少不总是更好

微处理 (Microprocessing)

Loyal readers of Microprocessing may remember that, about a month ago, I bought an AlphaSmart Neo 2, a 2000s-era word processor with a small, six-line LCD screen. It does nothing but type. Though my experiment so far has been a successful one (the amount I am writing on this thing… folks, the difference is incredible), I feel a little bit guilty for relying on wasteful consumerism to help me get the job done.

微处理L的oyal读者也许还记得，大约一个月前， 我买了一个新AlphaSmart 2，2000年时代的文字处理器具有体积小，六线液晶屏。 它除了键入什么都不做。 尽管到目前为止我的实验是一个成功的实验(我为此事写的数量……伙计们，两者之间的差异令人难以置信)，但我依靠依靠浪费的消费主义来帮助我完成工作而感到内。

Before I bought the Neo 2 I already had two devices — a laptop and a smartphone — that could have not only assisted me in writing a book, but also done the job of dozens of other gadgets they’ve replaced. I’ve been under the general impression that, all in all, fewer devices means a healthier environment. Several persuasive articles have made this very argument, including one in Wired that makes the case that this consolidation, known as “device convergence,” has helped “save the planet” through “dematerialization.” Six products in one means fewer products altogether, which means less consumerism, which means a lower demand for resources, less energy consumed, and a happier planet.

在我购买Neo 2之前 已经拥有两台设备(一台笔记本电脑和一部智能手机)，它们不仅可以帮助我写书，而且还可以完成其他数十种被替换的小工具的工作。 总的来说，我的印象是，更少的设备意味着更健康的环境。 几篇具有说服力的文章对此进行了论证，其中包括《 连线》中的一篇文章，证明这种整合(称为“设备融合”)通过“非物质化”帮助“拯救了地球”。 六种产品合在一起意味着更少的产品，这意味着更少的消费主义，这意味着对资源的需求减少，能源消耗的减少以及星球的快乐。

It’s a compelling and hopeful argument, and it made me feel worse about buying my AlphaSmart. It’s also probably not true. Despite the fact that one modern device can do the work of a dozen or more devices of yore, the iPhone is not saving the planet, according to numerous researchers I spoke to for this piece. It potentially could — and I’ll get to that in a moment — but right now, it doesn’t.

这是一个令人信服且充满希望的论点，这让我对购买AlphaSmart感到更糟。 这也可能不是真的。 据我与之交谈的众多研究人员称，尽管事实上一个现代设备可以完成十几台或更多台设备的工作，但iPhone并没有拯救地球。 它可能会(稍后我会讲到)，但现在还没有。

The diversity of products that have been shrunken into our smartphones or laptops is pretty astonishing. As historian Steve Cichon pointed out in a 2014 HuffPost piece, a 1991 RadioShack ad makes that consolidation incredibly clear. “There are 15 electronic gizmo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. Thirteen of the 15 you now always have in your pocket,” he writes. The ad depicts a “phone answerer” ($49.95), a VHS camcorder ($799), a deluxe portable CD player ($159.95), an AM/FM clock radio ($13.88), and a “microthin calculator” ($4.88), among other products.

压缩到我们的智能手机或笔记本电脑中的产品的多样性非常惊人。 正如历史学家史蒂夫·希雄(Steve Cichon)在2014年《 HuffPost》中指出的那样，1991年的RadioShack广告清楚地表明了这种整合。 “此页面上有15种电子gizmo类型的项目，将从America's Technology Store出售。 您现在口袋里的15个中有13个就在口袋里。”他写道。 广告中描绘了“电话应答器”(49.95美元)，VHS便携式摄像机(799美元)，豪华便携式CD播放器(159.95美元)，AM / FM时钟收音机(13.88美元)和“超薄计算器”(4.88美元)等。产品。

Photo: Steve Cichon/Buffalo Stories Archives

照片：史蒂夫·希雄/布法罗故事档案馆

All of these items have been made pretty much obsolete by smartphones, which can, in one form or another, perform all those formerly disparate tasks. One might assume that since we no longer need a separate calculator, camera, clock, and “phone answerer,” we’re now consuming less, and thus, the environment is better off. Not so. Or, not exactly, anyway.

所有这些物品都已被智能手机淘汰，这些智能手机可以一种形式或另一种形式执行所有以前分散的任务。 人们可能会认为，由于我们不再需要单独的计算器，照相机，时钟和“电话应答器”，因此我们现在消耗更少的东西，因此环境变得更好。 不是这样 或者，无论如何，也不完全是。

“There is no sign that we are using fewer resources because of the development of these new products [like smartphones]. Most production statistics show that increased amounts of resources are being extracted,” says Karen Hudson-Edwards, a professor in sustainable mining at the University of Exeter. “Predictions are that these increases will continue up to 2030 at least.”

“没有迹象表明，由于这些新产品(例如智能手机)的开发，我们正在使用更少的资源。 多数生产统计数据表明，正在开采的资源越来越多。”埃克塞特大学可持续采矿学教授Karen Hudson-Edwards说。 “预计这些增长至少将持续到2030年。”

Lotfi Belkhir, an associate professor of engineering practice at McMaster University in Ontario, says this is a topic that would benefit from a study directly comparing the life cycle impact of all these disparate devices to that of smartphones. (I’ve looked everywhere but was unable to find a study like this, which would be very complex and time-consuming, but not impossible.) Still, says Belkhir, “I don’t buy the idea that smartphone use has reduced the overall carbon footprint through consolidation.” The number of smartphone users is much larger than the usership of all those other products, he says — many people who may never have owned a digital camera or GPS likely own a smartphone. “So even in total number of devices alone, I think it’s safe to bet that the total number of smartphones alone today far exceeds the total number of those devices all combined.”

安大略省麦克马斯特大学工程实践副教授洛特菲·贝尔克希尔(Lotfi Belkhir)表示，通过直接将所有这些不同设备与智能手机的生命周期影响进行比较的研究，该主题将受益匪浅。 (我到处都看过，但找不到这样的研究，这将是非常复杂且耗时的，但并非不可能。)Belkhir说：“我仍然不认为使用智能手机会减少手机的使用量。通过整合实现整体碳足迹。” 他说，智能手机用户的数量远远超过所有其他产品的用户数量-许多可能从未拥有过数码相机或GPS的人可能会拥有智能手机。 “因此，即使仅设备总数，我也可以确信，今天仅智能手机的总数就远远超过了这些设备的总和。”

libi rose striegl, the manager of the Media Archeology Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder, agrees that the number of people who own smartphones now is greater than the number of people who owned all these other objects in the past. “While in the past there were a bunch of individual devices for individual tasks, there were also fewer people owning each type of device, and each type of device was often treated as more of a luxury good than a daily necessity, was more repairable, and lasted longer,” she says. “For example, 34% of households in the U.S. owned a home computer in 1997, versus 73% of U.S. adults owning a desktop or laptop in 2015.” That doesn’t even account for people who have multiple computers, like me — I have my Dell laptop, two godforsaken MacBooks, plus however many computers my husband owns (a lot).

科罗拉多大学博尔德分校媒体考古学实验室的负责人libi rose striegl同意，现在拥有智能手机的人数大于过去拥有所有其他这些物品的人数。 “过去，一堆单独的设备可以完成各项任务，但拥有每种类型的设备的人也更少了，而且每种类型的设备通常被视为比日常必需品更多的奢侈品，更易于维修，而且持续时间更长。”她说。 “例如，1997年，美国有34％的家庭拥有家用电脑，而2015年，有73％的美国成年人拥有台式机或笔记本电脑。” 甚至不算像我这样拥有多台计算机的人就算了-我有我的戴尔笔记本电脑，两台令人难以置信的MacBook，再加上我丈夫拥有的很多计算机(很多)。

“People are very hesitant to recycle [their devices]. And that’s one of the big problems, because a lot of these products have life left,” says Callie Babbitt, an associate professor of sustainability at Rochester Institute of Technology. “Even though I might have replaced a digital camera with a smartphone, there may still be people that want a digital camera. If I took my old camera immediately and put it into a recycling stream, it has a high chance that it might get reused. But if I let it sit in my attic for five years, nobody’s gonna want that old clunker.”

人们非常不愿意回收他们的设备。 那是个大问题，因为其中许多产品还没用。”罗切斯特理工学院可持续发展副教授Callie Babbitt说。 “即使我可能已经用智能手机代替了数码相机，但仍然会有人想要数码相机。 如果我立即拿起旧相机并将其放入回收流中，则很有可能会被重复使用。 但是，如果我让它在我的阁楼上坐了五年，没人会想要那个旧的旧车。”

Device hoarding is actually a big issue, and likely contributes to why convergence is having a limited positive impact on the environment. One U.K. survey from 2019 found that half of British families have at least one unused electronic device at home, while 45% had up to five of them; a 2014 study found similar numbers for Americans’ smartphones. Only 10% to 12% of American cellphones get recycled, while each day, 416,000 cellphones reach incinerators or landfills in the U.S. At the same time, most people replace their smartphone every 21 months. Since so many of us aren’t recycling or, even better, reselling our old device, we effectively treat a lot of perfectly good materials as disposable.

设备ho积实际上是一个大问题，并且可能导致为何融合对环境的积极影响有限。 英国于2019年进行的一项调查发现，一半的英国家庭在家中至少有一个未使用的电子设备，而45％的家庭最多拥有五个。 2014年的一项研究发现，美国人的智能手机数量也差不多。 美国只有10％到12％的手机得到回收 ，而每天有416,000部手机到达美国的焚化炉或垃圾掩埋场。与此同时，大多数人每21个月就要更换一次智能手机。 由于我们中的许多人没有回收利用，或者甚至更不用说转售我们的旧设备，因此，我们有效地将许多完美的材料视为一次性材料。

Meanwhile, the impact of our new devices is bad, and it’s getting worse. Belkhir, the McMaster University researcher, published a study in 2018 on the energy use of “ICT” (information and computer technologies) and found that the relative energy impact of these products has grown from 1% of the total global footprint of carbon emissions in 2007 to 3.5% by 2020, and by 2040, will reach 14%. Smartphones gobble up a majority of this energy consumption. His study found that, again, while product use certainly contributes to emissions — after all, the more we use our phones, the more energy they consume — most of its resource-guzzling stems from its creation. It’s a lot costlier to birth a smartphone than to use it later.

同时，我们的新设备的影响很差，而且越来越严重。 麦克马斯特大学研究员Belkhir在2018年发表了一项关于“ ICT”(信息和计算机技术)能源使用的研究，发现这些产品的相对能源影响已从全球碳排放总量的1％增长。 2007年将达到2020年的3.5％，到2040年将达到14％。 智能手机吞噬了大部分能源消耗。 他的研究再次发现，尽管产品的使用肯定会导致排放-毕竟，我们使用手机的次数越多，它们消耗的能源就越多-其大部分耗费资源的资源都来自其创作。 诞生智能手机要比以后使用要昂贵得多。

So, who’s to blame? You can certainly fault consumers for Earth-killing wanton materialism, but the party that bears the most responsibility is manufacturers, who are quite purposefully creating products that need to be replaced often and are difficult to fix. “Manufacturing electronic products has a huge environmental impact,” says Babbitt. “The chips that are using these products are very energy and water and resource intense. But if you use the product for long enough, you’re able to see those energy efficiency gains stack up, then it could potentially offset it.”

那么，谁该怪？ 您当然可以指责消费者，因为他们会杀死地球的肆意唯物主义，但是承担最大责任的一方是制造商，制造商故意制造需要经常更换且难以修复的产品 。 “制造电子产品会对环境产生巨大的影响，”巴比特说。 “使用这些产品的芯片耗能，耗水，耗资源。 但是，如果您使用该产品足够长的时间，您就能看到这些能效提升的叠加，那么它可能会抵消它。”

Between 85% and 95% of a phone’s total carbon emissions occur during its creation. If we could easily repair our phones and thus keep them for 10 years before replacing, the impact of those initial carbon emissions would begin to recede. But when we replace our phone with every other release, we’re doubling down on the most environmentally damaging part of the device’s life.

手机的碳排放总量中有85％至95％是在手机创建过程中产生的。 如果我们能够轻松维修手机并在更换前将其保存10年，那么这些初始碳排放的影响将开始减弱。 但是，当我们用其他所有版本替换手机时，我们会将设备寿命中对环境最有害的部分加倍。

This wasn’t always the case. When I was in high school, my mom gave me her old Pentax camera from the ’80s, and it still worked. I have a typewriter from the ’70s that, once a single sticky key is fixed, will run as well as ever.

并非总是如此。 当我上高中时，妈妈给了我80年代的旧Pentax相机，现在它仍然有效。 我有一台70年代的打字机，一旦固定了单个粘贴键，它就会像往常一样运行。

“We’ve documented over the years that consideration about the environment and human health often comes after the economic and consumer preferences in terms of providing functionality,” says Oladele Ogunseitan, a professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine, and co-chair of Apple’s Green Chemistry Advisory Board. A new smartphone might be marginally sharper and faster than the one I bought two years ago, but at what cost?

加州大学欧文分校公共卫生学教授Oladele Ogunseitan表示：“多年来，我们已经记录在案，在提供功能方面，通常是出于经济和消费者偏好，才是对环境和人类健康的考虑。”苹果绿色化学顾问委员会主席。 新的智能手机可能比我两年前购买的智能手机更锋利，更快，但价格是多少？

My AlphaSmart, meanwhile, is as good as it was in 2007, and in all likelihood will still be performing its simple task to the best of its ability 10 years from now, absent any unfortunate disasters or meltdowns. By then, my iPhone XR will be a distant memory, replaced by several newer, shinier, somewhat better models, each one leaving a trail of used-up resources in its wake.

同时，我的AlphaSmart与2007年一样出色，并且在没有任何不幸的灾难或崩溃的情况下，很可能在十年后仍将尽其最大的能力来执行其简单的任务。 到那时，我的iPhone XR将成为遥远的记忆，由数个更新，更亮，更好一些的型号代替，每个型号都留下一堆用尽的资源。

翻译自: https://onezero.medium.com/fewer-isnt-always-better-8756117829bd