The afterlives of discarded digital devices are just a tiny — if shiny — piece of the much larger story of global recycling. Minter reports that story so masterfully that by the book’s end, I was convinced that the best vantage point from which to view the forces of globalization might well be atop a pile of trash.
Read the rest of “The Afterlives of Discarded Objects: Adam Minter’s ‘Junkyard Planet’” here.
Plus, check out the author’s upcoming events in Los Angeles and London.
Jathan Sadowski takes on technological optimism and the “Californian Ideology” behind Byron Reese’s new book, Infinite Progress:
Silicon Valley already has a storied tradition of trying to predict the future. Byron Reese, chief innovation officer at the California-based content farm Demand Media, is the latest to hear the digitized hymns of the Internet Gods, and, like a faithful apostle, he leaps at the chance to sing their praises. His breathless, 312-page display of devotion Infinite Progress: How the Internet and Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger, and War is unabashedly confident that humankind is heading toward a world that will be free of the subtitular scourges.