN MY OPINION" Op-ed.

Here again is the section 30612 in the House Report version.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-zuxQILKwou7j8qCo62Bg-XBpxFEXLv9/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108266863784829595501&rtpof=true&sd=true

It did not make it to the Senate Version, text here.

\\https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4521/text

Fun fact:  CAER rep quoted in the Pro-30612 section was also, in 2006, selling to the same contract manufacturers I was selling to. I have photos.

This was a factory owned by Rowell Yang of Proview, who was in a much-publicized trademark war with Apple (Mr. Yang, who I met a few times, had trademarked "iPad" in China and Hong Kong).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2012/02/21/apple-disses-proview-ceo-over-ipad-trademark-fight/?sh=6d4f11f95e25

https://www.engadget.com/2012-02-23-shanghai-court-sides-with-apple-ipad-sales-to-continue.html

So when Apple's lobbyist accuses the Chinese contract manufacturer of "counterfeiting", they mean... reuse is bad.

Shame Blowback: Jim Puckett's 2015 Claim to be an Authority on Agbogbloshie

"The #TechSector in #EmergingMarkets honestly believes in the #CircularEconomy. But like Copernicus and Galileo, they do not believe it revolves around you." - Robin Freeland Ingenthron

That's my favorite self-quote from the past 10 years. I got to deliver it to a European Conference on E-Waste, seated side by side with Basel Action Network's executive director, Jim Puckett. 

"Shame Blowback" sometimes takes years. But Karma Occurs. 

After the laughter subsided, I told the audience that it is a bit absurd that they are relying on the advice of two white American men to explain the situation with used electronics in Africa's Tech Sector. Adam Minter later told me that #OwnVoices was a hashtag which framed that dynamic. The following year, Emmanuel Nyaletey was invited to present to the same conference audience. 

2007 Film Falsely Claimed these were illegally dumped. Lie,

Quickie documentary videos of Africa-bound sea containers shocked Europeans into twisting the Basel Convention - which explicitly identifies intent to dump, not intent to recycle or repair, as illegal - to a snare for African and Asian and Latin Americans in the reuse sector. Joe Benson was entrapped in that snare, which was baited by Jim Puckett with false claims, delivered in less than flowering Halloweenish descriptions of African Cities ("A Place Called Away"), that 80% of the trade Africans engage in is a "sham". "Millions of tons" "pawed through" by "orphans" in "the largest e-waste dump in the world".

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America v. Planned Obsolescence

Since I often have to hunt this down, here is copied the best Defense against accusations of "Planned Obsolescence". Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy In America, Volume 2, Chapter 8.

Note that it has nothing at all to do with piracy, counterfeit, gray market.

When a company correctly estimates that too much 'value', too much repairability, is being given to the market, and 'downsizes quality', that may actually be good for the environment.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. English Edition. Vol. 2.  

"You cannot believe how many facts flow naturally from this philosophical theory that man is indefinitely perfectible,d and the prodigious influence [762] that it exercises on even those who, occupied only with acting and not with thinking, seem to conform their actions to it without knowing it. 

Circular Economy and African Shanzhai: Under the Bridge

Shanzhai, or Shan Zhai, or sanzai...

I dropped the word "shanzai" recently.  In my mind, it's something I blogged about not that long ago (2011) - a term I learned from meeting Dr. Josh Goldstein at USC via Adam Minter.  But I do admit to that habit of dropping a word or a phrase in places where no one knows what I'm talking about (unless they do).

Like a reference to "the Keystone Cops", the word "shanzhai" went "whoosh" over the heads of my listeners.  But in a reuse and recycling context, it's a profound concept.  It is like a master guitarist finding that a fan has learned to play his riffs even better than he can.  It's the concept of taking an iPhone 6 and repairing it with bells and whistles that make it, virtually, like an iPhone 9 (yet to be invented).

Today's blog has three goals - 1) remind readers of the importance of shanzhai, 2) show some really awesome examples of Africans turning broken LCD TVs into things of higher value, and 3) explore the "poor communicator" dynamic which so often dumbs down own discussions. When is it necessary to go back and remind a new reader what a word means?  Often today, journalists and bloggers "hotline" the word by html to a definition somewhere else online, similar to a footnote.

So here's the thing - Shanzai is being re-defined in relationship to "counterfeit" stuff. In the same way the charitable industrial complex defined African electronic recycling with "bad" images of Agbogbloshie, and defined Chinese technology reuse with cesspools and rice paddies, someone is out to bury the concept of refurbishment itself, and to make it seem shameful.

And they are going to use European and American implicit racism and assumptions about Africans and Chinese people to keep the competition away.  Like second string white baseball players, the American and European "big shred" recyclers are frightened of competition from Jackie Robinson.

To be fair, shanzai does also mean borrowed or knock-off, but in Chinese it has a much more respected context.  As I explained in the blog, Shanzhai is respected in China, in the way that John Frusciante, 47, (Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist) respects Josh Klinghoffer, 37.  Klinghoffer copied Frusciante's guitar riffs and added a spice to them that put the Red Hot Chili Peppers on another level.

Here's what you will see in the blog below the "more" line:

1) Chili Peppers "under the bridge" video
2) An explanation of how I feel lonely explaining African exports (tied to lyrics)
3) A photo slide show demonstrating what Africans are doing with broken LCD TVs (like the ones Total Reclaim allowed to be exported to China)

And as usual, the conclusion

4) African geeks know more than we do, and the "circular economy" doesn't revolve around white people.

followed by

5) a blog-end of why it may be worth it to sometimes write a blog that's over most reader's level of expertise.

See if you can check the boxes

"Exaggerations Have Been Made" - NGO Exec Director

He huffed and he puffed and he blew the Hoax down

I'm really busy this month, in part due to the month away (Austria IERC conference, then 3 weeks in Ghana).  And I was in the Ozarks all last week for my father's DNR and funeral, simultaneously dealing with a tornado that wiped out water, electricity, internet, and my mom and dad's barn in Arkansas.  So... the blog's always poorly edited, but this month I've got really good excuses for it.

Here's what sticks with me from the January IERC Austria conference.  I sat on a panel with Jim Puckett, the Executive Director of the E-Waste NGO Basel Action Network.  We were speaking to a crowd of about 100 European WEEE delegates.

I opened by saying I used to be a teacher in Cameroon, Africa, from 1984-86.  I'd recently been to Agbogbloshie, and was going back again immediately after the conference.  I told the European audience that the junk they had seen photographed there was generated by African households and businesses, after decades of reuse.  Yes, it was originally imported used, but almost always repaired and used for 10-20 years before Africans discarded it.  I told them that 30 years ago my landlord had no running water but owned a (used) TV.  I told them that there wasn't any mystery around the baseline data - the World Bank clearly says that MOST households in cities like Accra had TV or computer 20 years ago, and the assumption that junk captured by photo-journalists was "dumped" in hundreds of sea containers by unscrupulous recyclers was categorically false;  I told them I had met Michael Anane, that he was not telling the truth about Agbogbloshie being a remote fishing village and he had certainly not been fishing and swimming there 20 years ago, that I was unable to find any newspaper that employed him, and that the people I asked in Agbogloshie said he worked for the AMA, the municipal land development group that forcibly evicted thousands of Old Fadama slum dwellers near the site, which they have a published plan to develop into shopping malls etc. The junk is collected in pushcarts from Accra city streets. I told them that the World Bank and IMF determined 15 years ago that used electronics in Africa were essential to creating the "critical mass of users" to fund TV stations and programming, cell phone towers, and internet cable.  I told them that Africa's Tech Sector found "Project Eden" to be scary, a threat to their livelihood, and cringe-worthy as a moniker.

E-waste Ebola Connection?

In conclusion, I counted backwards from 3, snapped my fingers, and  told them to forget all of the things Jim Puckett had told them for the past 15 years.

Jim's response?

"I will admit, exaggerations have been made."

It strikes me, 6 weeks later, as an incredible use of passive voice.  Exaggerations "have been made" by someone.

Exaggerations have been made, indeed.  Agbogbloshie photos have now disappeared from the CAER website, the conference speakers were now talking about keeping copper inside Europe's "circular economy", and Blacksmith Institute had changed its name.  That NGO allegedly told journalists 2 years ago that Agbogbloshie was the "most polluted place in the world" - something Blacksmith then denied but wouldn't issue any clarifying statement, despite our sending evidence they were cited by the journalists as the source of the claims about Agbo.  They did not tell me how much money they received to "transform" and "save" Agbogbloshie...

How To Pay For Africa E-Waste Cleanup? Part 3

Africans have a better idea about which view of Africa's the fine one

A month living with Africa's Tech Sector is like the opposite of the movie "The Matrix".  In the matrix all the humans think they are living in a normal world, but in reality dwell in torrid humid dystopic conditions.  Take the red pill, and you see the horror of reality...

Africa's Tech Sector has been described in halloweenish, dystopian, horrific terms by agents of the Charitable Industrial Complex, Big Shred, and Planned Obsolescence.  Take the blue pill, and you find a bunch of intelligent, happy, funny people living in a normal world of value added, growing standards of living, and healthy teledensity.

So just close your eyes, count backwards from Three, and when I snap my fingers, we'll solve Africa's real e-waste problems efficiently, fairly, and fairly quickly.

It's time for the good news!

Morpheus's "dirty little secret" isn't the truth.

The Truth in Africa isn't "Sodom and Gomorrah" or "Eden" either.  But it's a lot more like "Avatar" than it is "The Matrix".  Once you live here and see people are kind of the same, the solutions become easier to do.

There are simple and friendly and affordable solutions here.  (And the EU can still get all the unobtanium it wants.)  America is teaching Africa and Europe to "Dab" together, trade together, cooperate together.  With a little Interpol "community policing" we'll suffer less "collateral damage".

Dabbing to the Blue Pill!  Africa Dey FINE!

The Joy of Fair Trade Recycling, continued

OP ED: Recyclers, Stewards Must Free the Geeks of Color

[6/20/2014] We are all familiar with the photos of wide eyed, poor children in faraway, exotic places. CARE, UNICEF and others have tried to be more sophisticated about the “poster child” syndrome, but many others will fill the space. A child’s photo often earns a quick sympathy buck.

It's the gift that keeps on taking. Through either God’s grace or a million years of evolution, we are capable of nurture, we can empathize.  Risk to a child is as frightening as risk to ourselves.

But in a new development, poster children are becoming a tool of major industries. Electronics manufacturers practicing “planned obsolescence” and “big shred” machine makers are funding a photo campaign to stop the secondary market. It is an example of what Peter Buffett calls the "charitable industrial complex" [NYT Op Ed 2013].

Reuse and repair have met anti-gray-market alliances in the back alleys of prohibition trade.  The anti-reuse complex have created a racial profile of traders in used goods. The campaign actually accuses overseas buyers of poisoning their own children.

What is unique about this "e-waste" campaign is that, unlike CARE or UNICEF or Save The Children or OXFAM, the fundraisers do not share a dime of proceeds with the children in the photos.   In a crassly opportunistic way, they actually use the kids images to arrest their parents. Among philanthropic colonialists, the e-waste export campaign is an abusive step parent.

Joe Benson, a 54 year old man, born in Africa, never went to school. He registered legally as a reuse business in London. He was sentenced Thursday to 16 months in prison. During sentencing, either the London judge or the barrister compared Benson's export to "rape". When I compared these "bullyboy" cases to Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 2012, little did I know how similar the trials would be.

#freehurricanebenson