For this first blog post I thought that I would utilize my limited shelf space to analyze a very specific facet of Leonard’s argument, particularly her ideas on computer manufacturing and the manner in which it is made to fail, another tactic implemented by corporate America to increase profits and poison Mother Earth. While I feel that many aspects of her argument directed towards consumerism are well justified, her comments on the lifespan of computers and the way in which they are designed to fail are a bit misguided, in my humblest of opinions. I realize, of course, that Leonard is a very knowledgeable expert in her field and that it is entirely possible that she oversimplified many of her arguments to reach a greater audience, but for the sake of argument I will assume that she is ignorant of the misguidedness of her accusations. 

      She makes the claim in her video The Story of Stuff that she “opened up a big desktop computer to see what was inside and [she] found out that the piece that changes each year is just a tiny little piece in the corner… [That] you can’t just change…” Well I’m here to tell you that this is just not true. Maybe she was correct at the time of the video’s publication (I’m not entirely up to speed on the desktops of 2007), but she seems to be quite misinformed when it comes to computers. I assume this “tiny little piece in the corner” she was referring to would be the computer’s CPU, the central processing unit which deals with the daily operations of the computer, the power house for most computational tasks. In most PC’s, at least all that I have seen and worked on, replacing the CPU is very easy, sometimes requiring only two to three steps if a heat sink isn’t involved. Her claim that the computer was outdated because of the CPU doesn’t really make much sense, especially when she could easily have replaced the component with a faster, more powerful chip if she so desired, in turn freeing up the old chip to sell or share and reuse elsewhere! Assuming her motherboard was compatible with a quicker CPU this would be a very quick and easy fix. 

      Another aspect of her claim that I did not find ringing true was that the “tiny little piece in the corner” was the only thing that was upgraded annually in PCs. This, again, is not true. There are plenty of components in PCs that are routinely upgraded, GPUs, motherboards, RAM, etc. Claiming that the big computer corporations are feeding off of their customers failing CPUs is not at all representative of the computing industry. If she really wanted to make a difference she should probably view one of the countless tutorials on building a PC and create her own. This would save countless dollars in unnecessary upgrades and introduce her to the very thrifty PC building community that is, in many ways, quite sustainable.

      Disregarding her jab at computer operating systems, I would like to make one more defense of the tech sphere by bringing to the table Moore’s Law, the observation that nearly every 18 months the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles. Of course, this rule of thumb, if you will, was originally proposed by a cofounder of Intel, but it accurately represents the state of the industry. I don’t believe that these tech companies are purposely making products slower and less efficient on purpose, that they are saving the good stuff to keep consumers wanting more, it is just that the realm of technology is still fairly new and that there is much to be seen from this sector which has seen massive growth over the past half century. Of course, this realm of developing and manufacturing is not free of its social and ethical ills, but I do believe that Leonard has unfairly attacked the computer industry as a major waste producer when she seems to be fairly unfamiliar with the technology.