Fairphone is a company that builds smartphones using responsibly sourced material. Their smartphones are built to be durable, reparable, and less wasteful. The project began in 2010 as an awareness campaign about conflict minerals, and eventually became an independent company in 2013. The company desires to change the smartphone industry, and has won multiple awards for its sustainability, environmentalism, and entrepeneurship.
The Fairphone project is an example in the activism surrounding digital materialism. The project offers a way to study the Empire of digital culture through a decolonial lens that addresses the longer histories of oppression and exploitation (Wan, 2019).
For further reading
- Wan. 2019. Labour, mining, dispossession: on the performance of earth and the necropolitics of digital culture
- Navarro-Remesal and Zapata. 2018. Who Made Your Phone? Compassion and the Voice of the Oppressed in Phone Story and Burn the Boards