Post 2: The Idea of Progress: Quality vs Quantity

Presentation of the Apple Watch in September 2014

The first document, is a video that present the brand new product of Apple, the Apple Watch. The video begins with a view from space of the earth lighting up while the view move back until we find out that it was a video playing on an Apple Watch. At the beginning, music tempo refinement is very low but it increases during the video and at the end, it is regular and joyful. The contours of the product are shown from all perspectives, and we can see that they are perfectly clean. During all the video there is an insistance on the purity and refinement of the product, for example the white background, the slowmotion, the close-up and the very powerful light. All those processes allow the viewer to watch the product closely and in details, to see that there is nothing unrelevant on it, the watch is just simple. The watch is shown like a perfection of technology and modernity. We have here a basic Apple ad with a simple product (a watch is not something very special) turn into a modern and design technological tool that we desperately want to have.

Lake of Baotou, Mongolia interior

Chart of Rare Earth world production in 2009

This image of a perfect company, white like snow, that Apple wants to give with those ads is compromising because, before to end up on our wrist, an Apple watch is made in china with several littles minerals called rare earth. The rare earth is very expensive to extract, requires great machines and to drill very deeply.  It's dangerous for the miners but also very dangerous for the environment that is completely devastated after the extraction. China is the first producer of rare earth with 97% of the world production, that's why the second document is taking place in the city of Baotou near Mongolia in North China. As we can see, the lake, like the landscape has been totally destroyed by the extraction of the minerals. The industry and the mines around are rejecting all there chemicals and toxic products necessary to extract the minerals in the lake. Before the discovery of rare earth in the region the lake was like any other lake, which means blue, but now is just a pond of chemicals products. On the pictures the tubes that rejects the chemicals worth all the speeches of the world. This is the ugly truth behind products like the Apple watch, that are made on those destroyed lands like Baotou.

But we can't only blame Apple, they just fulfill our needs, we need to blame us as well. We always complaining about how China destroys the earth and looking for richness while their nature is dying but that we don't understand is that we are the cause of all this. The chinese are the victims who are just responding to the constant and growing demand of the western economy. Chinese workers are the real victims of Europeans unlimited needs of technology.They are forced to work in mines where the mortality is very high and they are exposed to all sort of chemicals during the process. Apple and all the phones companies  are guilty of the destruction and the degradation of a large part of China, but we are also guilty of letting companies like Apple doing whatever they like in others countries while buying their new products like the Apple watch which is very nice, but honestly useless.