Cobalt Red
The revelatoryNew York TimesandPublishers Weeklybestseller, shortlisted for theFinancial TimesBest Business Book of the Year Award.An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo’s cobalt mining operation―and the moral implications that affect us all.Cobalt Redis the searing, first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt. To uncover the truth about brutal mining practices, Kara investigated militia-controlled mining areas, traced the supply chain of child-mined cobalt from toxic pit to consumer-facing tech giants, and gathered shocking testimonies of people who endure immense suffering and even die mining cobalt.Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
13mentions
9people
2023–2026years
54% recommend46% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara is a fascinating if horrifying long read which looks at the toll cobalt mining takes on the people and environment in DRC.
- Cobalt, however, which is used in common lithium battery chemistries, is mostly sourced from the DRC (Congo), much of it under terrible conditions: forced labour, child labour, and rampant environmental degradation. The book Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives [1] is a real eye-opener if you haven’t read it. Fascinating and deeply disturbing.
- It's slave labor (or close to slave labor) during production (Cobalt Red, Dying for an iPhone are some good overview books on the matter, though you can dive in further if you care), it's working against the "owner" of the device (who often doesn't actually have much in the way of access) during life, collecting behavioral surplus to sell to people who'd like to influence the owner (Zuboff's book on Surveillance Capitalism is a good read here, though the recent Means of Control book looking at the data flows from adtech into government is a useful one too), and it's burned in a third world country at end of life.
Maybe digital consumer tech was a bad idea. At least the way we've gone about it.
- Permutation City is so good! I haven't ran into it in the wild before but excited to check out his notes. It's a favorite and highly recommend.
I like Goodreads for tracking everything I read and collecting all my reviews, which are just unedited thoughts that I can return to later and very rarely helpful to others. It's also fun to see what friends are reading. Just yesterday I was able to pull up my last two years of books to quickly give a friend a few recommendations based on their interest.
I find listening to books far easier but they have to be non-fiction (or a reread of fiction) and not too complicated. Cobalt Red, Outlaw Oceans and There Are No Accidents were all great listens from this past year. But it's the only way I get through the 2hr minimum of exercise my dog needs a day.
- My guess is that it was a small, rather high efficiency little subcompact Toyota pickup, and that it was driven relatively few miles annually and kept in good running order.
Depending on the country and engine, there's also a possibility it was a waste vegetable oil burner (that was quite popular in certain circles, and I believe the old Toyota diesels were just fine with it).
Also, there's more than just carbon emissions to consider, and this is an odd, deliberate-seeming blindness of the "environmental movements" of the past decade or so - blowing up a mountain for the minerals is fine, as long as it's carbon neutral. If you'd like to "never want another mobile computing device again," I suggest the book Cobalt Red, on the lies and deceit active in the DRC related to cobalt mining out there (basically, the nutshell is that regardless of what anyone claims to have done to improve the conditions, they've "worked around the problem" locally in ways that are almost impossible to detect on the ground, and it's still a ton of hand-dug cobalt in horrid working conditions, with the short lifespans and horrible deaths to go along).
- No real surprise. A good number of people who have grown up with the promise of the tech are pretty well disgusted by what it's turned out to deliver, which is mostly "A handful of multibillionaires treating the rest of us as sets of eyeballs to be monetized at all possible costs."
I'm certainly there. I grew up with the promises of the internet, and I have to agree with Doctorow about "Enshitification." Most of the promised stuff has turned out to have some pretty nasty side effects and consequences. Turns out, humans don't scale to a global conversation very well, and especially not when your goal there turns into "ensuring they see as much of the platform as possible to view your ads."
That's before getting into the fact that we can't trust computers in the slightest, because they're too complex for even the people who make them to reason about, and our software is a hot mess - but, hey, we have tools to bring in all 2700 un-audited dependencies for the Electron app! Hey, where'd my crypto wallet contents go? Huh. Find someone who's done computer security for long, and they'll either be a weird off grid prepper or be planning for something of the sort, with nothing more complex than a microcontroller or two.
We've tried, for north of a decade, and with a solid couple years of effort, to build human interaction with various forms of consumer tech intermediating all the interactions, and it's been an unmitigated disaster in no shortage of ways (David Sax's book The Future is Analog is a good survey of the topic). I've been having good results lately returning to analog human interaction around a campfire on a regular basis.
That's before you get into the slave labor, near slave labor, and "I Can't Believe It's Not Slave Labor" that goes into pretty much all our modern devices - from the cobalt on up (Cobalt Red by Kara is a good read here, Dying for an iPhone is relevant, and there's no shortage of others). It's nasty, and behind every promise to do better seems to be some mechanism or another to further obfuscate the human labor going into the modern short lived electronics (because, of course, long lived devices are bad for profit).
So, yeah. Good for him. The tech thing has rotted. Let's try something different.
