Earlier this year, journalist George Monbiot wrote about the next mobile phone he was going to buy. It was a difficult decision:

If you are too well connected, you stop thinking. The clamour, the immediacy, the tendency to absorb other people’s thoughts, interrupt the deep abstraction required to find your own way. This is one of the reasons why I have not yet bought a smartphone. But the technology is becoming ever harder to resist. Perhaps this year I will have to succumb. So I have asked a simple question: can I buy an ethical smartphone? … I haven’t yet made a decision. There are all the other issues to investigate, including the remarkably short life of these phones … Perhaps I will wait until FairPhone manufactures a handset. Or perhaps I won’t bother. I might resign myself to less immediacy, less accessibility and a little more space in which to think. George Monbiot 2013 [link]

This is the ad for the Fairphone he was talking about. It’s just been posted online. Please press play.

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We love this project. It starts with the argument that we start with. But they’re not exposing exploitation (see here). They’re not making a banned smartphone game that shows how it’s made (see here). They’re not spoofing the existence of a conflict free phone (see here).

Like these other examples, however, they are putting pressure on manufacturers. By showing that conflict free phones can be made. By making and marketing one. That’s cool and affordable as other smartphones. €325. That you can buy and use (in Europe first). They need 5,000 orders. Here.

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