Video: Unseen Connections: A Natural History of Cell Phones

Cell phones are among people’s most prized possessions. They play an important role in daily life, facilitating everything from communications with others to the recording of social experiences and emotions. Despite the importance and ubiquity of cell phones, few people know how these devices are made or what happens to them after they are discarded. Using an anthropological lens, Joshua Bell discusses the international network of relations that underpins the production, repair, and disposal of cell phones and the emerging social implications of this network at both global and local levels.

Joshua A. Bell, Curator of Globalization, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

Presented by Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology in collaboration with the Cambridge Science Festival

Recorded April 18, 2018

Transcript

[00:00:06.64] Dr. Bell is curator of globalization at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and is a professorial lecturer in anthropology at the George Washington University. He received his undergraduate degree from Brown University, his master's and doctorate degrees from the University of Oxford. Dr. Bell's research combines ethnographic fieldwork with research in museums and archives to examine the shifting local and global network of relationships, as I previously said.

[00:00:37.12] He's interested in materiality, the politics of representation, transforming political economies and ecologies, as well as issues around the production and understanding of history. Since 2000, he has conducted fieldwork with communities in the Purari Delta and an ecologically diverse tidal estuary on Papua New Guinea's south coast, examining and documenting their social, economic, and ecological transformations.

[00:01:05.63] This work is complemented with ongoing archival and museum-based research in Australia, Europe, Papua New Guinea, and the United States. At the National Museum of Natural History, he's carrying out several projects. One of them, "The Sweetness of the Stone-Age," examines the narratives found in the artifacts, photographs, films, texts, and biological specimens collected during the 1928 US Department of Agriculture sugarcane expedition to New Guinea to understand the cultural transformation and shifts in biodiversity that occurred in the region since the expedition took place.

[00:01:46.96] Another of his projects aims to survey the Smithsonian's cultural and natural history collections from New Caledonia, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu to understand the social relations that facilitated the acquisition of his materials and what they tell us about the culture and history of Melanesia. Through the Recovering Voices initiative, he's also helping to lead an interdisciplinary team at the Smithsonian, working to address the issues surrounding indigenous language and knowledge sustainability at national and global levels.

[00:02:20.20] Tonight, he'll be discussing another of his projects, which examines the extraordinary, intimate, and global relations materialized in cell phones. Dr. Bell has published extensively in all of these topics, and is actively involved in sharing his expertise through conferences, symposia, and workshops. He's a board member of the Council for Museum Anthropology and of Museum Worlds-- Advances in Research, a multidisciplinary journal that publishes research on global trends, case studies, and theory relevant to museum practice and scholarship around the world.

[00:02:55.24] And just before we begin a talk on cell phones, may I remind you to please turn yours off? Meanwhile, welcome, Dr. Bell.

[00:03:03.20] [APPLAUSE]

[00:03:12.25] So my talk today, as Jeffrey mentioned, draws on an ongoing project, the genesis of which is really rooted in my coming to the National Museum of Natural History back in 2008, and entangled also with this strange title of curator of globalization. And in fact, it was thinking about the job talk and what globalization was that I stumbled on this topic, in terms of cell phones.

[00:03:39.33] But my work, as was alluded to-- I've worked in Papua New Guinea since 2000 and have always been interested in global/local relations, particularly as it relates to cell phones-- or sorry-- into objects and the ways in which people use objects. So it was a natural fit, in some ways, that, when I took the job in 2008, then, the iPhone was a year old. And there was a lot of discussions in the media that continue today about the political economy and ecology and what cell phones are doing to us.

[00:04:12.34] And so it was being interested in labor practices, in the environment, in the communication-- new communication affordances that these smart devices do that I started conversations with colleagues at GW, which morphed into the five-year collaborative project that I'm going to be touching on today. And I should name my colleagues-- that is Joel Kuipers and Alex Dent, as well as a host of research assistants at GW, as well as interns to the National Museum.

[00:04:41.49] So I'm going to be talking about that, as well as this research project-- is leading into what we hope will be an exhibit opening in 2021 with the same name-- "Unseen Connections-- a Natural History of the Cell Phone." So as with any exhibit, my talk is going to look-- as with the exhibit, rather-- my talk is going to look at the political economy and ecologies that inform the devices that I'm assuming all of you have owned multiple copies of throughout your life and maybe even are looking at now.

[00:05:14.97] But I'm going to focus-- I'm going to give you a broad outline of some key aspects of what we might think of as a natural history of cell phones. And we can talk about that further in the Q&A. But I'm going to give you an introduction to the project, and then look at third-party repair technicians and the ethnography we've done.

[00:05:33.09] And my talk really derives from these collaborations, some of which is in a new book that's going to be coming out, hopefully later this month. And I really want to acknowledge my collaborators. So any mistakes are my own, but the work is collaborative in essence.

[00:05:48.54] So the question tonight that frames my talk is, what do we touch when we hold our cell phones? What are the unseen connections that we have to the world through our devices? So at first glance, the answer is-- and I don't know who this is-- is a technological device that allows us to call people, to text, to take moving and still images, to purchase things-- now with our face, if you have the new iPhone-- order cars through other apps, find our way around-- that's how I got here.

[00:06:23.35] And in short, it's really a device that encapsulates a range of devices-- your clock, your alarm clock, all hosts of things-- that usually were dispersed over a wider array. So these communicative devices are one of constant innovation, either through industry or through the apps that you download onto the device. So they're technological devices at one level.

[00:06:48.14] But they're also manufactured devices. And that consists of an array of elements. And I should have started by saying a caveat. One of the joys and pleasures of being an anthropologist is we get to dabble in a lot of things. And this is my excuse to learn a lot about geology. I am not a geologist, so if there are any geologists in the room, I look forward to your questions.

[00:07:11.00] So why focus on the manufactured device? So it's a commodity, first and foremost, that consists of things, such as an aluminum plastic body. And I've listed a bunch of different elements that you find in your device-- aluminum, silicate glass, indium tin oxide, rare earths that make up the screen, lithium battery, sensors, microchips that use copper, tantalum, nickel, et cetera.

[00:07:39.56] So for example, the just to delve into this a little bit, your touchscreen, for example, is covered with a grid. If you've got the iPhone, it's got a Gorilla Glass, but on the-- covering that glass is a matrix of indium tin oxide, which basically allows your finger to touch that device and it to respond. So it kind of activates electricity.

[00:08:09.06] So I raise this because minerals in these devices are actually very, very important. And they, of course-- every object has these array of minerals or some array of minerals, but there's something particular about this device, I would like to argue, which I'll get into.

[00:08:23.76] Another object that's in it that you may deal with and hopefully not lose is your SIM card. SIM cards are these electronic chips that are made from silicon, which is found prevalent around the world. It's second only to oxygen, in terms of minerals or elements. And manufacturers will use-- add phosphorus. They plate gold and other minerals. And it's housed in plastic shell.

[00:08:49.86] This is what is your tracking device on your cell phone. And again, I mention this because, around 2008, when there was this shift to the smartphones, there's an interesting-- if you Google salvage or gold in cell phones, you'll find a lot of YouTube videos where people will talk to you about the gold that are in phones. So every technological shift we see in these devices raises the specter of how to recover some of the elements in this.

[00:09:20.31] Well, why does this matter? Well, it matters because, when you hold your cell phone-- smart or not-- you're actually holding a distillation of a global labor process whose supply chains-- and this is an impressionistic map where some minerals and elements are in the world. The supply chain stretches through a series of manufacturers, some of whom you've heard, some of whom you haven't heard of, that connect us to the women and the men who work to extract these minerals-- also to manufacture them in factories in a lot of different places-- that then come into the device that's in your pocket, hopefully, now.

[00:09:56.19] And this stuff, in terms of these minerals, have been the focus of lots of different anthropological research. So one of the interesting parts of this project is-- I have not done a lot of research on these different mineral extraction zones, but there's a lot of good anthropology that has. So while it varies, actually, how many elements are in your cell phone-- it varies on the model-- there can be upwards of 40 to 70 different elements in your cell phone. And we've got more down here, listing in terms of their element and then the ore mineral.

[00:10:32.06] So let's just take one for an example. You may have heard of coltan. Has anyone heard of coltan? Tantalum is the-- OK, so one of people. So tantalum is relatively new in terms of manufacturing, but other minerals, such as gold, silver, copper, iron, bauxite-- which is aluminum-- or is turned until aluminum-- or aluminum is extracted-- tin, have these long-term histories.

[00:10:58.56] Tantalum, of course, is famous because of a lot of deposits found in the eastern Congo-- Democratic Republic of Congo-- and linked to various wars. So I mentioned this because the minerals, of course, in your devices-- in our devices that we consume-- have these deep and complicated histories connected to them.

[00:11:21.87] But then, of course, look at something like tin in the islands-- an island Bangka chain-- a Bangka island off of Sumatra-- this is a place where tin has actually been extracted for over 100 years. So one of the interesting things about the global supply chain that goes into our cell phones is actually that it has these relatively short depths, and then long ones. In fact, there was just the other day a research article that's come out about Japan, saying that an island chain off Japan, they found this huge deposit of rare earths, which is interesting moving forward with manufacturing.

[00:12:02.67] So part of the goal in thinking about the minerals and the unseen connections is to think about the ecological impacts of our devices and, really, the people-- the hands-- that make the devices we use. And this, of course, is a tried-and-true method of anthropology, stretching back, but I think one that needs to be revisited, in some ways, and is particularly fruitful with cell phones.

[00:12:30.17] So the story of the cell phone, I will argue-- and this is what motivates this exhibit idea and motivates the research-- is really, I would argue, the story of us-- humans in the 21st century. It's a story of humanity's changing relationship to the environment and our interconnection as a global community. It's a story that is of the Anthropocene. And I think it's one that anthropologists actually need to engage in.

[00:12:57.68] Now, it can be argued that, while this is true of many commodities that we have-- so think of your computer, think of your car, think of your house, think of your clones. All of the things that we consume, unless you live on a farm somewhere and are making things yourself, come from somewhere else.

[00:13:17.34] And I don't deny that, but I would like to argue or posit tonight that the cell phone, in some ways, actually-- there's something there which is really interesting. And I think it has to do with not only the kind of global reach of the minerals the supply chains that feed into it, but also because it's an intensely intimate device. All of you probably have a cell phone in your pocket. We carry it on our person. I know, if you're like me, I can leave the house and forget my wallet. But if I forget my cell phone, I'll go back, because I got to connect with my wife, because we have small kids.

[00:13:53.12] And so there's something about the cell phone that's particularly important. And I would argue that it's this intimacy, the way in which it collapses this range of tasks and capacities into this one device that we then carry on our person, that we use for a lot of things-- buying, et cetera, taking photos.

[00:14:13.34] So why is it, then, so intensely personal? Why is this something that, as an anthropologist, I should be interested in? Why, as a lay public, should you be interested? This is a consumer and user [? for ?] these devices. Well, partly, this is because of this extraordinary history of the cell phone.

[00:14:30.59] Just at the top here, these are different names in various languages of cell phones. So the cell phone is 44 years old. I actually-- there was a joke made about Bell. And I don't think I have any relation to Alexander Graham Bell. But one relationship I do have to the cell phone is that the cell phone and I are basically the same age, 44 years old.

[00:14:54.44] And the reason I mention that is because I'd like to argue-- and if you know of another device which beats the cell phone, please tell me. I'd like to argue that the cell phone is one of the fastest spreading technologies in human history. In 44 years, the cell phone has gone from being an elite item-- who remembers the Motorola DynaTAC? Does anyone? OK. This was the first cell phone that Marty Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, used in 1973 to make a phone call.

[00:15:25.17] Now, the DynaTAC didn't go into commercial sale until 1984, so maybe we could shrink that. Maybe it's not 44 years old. But in any event, this cell phone went from being a kind of elite item of high prestige-- I think the first one sold for something like $4,000, and it weighed 2.5 pounds-- to one that's owned by nearly 90% of the world's population. Either 90% of the world's population actually has a cell phone or they have access to one.

[00:15:57.03] And so, by current estimates, there are about 7 billion in circulation. So it's a device that really has percolated the globe, which is fascinating. And so, partially, it's that meteoric rise of the device that interests me. And then, when you add the fact that the smartphone really came online around 2007, the last 11 years is quite remarkable.

[00:16:22.76] So according to Pew, if we just turn from the globe to look at the US, the vast majority of Americans-- 95%-- now own a cell phone of some kind. And that share of Americans now-- that own smartphones is up to actually 77%. When they started the study in 2011, it was 35%.

[00:16:43.78] So again, it's something that's ubiquitous. It's in a lot of communities. It is the computer. There is no computer at home, but there is the smartphone. So it's something that has really come to dominate us in many ways.

[00:16:57.84] But of course, our cell phones are not-- they're not just a device in and of themselves. They're part of a wider infrastructure, which you will see in this. I had a hard time choosing my favorite slide for this. But this is a cell phone relay repeater tower that-- unfortunately, you can't see it that well-- but is designed to look like a pine tree. If you go out to the southwest, you'll see them looking like cacti and everywhere.

[00:17:25.09] So there's this spread of infrastructure, in terms of cell phone towers, server farms that we don't see, as well as anxiety about these things. What are the waves doing to us that they relay the signal? And then, of course, there's the impact of the electricity and what that is doing, and the water that the server farms need. And we could talk about that.

[00:17:48.67] So again, why does this matter? So not only does the cell phone draw on resources in new ways, and thus create new labor regimes, I would argue, as well as sustain older ones, but it's also a process that forces an examination of our relationships to technology.

[00:18:07.53] And I'm showing you a slide here from where I've done long-term work in Papua New Guinea. This is in Port Moresby, the capital. And this came particularly close to home when I was there in 2010, where I watched the explosion of cell phones and a lot of anxieties among my interlocutors in the communities I worked, too, about what cell phones were doing. So I saw the same things that were happening here happening there. And this got me to think about it, and this what is technology doing to us? What are we doing to technology? Et cetera.

[00:18:44.79] This slide is for the anthropologists in the room. This is Frank Hamilton Cushing and an unidentified anthropologist at the Smithsonian doing a demonstration of fire-making with an Eskimo strap. Interests in technology and the relationship between technology and society is not a new concern for anthropologists. And I wanted to just note this, particularly being here at Harvard, which was the rival of the Smithsonian back in the day. And a lot of the rivalry was about the relationship of technology, how societies change, diffusionism, et cetera.

[00:19:22.02] But it was something an enduring concern for anthropologists. Now, at that time, in the 19th century, it was largely about so-called primitive technology of the global south or indigenous populations. But I would argue what's happened and what's continued is this interest of, what does technology do? And a slight unease that we have-- I know I have-- about what this device-- our devices-- how they're shaping us.

[00:19:48.67] And as an anthropologist, I'm committed to understand that difference and the tensions there. And despite the fact you'll read in a lot of literature people arguing about how cellular technology, the internet, is flattening things through globalization-- and I would argue, actually, it's allowing new-- well, both older cultural forms to continue, but also allowing for new forms and new innovations. So I wanted to throw you-- show you, rather-- three examples of that.

[00:20:22.68] So one, on the far right, is from my fieldwork and a bilum, which is a string bag made of yarn, that I collected in 2011, now at the National Museum of Natural History and will hopefully go on the exhibit. And it says, I love my Digicel. Digicel is a telecom company that-- very popular in the Caribbean and now in Papua New Guinea.

[00:20:44.34] And so here, we have an example of actually a brand identity being incorporated into a local object that is of national-- it's an emblem of national pride. So interesting things about changing identities there. We're also looking at, in the National Museum of African Art, a Nokia cell phone coffin-- a so-called fantasy coffin from Ghana. These, you normally see them in cars and planes, but this was a coffin-- never used-- which alludes to the fantasies and desirabilities that a cell phone projects, which is interesting.

[00:21:21.87] And then, finally, here is a beaded cell phone case made by Buffy Shanta, Sr. who's a Mescalero Apache, which is in the National Museum of the American Indian. So there's this effervescence of stuff to either bedazzle cell phones-- and if I had more time, I could show you stuff from Japan, et cetera-- that point to the interesting areas in which the cell phone is giving rise to and reinforcing cultural identities.

[00:21:52.98] But then, also, we're living in a moment, I think, globally, where we're still working out the norms of what these devices-- both how to use these devices and what it means to be attached to them. And so I'm showing you two images here. This is from the GW Campus. So it says, "Look up. Watch where you are walking." And this, of course, is for students and people like myself, who are glued to our device and walking, so we don't walk into the street. And this is a precautionary measure.

[00:22:24.33] This one is from Japanese metro. And it says in English, "Please set your mobile phone to silent mode and refrain from making calls." So right now, because these devices are relatively new-- and here, I'm talking specifically about the smartphone-- we're still, as a society-- particularly in North America-- working out, what does it mean to actually have this thing? Do I use it at the dinner table? Is it rude to text and talk to someone at a meeting? Et cetera. And we all have our own opinions about that.

[00:22:56.23] And what's interesting about studying it now as an anthropologist is, as what happens with any technology, our understanding of that and use of it will become slowly habituated, such that it'll be unconscious. But right now, people are always talking about-- almost every day, there's something in the news about cell phones doing this, doing that.

[00:23:17.76] So in the literature, if I can make broad distinctions, we see two narratives-- if I can generalize. On the one hand, we have a dystopic narrative that particularly the youth today-- millennials-- are disconnected. And here, I'm thinking of works such as "Alone in a Crowd" by Sherry Turkle at MIT. There are almost daily articles talking about how youth and just society in general is less empathetic, more distracted. As a recent headline in the New York Times commented-- it declared, quote, "Smartphone addiction kills manners and moods." End quote.

[00:23:55.35] So just out of curiosity, how many of you feel that you're addicted to your device? Oh. How many of you know people who are addicted to their devices? Yeah, a lot more hands go up. And the fact that we even use the term addiction is interesting. So on the one hand, if we have this dystopic narrative-- and you could look at this image. These are youth at the National Museum of the American Indian watching a fantastic band called Tribe Called Red, and they're all filming it.

[00:24:27.01] So one way of reading this image is they're not actually watching. They're streaming it. They're doing-- snapping it, et cetera. And they're disconnected. The flip side is that-- I'm getting a weird-- is that you-- is that, actually, the other narrative is one of utopic promise of technology, so that these devices are actually saving us, that they're leveling the digital divide, that they're helping communities and nations leapfrog technology.

[00:25:00.62] So if you've heard about mobile money in Africa, providing communities, countries, a continent with infrastructure-- our ability to jump over infrastructure issues that they face, sparking revolutions, such as in the Arab Spring, and increasing our connectivity. So another way of looking at this is that, OK, they might not be talking to their friends, but they're allowing people who aren't at the concert to see it and engaging it in new ways.

[00:25:27.79] So there are these two poles. And we can get into where I fall later. But I think I should note here that, of course, these narratives are not new. Ever since people have been writing, there have been qualms and anxieties, as well as hopes placed on technological innovations and [? just ?] [? news. ?] So I'm thinking of, for example, Plato, very famously in the Phaedrus-- in the dialogue with Socrates-- talks about how writing is going to destroy memory and how it's the end of society.

[00:26:04.05] So one of the things I think that, as an anthropologist, I'm interested in-- there's a lot of good historians working on this-- is how this technology is-- what is it actually doing? And thinking through that. So here's a picture of my two sons being absorbed in the cell phone that they're holding.

[00:26:22.79] And so I would argue that anthropologists are actually particularly well-suited to study this, because we're actually really invested in understanding not only what people are saying about technology, but more importantly, what they're actually doing-- and so observing and doing participant observation. And this is where anthropology, on the one hand, can tease out media ideologies-- so what people say and their views about-- looking at this image, for example, if I am a bad parent, because I'm letting them use this device-- as well as another thing, which is the media ecology. So how does this connect to the-- let's say-- a newspaper or a book, et cetera.

[00:27:04.56] So it was really with this interest in mind that I started this project with Joel Kuipers originally, and then with Alex Dent. And we started basically studying cell phone use in Washington, DC, focusing on GW students, and then the Latino population. And it was really by accident that we stumbled upon third-party repair technicians.

[00:27:26.73] And I'm going to turn to that now. I will say that-- and I'm happy to answer questions-- we are currently in the third year of a three-year-- and we've asked for a fourth year-- four-year NSF-funded project to look at teenagers and cell phone-- and families. So that partly informs my work. But for this, I want to focus on the repair technicians, particularly because repair technicians, as I'll argue, allow us to look back at these supply chains and to think more critically, I would argue, about these technologies, and whether we understand them or not, and what they may or may not be doing.

[00:28:02.30] And this is when my computer is not working. This is technological breakdown, one of the things I'm interested in is in breakdown. Oh, there we go. Oh, jumping quick. So before I get into the repair technicians and the ethnography of that, I want to set the stage, which is to say that one of the things that-- and you all know this-- with cell phones is that there's a high built-in disposability, you might say, of the cell phone, and a high turnover. It is estimated that there are 130 million cell phones retired annually in the US, and it's actually probably higher.

[00:28:43.99] And so really, on average, Americans are replacing their phones every 2.6 years. So you have this device that I mentioned earlier. Intensive amount of resources and minerals put into one device, and then is getting recycled, with-- I'm not going to be talking about it now, but we can talk about it in terms of the Q&A-- with mixed results, in terms of extracting all of that minerals back out of that device.

[00:29:10.59] And so that is interesting. So built into the business model of cell phones is getting you a new one. So where do repair technicians come in there? So I would argue that repair, though a fundamental aspect of being human-- so we repair things all the time, whether-- I just tried to repair the fact that I had a blip in my presentation there, in terms of talking-- a linguistic repair. But we also repair social relations. We repair our devices.

[00:29:44.25] So repair is a central feature of what it means to be human, at one level. Interestingly, I would argue, an anthropology repair, in a few occasions, it hasn't rised up to the focus of ethnographic examination, which is interesting. And there exemplars of where it has, such as Julian Orr's study of Xerox repair technicians. But by and large, anthropologists are very interested in making things, maybe even iconoclasm, but not so much repair.

[00:30:16.90] Now, that said, the work that has focused on repair has teased out the fact that, actually, in looking at repair, we can actually understand people-- how they actually understand the objects and what it is to actually use it. So it was with this in mind that we started a year-long study looking at repair technicians to try to figure out, OK, if we have these devices that are essentially black-boxed-- i.e., it doesn't come with an instruction manual how to open it, the way electronics used to in the '80s. How do third-party repair techs actually reverse-engineer your device? And so we started looking at that.

[00:30:55.12] And again, this is slow. Here we go. So one of the things we found-- and we ended up working with two main repair shops in Washington, DC. And we ended up working with technicians carrying ethnography, which involved sitting, and watching them, and talking to them. Customers, interestingly, were not as interested in talking to us, because they were anxious about their cell phones.

[00:31:19.86] And this is one comment, which I think gets at why the cell phone is so important. A woman said to us, "I couldn't function. I didn't know what to do. I felt like something was missing inside of me." I don't know how many of you have broken your cell phone and felt similarly. Anyone? Anyone? I know I have.

[00:31:37.47] And so what we started doing was to do ethnography to figure out how these technicians-- the expertise, the ways in which they understood how to do this. And what we found was we ended up working with two, which I'll get into. But during the study, there were three new editions of iPhones released and numerous Android-based phones. In fact, Android seemed to come out every month-- a new one.

[00:32:02.67] And what we ended up watching was how the technicians, one, got access to figure out how to reverse-engineer it, and how they worked around and tacitly came to know how to repair this. So they used a variety of tools. This gives you a sense of things. And I'll get into-- this was and wasn't available to public customers watching. So people used jeweler's loupes. They used their fingernails. They use hammers very carefully.

[00:32:33.06] And repair, as you can see, is a very intimate act. Has anyone ever tried to open their cell phone? It's a pain. It's a real pain. And we can get into why that is. And so we were fascinated with talking to them-- the way in which information about how these repair circulated within the repair shops.

[00:32:54.99] And so here, I wanted to go briefly into these two repair shops. So this was one of them, by the name of-- we've given pseudonyms to the stores. And so this was owned by one individual who was originally from Ethiopia, came to DC about 15 years ago, opened Celltech first, which was in a former garage, and then opened a much fancier KoolFix on Yew Street in Washington, DC.

[00:33:24.94] And here, this is a little map. I apologize if you can't read it very well. But the main thing is that both of these repair shops have an ethos of openness. So customers will come in, sit on the stool, and watch the tech repair their cell phone right there. So one of the things that-- I'll call him Anthony-- that the owner of these stores said, if I can't do it in front of you, why would you come to me? I need to show you my expertise.

[00:33:58.27] So he was very proud of the Virtuoso repairs and did it in front of you. This is a set of images documenting the repair in one of the locations of an iPhone 4. And what comes out? Well, in KoolFix, even though it's open, it's very chaotic repair. So good luck if you try to follow the steps.

[00:34:20.54] There's almost a quick sleight of hand-- not intentional, but maybe perhaps-- where the cell phone is being repaired, but Hal here, he's multitasking, talking on the phone, talking to customers. And trying to get a sense of how they're doing it, really, really impossible. So good luck trying to follow it. So this tension between open repair and a kind of ethos of openness and performance., but at the same time, concealment in interesting ways.

[00:34:49.61] So if that's the case, then going to BrokenFixed, the pseudonym of the other, here, as Aaron, the owner of this-- is was franchise-- a national franchise. Aaron, who was the owner of this particular location, commented, we're almost like therapists for people with electronics. It's pretty-- like, people will tell us their stories and then stand there for, like, 45 minutes, just talking about how it broke, how they're so sad, how they're so upset. And then we help them fix it, and they leave feeling better.

[00:35:23.44] So you go into this store, and it's like a lot of the-- if you go to a dealership for your car, you go to the counter, you hand over your device-- rather reluctantly, if you're like me-- and people go back, and they repair it inside. Now, so the key difference here, of course, is the repair shop is closed, if you will, to the public. And when we asked them about that, they said that they devised this partition because they dealt with too many anxious customers who got very upset watching their cell phone being opened and what data might be lost. And I can relate to that.

[00:36:01.21] But whereas if it's closed to the public, here, the technicians actually work very well to each other. So one of the features of the previous one was it was clear that there was a hierarchy of repair technicians and a hierarchy of expertise. Here, in this corporatized environment, the technicians shared their knowledge about everything. And so there were videos that they would share.

[00:36:27.95] And so here's the steps of a repair, using a heat gun to take over the shattered glass. One of the things we were doing was studying all the gestures that went in-- so the implicit, tacit knowledge. And here she is checking to make sure that it's not too hot, because you don't want to burn the LCD display underneath. Cleaning off the glass-- and what was interesting in BrokenFixed was this notion of actually repairing it, such that, actually, your device was better off than when you started.

[00:36:58.73] And there was obviously tensions. If you've been following the rights to repair, there's a tension ongoing with telecommunications and electronic manufacturers, who want you to come to them to repair, with these third-party repair techs. So one of the things that all repair technicians that we worked on-- if a phone was in warranty, they would say, look, if I repair this for you, then your warranty is going to be voided.

[00:37:24.52] But they were very proud of the fact that they could repair it. They said, and even Apple and other companies would not know that it had been repaired. So lots of efforts to, if you will-- so if the other one showed off the labor and showed you what was inside the device, here, there was a real effort to actually conceal all of it, so give you back a shiny new phone, which is interesting. So again, store structure-- open. And then knowledge-- closed in KoolFix, a kind of tension among the repair technicians. And then the reverse for BrokenFixed, which is interesting.

[00:38:02.11] So what I'd like to argue in this global economy of cell phones-- and obviously, what's going on in North America is very, very different from what's going on in the global south. So if you've traveled, repair shops for cell phones are everywhere. There's a kind of bricoleur approach, where people are constantly taking things apart.

[00:38:21.81] In North America, given copyright and the corporatization of these devices that we have, I would argue that third-party repair is both intimate and a transgressive act in an economy that depends on marketing manufactured things and positioning them as finished, closed, and disposable. What's wonderful about repair and the promise of repair is by actually doing repair, we can actually come to know our devices. I would argue that we could come to know what's in the devices and hopefully come to know the people who make our devices.

[00:38:56.46] And why does that matter? Well, to end, I want to return to Sydney Mintz, who, in his Sweetness and Power, said, "In understanding the relationship between the commodity and the person, we unearth anew the history of ourselves." What I'd argue, and I hopefully demonstrated tonight, that in looking at cell phones within this multifaceted way, we begin to understand not only us as individuals, what technology is doing, but also global ecology and what is happening on the planet today. Thank you very much.

[00:39:26.25] [APPLAUSE]