AirPods and the earth: Digital technologies,planned obsolescence and the Capitalocene

Apple's AirPods exemplify cutting-edge twenty-first century technology; AirPods are wireless, networked, sensor-filled, digital consumer devices that have helped forge a multibillion-dollar market for true wireless hearable devices. AirPods have reinforced Apple's market valuation and reputation as an innovative corporation that does not just dominate existing microelectronics market sectors but creates new ones. However, when we consider the political ecology of AirPods a rather different story emerges, they are complex and costly material artefacts that are designed to function for a brief period before becoming toxic trash. This temporal imbalance is illustrative of contemporary digital capitalism. Digital technologies are advertised as devices that will fulfil our desires, improve productivity and make us happy, however, the material impacts of this consumption inflict significant harms upon human and nonhuman ecologies.

These impacts are not equally distributed. Child labour, water shortages faced by indigenous communities as a result of corporate mining activities, communities being poisoned by electronic waste, and many of the worst impacts of longer-term issues surrounding climate change are not typically experienced by those who can afford luxury commodities such as AirPods. This discrepancy between wealthy consumers and corporations on the one hand, and those who suffer the consequences of unsustainable levels of socially unjust consumption on the other, epitomises the critique of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a descriptor which problematically indicates that an undifferentiated species is to blame for ecological crises. Consequently, the ‘Capitalocene’ has been suggested as an alternative term that foregrounds the role of capitalism, and all its attending inequalities and contradictions, in contemporary ecological crises (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016; Moore, 2015).

Building upon existing eco-materialist studies of digital technology (e.g. Caraway, 2018; Cubitt, 2015; Gabrys, 2011; Kinsley, 2014; Maxwell and Miller, 2012; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2019; Parikka, 2012; Parks and Starosielski, 2015), this article argue that AirPods exemplify the Capitalocene; they embody a form of novel and luxurious consumption whose benefits are predominantly enjoyed by wealthy global elites, yet which cause significant harms to less privileged human and nonhuman communities. This dynamic is not inevitable, but for systemic change to enact social and environmental justice, it is pivotal that the popular, advertising-fuelled rhetoric that casts digital technologies as magical, dematerialised commodities, which enable infinite economic growth on a finite planet because of this supposed dematerialisation is challenged and replaced with analyses of the material social and ecological impacts of technology. As a new class of device – true wireless hearables – AirPods require additional material extraction, purification, energy (including fossil fuel) use, and labour while generating additional electronic waste. The article contributes to the emerging transdisciplinary literature that questions whether the ongoing expansion of digital technologies is compatible with environmental justice (Foth et al., 2020, Taffel, 2021), arguing that the growth-based imperative for a steady stream of new types of digital device is incompatible with reducing greenhouse gas emissions and material footprint to sustainable levels, especially when considering that current overconsumption is only enjoyed by a fraction of the human population. Furthermore, AirPods require additional consumption in the near future due to planned obsolescence (Guiltinan, 2009; Hertz and Parikka, 2012) and irreparability being features of their current design. This design strategy is fundamentally at odds with pending legislation surrounding ‘right to repair’ which is being introduced in the EU as part of the Circular Economy Action Plan (European Commission, 2020), with similar legislation, the ‘Fair Repair Act’ proposed at a Federal level in the US (Kan, 2021); having the right to repair a device that cannot be repaired is a contradiction in terms. I propose that legislation designed to enact long-term visions for sustainability should include measures designed to end planned obsolescence and the production of irreparable microelectronics.

A further contribution of the article surrounds multiple temporalities, digital devices such as AirPods and ecological crises. Digital technologies have predominantly been theorised within a framework of temporal acceleration (Crary, 2013; Kitchin and Fraser, 2020; Stiegler, 2017). Notable exceptions to digital accelerationism emphasise forms of slowness – from lunchtime yoga classes to urban sleep pods – that enable embodied humans to adapt to digital speeds, (Sharma, 2014), and articulate ways that digital technologies alter temporal ontologies, employing the statistical study of human behaviour through big data and machine learning algorithms that ‘capture the future through the past and impose it on the present’ (Hui, 2021, see also Amoore, 2020; Andrejevic, 2020). However, these accounts largely neglect the ecological and geological temporalities associated with producing digital technologies and infrastructures. There exists a massive temporal imbalance between the millennia it took for the materials employed in AirPods to form, the decades or centuries they will adversely affect communities and environments and the eighteen to thirty-six months for which they are functional digital devices. This disparity between the speeds of digital capitalism and the adaptive capacities of Earth's ecological systems is at the heart of the metabolic rift (Foster et al., 2011) which produces contemporary ecological crises. Homologous to the role of single-use plastic bags and the global plastics crisis, resolving specific issues surrounding AirPods and planned obsolescence is relatively trivial in comparison to addressing the systemic and infrastructural issues surrounding digital technology, exploitation and inequality within an extractivist planetary assemblage predicated upon infinite, ever-accelerating economic growth on a finite planet.

Methodologically the article combines media geology (Parikka, 2015), with political ecology (Hornborg, 2015; Robbins, 2011). Media geology focuses on the materiality of media through a temporal framework that is attentive to multiple temporalities, ranging from the geological durations over which the materials used within digital technologies were formed, to the microtemporal durations at which contemporary computation function. Conversely, political ecology examines how unequal relations of power and economic exchange shape ecological crises, productively complementing the temporal focus of media geology. These approaches share a focus on flows of matter and energy, and a concern with how power permeates these dynamics. However, where these two approaches are not always in agreement surrounds the agency of nonhumans. Media geology's theoretical lens is indebted to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) geophilosophy and specifically seeks to ground nonhuman agency within the ecological politics of mining and energy systems, whereas political ecology has recently seen significant debate surrounding whether nonhuman agency productively augments ecological politics (White et al., 2017) or fetishises an illusionary autonomy of artefacts that actively inhibits ecological action (Foster, 2016; Hornborg, 2016). Noting that critics of nonhuman agency largely foreground Bruno Latour's (2004) politically conservative actor-network theory rather than Guattari’s (2008) radical ecology, my position here aligns with recent work in political ecology that emphasises the political diversity of nonhuman critique (Büscher, 2021). This is not to suggest that no differences exist between the agential capacities of humans, animals, and machines (especially decision-making digital machines), but that grasping how differentiated agencies coalesce within assemblages and contribute to systems and asymmetries of power is an important precursor to taking effective ecological action.

In terms of concrete methods, the paper combines follow the thing analysis (Cook, 2004; Marcus, 1998: 91–92) with political economic analysis of AirPods sales and revenue data and discourse analysis of Apple's video advertising for AirPods. Follow the thing analysis maps the circulation of matter associated with AirPods through different spatiotemporal contexts based on data drawn from corporate environmental reports, economic data, consumer-focussed repair teardowns and mining industry data. This is complemented by economic data surrounding the commercial success of these devices and their role in popularising a new class of digital device, true wireless hearables. These materialist methods are supplemented by analysing the discourse of individual freedom that is central to Apple's marketing of these devices, and contrasting the rhetoric of wirelessness, airiness and freedom with the material consequences of AirPods.

I next turn to a synopsis of the debates surrounding the Anthropocene/Capitalocene; to discuss AirPods as an artifact that exemplifies the Capitalocene this recapitulation is required to contextualise this claim. Following this, the article addresses the specific case of AirPods, first highlighting how Apple has successfully forged a new market sector for these devices, thereby expanding the scope of digital consumption, before articulating the social and ecological justice issues that are present in the production of these devices, the infrastructures required for them to function and delineating the model of planned obsolescence and irreparability that are features of AirPods’ design.

Humans, capitalism and ecological crises

The sum of human-induced changes to the planet have led geologists and earth system scientists to argue that the Earth has shifted into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000; Steffen et al., 2007, 2015; Zalasiewicz et al., 2017). These changes include climate change, loss of biodiversity, alterations to the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, ocean acidification, land-system change and so on. These crises do not indicate a shift from a homeostatic ‘balance of nature’ to sudden change, but involve an acceleration of the rate of ecological change which now exceeds the adaptive capacity of many species and ecosystems. This unprecedented geological context is evidenced by numerous quantifiable indicators, including the abrupt presence of radioactive nucleotides resulting from the use of nuclear weapons and the introduction of technofossils; materials produced by human intervention that were previously not present on Earth (Zalasiewicz et al., 2014). Technofossils include petrochemical-derived synthetic polymers, elemental aluminium and purified neodymium and silicon, all of which are used in AirPods. ¹

The nomenclature of the Anthropocene has, however, received substantial criticism for homogenising the ecological and geological impacts of humans. The term Anthropocene combines the suffix – cene, which refers to an epoch located within the Cenozoic era, with the prefix Anthropos, meaning man or human. Literally defined it designates the human epoch, strongly resonating with the rhetoric of the human species having a planetary impact which rivals, surpasses, or even overwhelms ‘the great forces of nature’ (Steffen et al., 2007). The point of contention is not the scale of disruption and degradation to ecological systems, but the Anthropocene's emphasis on the activities of a single, undifferentiated species. Far from being equally responsible for contemporary ecological crises, differing groups of humans have enormously unequal environmental impacts which often correlate with economic privilege. For example, with regards to climate change it is estimated that the richest one percent of humans (approximately 63 million people with a per capita income of over US$109,000 per annum) account for fifteen percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, over double that produced by the poorest fifty percent (approximately 3.1 billion people with a per capita income of less than US$6000 per annum) (Oxfam, 2020). Far from being an issue that is homogenously produced by the species, climate change is predominantly an issue that results from the activities of a relatively small subset of economically privileged humans acting within the context of a capitalist socio-economic system.

In response to criticism from humanities and social science scholars problematising the species-level approach of the Anthropocene, its proponents in the natural sciences now typically acknowledge that that a ‘profound scale of global inequality’ (Steffen et al., 2015: 91) meaningfully contributes to the development of these crises. However, inequality is described as a distortion of the distribution of the socio-economic benefits of the Great Acceleration (Steffen et al., 2015: 91), rather than a central feature of the capitalist mode of production. As Malm and Hornborg (2014: 64) contend, ‘The affluence of high-tech modernity cannot possibly be universalised – become an asset of the species – because it is predicated on a global division of labour that is geared precisely to abysmal price and wage differences between populations.’ The deeply inequitable distribution of benefits and harms associated with the proliferation of digital technologies such as AirPods is not an unfortunate and temporary arrangement, it is integral to contemporary and historical modes of capitalism.

Political ecologists have conceptually outlined (Bedford et al., 2020; Hornborg and Martinez-Alier, 2016) and empirically demonstrated (Dorninger et al., 2021; Jorgenson and Clark, 2014) the process of ecologically unequal exchange, whereby high-income nations’ economies rely upon resource-intensive technologies and infrastructures which require vast annual transfers of biophysical resources from low-income countries. This asymmetry functions alongside high-income countries deriving far higher monetary exchange values when exporting both embodied materials and labour. Consequently, ‘On aggregate, ecologically unequal exchange allows high-income countries to simultaneously appropriate resources and to generate a monetary surplus through international trade’ (Dorninger et al., 2021). Further, ecologically unequal exchange sees environmental and social harms resulting from extraction and waste accumulate among low-income nations, it is a theory of ecological injustice as well as exchange (Givens et al., 2019). As we shall see, digital technologies such as AirPods exemplify these asymmetries.

As a result of the vastly differential contributions to ecological crises, the ‘Capitalocene’ has been suggested as an alternative term that does not aberrantly imply that indigenous peoples, subsistence farmers, environmental activists and fossil fuel executives are equally culpable for ecological crises (Malm, 2015; Moore, 2016). Instead of blaming humanity, as though ecological crises are an inherent characteristic of the species, the Capitalocene contends that the socio-economic system of capitalism, with its systemic requirements for ever increasing forms of accumulation accompanied by perpetual economic growth (Harvey, 2005; Hickel and Kallis, 2019) on a materially finite planet is predominantly to blame for contemporary ecological crises. Accounts of the Capitalocene typically employ a longer temporal framing than that of the Anthropocene, whose onset is typically framed within the post-World War II Great Acceleration (McNeill and Engelke, 2014; Steffen et al., 2015). The broader temporal framings assist in revealing how accounts of individual genius and invention that surround Western technological innovations from the steam engine and industrial revolution onwards, were in fact dependent upon planetary networks of colonial dispossession, slavery and military conquest (Hornborg, 2015; Patel and Moore, 2017). Indeed, the misidentification of digital systems with individual, predominantly white, predominantly male entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs/Apple or Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook demonstrates the contemporary continuation of this ideologically laden individualistic fetishism. Accounts of the Capitalocene demonstrate that capitalism has never just been a socio-economic system but is better grasped as a world-ecology that has generated social wealth through the exploitation and cheapening of nature and labour (Moore, 2015).

The Capitalocene has been criticised for propagating a global metanarrative around capitalism which becomes disempowering and effectively incontestable (Latour et al., 2018), and for failing to account for how the ecological boundaries associated with the Anthropocene ‘are independent of capitalism or socialism’ (Chakrabarty, 2009). This latter critique forcefully highlights that the ecologically calamitous productivism associated with the Soviet Union during the twentieth century was far from sustainable; replacing capitalism does not necessarily imply resolving ecological crises. Nonetheless, in moving beyond the homogenisation of ecological crises as a species-level event or the technocratic portrayal of socio-ecological inequities as a distortion of development and instead identifying a mode of production whose requirement for continuous economic growth is fundamentally incompatible with the finitude of terrestrial resources and ecological boundaries, the Capitalocene remains a more productive label than the Anthropocene.

Making a market for true wireless hearables

AirPods are a range of luxury headphones that connect to iOS devices via the Bluetooth wireless technology standard. While listening to digital audio is a primary use of AirPods, they additionally feature built-in microphones, allowing users to communicate with Siri – Apple's digital assistant – and to answer phone calls. AirPods contain accelerometers and optical sensors to detect in ear placement and finger taps, allowing users to pause audio by double tapping the device and automatically pausing music when AirPods are removed from the user's ears. AirPods were originally released in 2016, with second-generation and Pro versions released in 2019 and a third-generation version released in 2021. The introductory price for AirPods was US$159 or US$199 with an included wireless charging case. The Pro version, which additionally features active noise cancellation and IPX4 water resistance cost US$249.

Over 60 million sets of AirPods were sold in 2019 and this was forecast to increase to over 80 million in 2020 (Savov and Kim, 2020). Currently, Apple is the major player in the true wireless headphones market, with AirPods responsible for over 40% of unit sales and 60% of revenue (Lee, 2020). These figures indicate that AirPods sales were over US$8 billion in 2019 and will top US$10 billion in 2020 (Reisinger, 2019). The gross profit on each pair of AirPods sold is between US$90–100, suggesting that in 2019 Apple accrued over US$5 billion in profits from AirPods sales (Reisinger, 2019). Although these sums are dwarfed by Apple's overall 2019 sales of US$260 billion and gross profits of US$98 billion (Apple Inc., 2020), they represent a rapidly growing new revenue stream for the company. Indeed, it is important to note that Apple's market capitalisation of US$2.5 trillion (Nasdaq, 2021) is partly premised upon the corporation's ability to produce novel digital devices that attract widespread consumer demand.

While Apple originally rose to prominence producing hardware and software for desktop and then laptop personal computers, its meteoric rise to become the world's most valuable corporation by market capitalisation is premised upon the success of numerous i-devices, beginning with the iPod portable MP3 player that was released in 2001. This gathered pace with the release of the iPhone in 2007, which has subsequently been Apple's bestselling and most profitable device as well as forming the heart of the assemblage of hardware and software that is commonly described as the ‘iOS ecosystem’ (Kapoor and Agarwal, 2017; Qiu et al., 2017). ² Subsequent Apple devices: the iPad, which was released in 2010; the Apple Watch, which was released in 2015; and AirPods; are premium-priced consumer microelectronics devices that have significantly expanded markets for tablets, wearable computers and hearables, with Apple's product becoming the bestselling device in each category. In 2015, prior to the introduction of AirPods, wireless earbud sales were less than one million units per year (Hunn, 2016), indicating that in the five years following their introduction, the market for wireless earbuds has grown over 160-fold.

Thus far this is a familiar story outlining how Apple characterise Silicon Valley-styled disruptive innovation (Vinsel and Russell, 2020). Apple does not merely dominate existing markets, but actively produces new ones through the design, marketing and affordances of desirable digital devices. Although touchscreen smartphones, tablet computers, wearable devices and wireless headphones were all initially introduced by Apple's competitors, Apple have been responsible for the popularisation of these devices. This can be partially attributed to well-funded and stylish marketing campaigns, but also involves the aesthetic design and functional affordances of the devices themselves, which typically interact with other devices within the walled garden of the iOS assemblage relatively seamlessly. From a purely economic standpoint, it would be difficult to argue that AirPods are anything but the latest in a long line of Apple's successes.

Airpods or EarthPods?

Whereas most analyses of AirPods consider what they offer end users in terms of functionality, affordances, aesthetics and cultural capital alongside the profitability and enhanced stock market valuation they bring to Apple (Davidson, 2017; Hunn, 2016), adopting the theoretical lens of media geology shifts the focus away from end users and corporate profits, instead looking to situate those actors within a broader material assemblage encompassing spatio-temporal scales that are far removed from those of digital capitalism. Media geology reconnects digital technology to the deep time of the earth, prompting an examination of the material composition of AirPods. Furthermore, it asks us to consider where these materials were procured from, the labour conditions at those sites and how a range of human and nonhuman power relations inform the material dimensions of media technologies. As media theorist Jussi Parikka (2015: 20) elaborates, a geological approach to media is designed to ‘find concepts that help the nonhuman elements contributing to capitalism to become more visible, grasped, and understood-as part of surplus creation as well as the related practices of exploitation. This historical mapping of the environmental is also a mapping of the historical features of capitalism as a social and technological planetary arrangement.’ Media geology, then, is not just about mapping how materials are moulded into media technologies, it focuses on how the processes that produce media technologies sustain particular sociotechnical systems of power. Media geology does not advocate for an apolitical scientism, instead it outlines how forms of technological production are never neutral, they produce particular social, cultural, economic and environmental relations that benefit some agents while harming others.

Like most contemporary microelectronics devices, AirPods are materially complex artefacts. As with other digital devices, the material footprint of the device enormously outweighs the product. For example, a 120-gram mobile phone typically requires over 70 kilograms of raw materials (Calatayud and Mohkam, 2018). AirPods are composed of numerous materials located in disparate places and which are extracted from the planet in dramatically differing ways. In briefly outlining some of these materials and a handful of the significant harms associated with their procurement and production here, I cannot do justice to the complexity of these processes or the damage they do to specific communities and ecosystems, as this would require far more space and detail than is available. Entire phases of production, such as the manufacturing processes undertaken in China and Vietnam which has been termed iSlavery (Qiu, 2017) are entirely absent from this partial and selective account. Flagging several specific issues surrounding digital extractivism does, however, begin to indicate the scale of unseen and often unacknowledged harms involved in producing AirPods, while also demonstrating how the current forms of high-speed digital computation require a global system of trade and extraction because of the geographical distribution of materials with specific affordances.

These materials include highly purified silicon, ³ which is the principal material used for microchips such as the Apple W1 (original) or H1 (second generation and AirPods Pro) processor which controls the Bluetooth connection, connects to devices and delivers audio to the speakers, and the Bosch inertial measurement unit which contains a 16-bit accelerometer and ultra-low-power gyroscope that provides real-time motion data to enable spatial audio (Apple, 2020d). Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and silicone plastics are used for the external casing and tips (Apple, 2020c). The circuit boards are composed of thermoset plastic (LaDou, 2006), and the flexible circuitry is comprised of a polyimide film (Campbell, 2017). Tantalum is used in the capacitors that are found on the circuit boards (Padilla, 2017), while Gold is used for the pins which connect the silicon chips to the circuit boards (iFixit, 2016). Tantalum and gold, alongside tin, which is employed in leadfree solder and tungsten are collectively referred to as 3TG and have been conflict minerals within the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that have played a significant role in financing warlords and militias within the ongoing civil conflict that has claimed thousands of lives since the end of the international stage of the Congo wars which directly and indirectly led to over five million deaths (Coghlan et al., 2007; Nest, 2011).

The AirPods’ battery, which I shall discuss in more depth later, is a lithium ion battery composed of lithium, nickel and cobalt. The majority of the world's lithium comes from the arid Atacama Desert in South America, where lithium is evaporated from brine salts. This water intensive process has led to significant disputes with local indigenous people, who suffer the depletion of already scarce water reserves and whose crops are contaminated by saline-rich runoff (Bhowmik, 2019; Cubitt, 2016). Approximately 60% of the world's cobalt is located in the southern Katanga province of the DRC (Sanderson, 2019), where artisanal cobalt mining employs children as young as four years old (Niarchos, 2021). It is estimated that approximately 40,000 children labour as artisanal cobalt miners (Walther, 2012), and that they earn as little as US$0.11 an hour for this work (Crawford, 2016).

Headphones fundamentally act as transducers, they convert electrical energy into mechanical wave energy, sound waves. ⁴ The components of the headphones that perform this transduction are known as ‘drivers’. Most headphones incorporate moving-coil drivers, which contain a diaphragm, a voice coil, and permanent magnets. High purified, electrolytic copper is used for the voice coil, and the magnets are an alloy of neodymium, iron and boron that are referred to as neodymium magnets. Neodymium magnets are the most powerful type of permanent magnet (Van Gosen et al., 2017: 3), consequently they are frequently employed when reducing size and weight is a key design parameter, such as within AirPods, which weigh a meagre five grams per earbud.

Neodymium is one of the lanthanides or rare-earth elements (REE), a collection of materials which despite their name are not particularly scarce, but which typically occur in very low concentrations and are entangled with one another and radioactive materials such as thorium and uranium. Consequently, the extraction and purification of REE is a complex process which produces vast amounts of toxic waste; ‘9600 to 12,000 cubic metres (340,000 to 420,000 cubic feet) of waste gas – containing dust concentrate, hydrofluoric acid, sulfur dioxide, and sulfuric acid – are released with every ton of rare metals that are mined. Approximately 75 cubic metres (2600 cubic feet) of acidic wastewater, plus about a ton of radioactive waste residue are also produced’ (NASA, 2012). The largest REE processing facility at Bayan Obo in China has an unlined tailings pond that holds an estimated 180 million tonnes of waste. The nearby city of Baotau is frequently referred to as a ‘cancer village’, (Klinger, 2017: 122) due to the significantly elevated rates of cancer-related deaths that result from human proximity to REE refinement. Additionally, chronic arsenic poisoning and skeletal fluorosis are rife within human communities located close to Bayan Obo as a result of REE mining and processing. These debilitating conditions are not rare, 40% of the inhabitants of the Hetao Plain suffer from arsenical dermatosis (Mao et al., 2010).

The materials required to produce AirPods inflict significant harm upon humans and environments in numerous locations across the planet. They are not global in the sense of being uniform, but unequally distributed. These harms are typically inflicted upon ‘invisible bodies’ (Taffel, 2016) located outside of the economically privileged urban centres of global capitalism in places such as Bayan Obo, the Atacama desert and DRC. ⁵ Considering the dependence of digital microelectronics on these highly purified earthy substances it seems counterintuitive that airiness is such a frequently invoked metaphor surrounding digital technology, and Apple products in particular. From describing planetary assemblages of data centres, transoceanic and terrestrial fibre-optic cables, wireless, wired and cellular networking equipment as ‘the cloud’, to the Macbook Air laptop, iPad Air tablet, AirPort wireless routers and the AirPlay/AirTunes protocol stack designed to enable wireless streaming between devices, the nomenclature associated with Apple gestures towards the sky rather than the ground.

Apple's advertisement from 2016 which accompanied the launch of AirPods begins by stating; ‘We believe in a wireless future’. Although over 99 percent of global Internet traffic travels through undersea and underground fibre-optic cables (Starosielski, 2015: 1), the fact that end-user devices typically connect to Wi-Fi, cellular and Bluetooth networks, alongside wired digital infrastructures being designed to retreat into the background (Leigh-Star, 1999; Weiser, 1991) and become functionally invisible promotes the belief in wirelessness as an irresistible force (Mackenzie, 2010). Later advertisements for AirPods, such as ‘Stroll’ (2017) and ‘Bounce’ (2019), depict figures wearing Airpods dancing through monochromatic urban landscapes. Characters fly through the air, walk upside down, bounce off buildings and otherwise traverse urban space in a joyful and fantastical manner that visually represents the tagline that appears at the end of Stroll, ‘practically magic’. ⁶

While this phrase is intended to gesture towards the supposed freedom that wireless headphones afford consumers, it is eerily reminiscent of Karl Marx's description of ‘the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities’ (1967: 21). Airiness and magic are deployed as rhetorical tropes that obfuscate the geological and social dimensions of technology. Consumers are encouraged to ignore the material composition of these devices, the extractive processes that produce them and their exploitative and toxic effects upon workers, communities and ecosystems. Instead, the magic of wirelessness is invoked to promote what these commodities afford atomised individual consumers; this is a textbook case of commodity fetishism presenting artifacts as autonomous objects ‘disembedded from their social relations’ (Hornborg, 2016: 11).

Alongside the discourse of technology as magic, which Apple actively participate in through the advertisements produced for AirPods, we should acknowledge the longstanding Marxist critiques of advertising as magic (Jhally, 2000; Williams, 1980), which contends that the techno-scientific development of advertising during the 20th century supplanted the role of religion in inculcating populations with a system of beliefs and behaviours which economically benefit the ruling class through encouraging them to identify as consumers rather than as producers or workers. As Sut Jhally (2000) elaborates:

To the extent that a society wants to divert attention away from the political consequences of economic structures it encourages people to regard themselves as consumers of industrial products rather than as their producers. Democratic activity in this perspective is equated with the different options that the marketplace is able to offer. Consumption is democracy, in as much as people have “choices” about the product they can buy, but not the productive arrangements under which they live.

A ‘consumer democracy’ involves an individual's ability to participate being equivalent to their wealth, meaning that enormous numbers of humans – many of whom are amongst the worst affected by ecological crises – are effectively excluded from the demos. Within the contemporary conjuncture, this critique of the conflation of consumer choice with democracy requires a supplementary ecological dimension which emphasises that the choices of wealthy consumers are having a catastrophic effect on the environmental conditions that are a prerequisite for sociotechnical production.

Advertising is not just important in the context of AirPods because it obfuscates the materiality of these devices and normalises an ecologically calamitous form of consumption, it is also a key mechanism for instilling desire within affluent publics for AirPods and other new types of smart object. This point is illustrated by advertising studies which contend that advertisements are more likely to drive consumer behaviours in young markets (Chandy et al., 2001). Put simply, without knowledge that new types of device exist, few consumers would be motivated to purchase them. Consequently, both the discourse of technology as magic and the magic of advertising work to advance AirPods as denatured and dematerialised commodities whose materially calamitous production remains out of sight and out of mind for consumers.

The frenzied pace of consumption among the rich defines the current trajectory of the Capitalocene. Since 1990, 81 percent of per capita growth in material use results from increased consumption in high-income nations (Hickel, 2020: 110), and as we have seen, the global rich are largely responsible for climate change. Yet the global advertising industry will spend approximately US$749 billion in 2021 (Bruell, 2021) persuading consumers that additional consumption is desirable, necessary and normal. This imbalance between the speeds of the capitalist economy and earth's ecosystems is integral to the widening planetary metabolic rift responsible for the entangled ecological crises referred to as the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. Emphasising the contemporary politics of speed with reference to ecological crises partially parallels Rob Nixon’s (2011: 2) articulation of slow violence: ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.’ While a range of contemporary environmental harms are functionally invisible to humans, such as the disruption to human endocrine systems by plastics (Farrelly et al., 2021), or the harms neonicotiniods inflict on pollinators such as bees (Blacquière et al., 2012), this cannot readily be transposed to the social and environmental harms associated with the mining, processing, manufacturing and waste disposal associated with digital technologies such as AirPods. These processes are at least partially visibly and demonstrably harmful in ways that are straightforwardly representable through visual media, which categorically departs from Nixon's description of slow violence. While harms associated with AirPods reverberate across multiple temporalities, and certain harms are imperceptible to humans, the functional invisibility of the environmental harms of digital devices are not a consequence of innate representational challenges surrounding visibility, rather, it stems from the success of commodity fetishism and advertising in severing artefacts from the flows of energy, matter, labour and knowledge that produce and sustain them.

Ecology and AirPods

Whereas a media geological approach to AirPods foregrounds the multiple relations between digital devices and the earth, drawing upon political ecology focuses upon how systems of power structure the flows of matter and energy that coalesce to form AirPods (Devine, 2015, Robbins, 2011) both in terms of the life-cycle of the devices themselves, and the infrastructural contexts that enable them to function (Taffel, 2019). Ecology is the study of dynamic, relational complex systems across multiple spatio-temporal and organisational scales; unlike biology – the science of life – ecology explores flows of energy and matter across populations, communities and ecosystems (Begon et al., 2006). The emphasis on this being a political process foregrounds the ways that sociotechnical systems are never simply neutral. Approaching consumer devices as processes – as temporary assemblages that affect labour, climate, culture, ecosystems and power – presents a striking contrast and an important corrective to the dominant way of conceptualising them as objects, as discrete and decontextualised commodities.

An ecological approach to AirPods involves situating these devices within the vast planetary infrastructure upon which their functionality depends (Taffel, 2019). Streaming digital audio from Spotify through a set of AirPods requires an enormous array of technologies and humans whose existence enables these seemingly magical devices. The hardware includes the instruments and computers that produced the music, the data centres where digital audio is stored, the planetary network of undersea and terrestrial fibreoptic cables, the cable landing stations and internet exchange points through which digital data travels, the cellular towers and antennas, wireless routers and finally the smartphones which send the digital audio to the AirPods. Alongside this assemblage of hardware exists the various forms of software and standards that enable contemporary telecommunications including, digital audio workstations used to record, mix and master music; Spotify's platform which includes the user interface, music database and the recommendation algorithm that assists users in finding new music, file formats such as .WAV, .FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, networking protocols including the Internet protocol, transmission control protocol (TCP), Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), Spotify's proprietary Spotify synchronisation protocol, the 3/4/5G broadband cellular standards, various iterations of the Wi-Fi wireless network protocols that are based on the IEEE 802.11 standards, and the Bluetooth wireless technology standard.

Of course, none of this technology designs, produces, or maintains itself. A huge number of humans are involved in producing and maintaining this gargantuan, planetary sociotechnical assemblage, ranging from child labourers in DRC who earn a few cents an hour to extremely wealthy corporate executives at companies such as Apple and Spotify. The spatial scales, speed and complexity involved in contemporary digital assemblages almost defy human comprehension, precisely because the inhuman, planetary scale at which they operate is so significantly divorced from the embodied, place-based functioning of human beings. Equally though, the temporalities of digital assemblages leverage centuries of human knowledge production and culture in ways that are rarely acknowledged.

The names of our ancestors are all but forgotten … Dead labour congeals to form the technologies of production comprising factories and machines that Marx defined as fixed capital, as opposed to the liquidity of money and workers. The historical gift of previous generations whose expertise, knowledge, and creativity was taken from the commons lies embedded and embodied in today's machines. Anonymous and ignored, our ancestors inhabit our technologies. (Cubitt, 2016: 155)

While culturally dominant ways of understanding digital technologies involves the attribution of invention and innovation to the individual genius of technology corporation CEOs such as Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, Cubitt illustrates how the Marxist concept of dead labour re-historicises the social relationships that are necessary for production. While flows of matter and energy are necessary for technological production, the sum of centuries of human labour and knowledge are equally vital, but this reliance upon common knowledge is often obscured or erased by contemporary ideologies based upon individualism, innovation and intellectual property. While AirPods’ advertisements declare them to be practically magic, this magical thinking only exists by severing AirPods from a multiplicity of relations. One of the key interventions of political ecology is to foreground these spatial and temporal flows of matter, energy, labour and knowledge, while drawing attention to the exploitation and inequality that is effectively erased by a myopic focus upon devices and end users.

An additional line of critique which becomes prominent and visible because of political ecology's focus upon flows of matter and energy surrounds the additional volumes of material extraction, purification, energy use (including the combustion of fossil fuels), human labour and waste that are required to produce new types of device such as AirPods. While the economic growth associated with new types of device is typically celebrated as digital innovation, the ecological context in which this growth is embedded is one where dramatic reductions in fossil fuel use are urgently required if wealthy nations are to meet Paris agreement requirements to limit climate change to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and to attempt to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees C. Equally, the strong correlation between aggregate material use and economic growth (Pothen and Schymura, 2015) entails that future ecological sustainability requires an absolute decoupling from both material use and greenhouse gas emissions. Whereas relative decoupling denotes a weakening of the correlation between material use or environmental impact and economic growth, it still allows for a net increase in both material use and environmental impact which is incompatible with addressing global ecological crises. Furthermore, this absolute decoupling must occur on a permanent rather than temporary basis and on a global rather than local or national scale (Hickel and Kallis, 2019).

The global spatial scale is important here, as since the 1970s there has been a decoupling of material use in knowledge based economies, however, this apparent decoupling is ‘counterbalanced by the intensified resource intensity of several developing economies’ (Bithas and Kalimeris, 2018). AirPods provide a useful exemplar here, they are the products of globalised industries which involve the flow materials from extraction sites that are often located in the global South, such as Congolese cobalt and tantalum mines or Atacaman lithium, through Chinese and Vietnamese factories before predominantly being purchased and used by wealthy consumers in the global North. These movements of matter and their attendant energy requirements provides a useful supplementary dimension to the process of data colonialism elaborated by Couldry and Mejias (2019). While the value extracted from global data flows accumulate with a relatively small number of multibillion-dollar corporations predominantly based in the United States (and to a lesser extent China), the raw materials required for this new mode of extraction largely flow from the global South to the global North. These flows, which see biophysical resources and wealth accumulate with high income nations, while environmental and social harms from extraction and waste are largely borne by low-income nations exemplifies the process of ecologically unequal exchange.

Digital microelectronics provide an interesting case study for considering questions of decoupling. Continuing trends towards miniaturisation and significant energy-efficiency savings are frequently mistaken for an ecologically benevolent mode of dematerialisation (Franck, 1999). However, this apparent dematerialisation has rarely involved actual reductions in material throughput or greenhouse gas emissions that would be characteristic of absolute decoupling, instead a significant relative decoupling can be observed (Kostakis et al., 2016), whereby energy efficiency significantly increases, but overall energy usage still rises. For example, the iPhone 3G released in 2009 had a greenhouse gas footprint of 55 kg CO2e (Apple, 2009). Conversely, despite the efficiency savings gleaned in over a decade's worth of improvements to microprocessor fabrication, the various versions of the iPhone 12 have greenhouse gas footprints ranging between 70–110 kg CO2e (Apple, 2020a, 2020b). The relative decoupling associated with efficiency savings at the transistor level ultimately translate into a larger environmental impact. This exemplifies the rebound effect known as Jevons’ paradox, whereby a more efficient use of a resource leads to increased rather than diminished demand for that resource. As Foster et al. (2010: 10) demonstrate, far from being novel or historically anomalous, ‘the rule that efficiency increases energy and material use is integral to the “regime of capital” itself.’ Rather than providing a panacea for ecological crises, the relative decoupling associated with efficiency savings has played a key role in the capitalist development that causes them.

Unlike iPhones, however, AirPods are a new class of device. As we have seen, until 2015 the global market for wireless earbuds was minuscule. The proliferation of new classes of luxury devices such as AirPods are fundamentally antithetical to the absolute decoupling that is urgently required to prevent contemporary crises of overconsumption leading to ecological calamity. Rather than reducing material use and fossil fuel emissions these new types of devices produce additional impacts and harms. Furthermore, these harms are compounded by the incorporation of planned obsolescence and irreparability into AirPods design.

Obsolescence and AirPods

The term planned obsolescence was introduced by American real-estate broker Bernard London (1932), who in response to the widespread unemployment and economic recession associated with the Great Depression argued that artificially limiting the life span of products would spur economic growth, and that government should enact a legal framework for enforcing this limited duration that goods would remain functional. While London's plans for a legislative form of planned obsolescence were never realised, the practice of designing products to only function for a limited period, thereby requiring further consumption in the near future, is common within microelectronics and is widely criticised as a practice that is inimical to sustainability (Andrews, 2015; Foth et al., 2020; Hertz and Parikka, 2012).

AirPods, like many portable contemporary microelectronics devices, are powered by lithium ion batteries. These are described as rechargeable batteries because they depart from single-use primary cell batteries. They are not, however, endlessly rechargeable. The capacitance of the battery, its ability to store electrical charge, degrades over time with usage, with typical degradation being around 20% of the original capacitance after approximately 300–500 charge-discharge cycles (Buchmann, 2017). For microelectronics devices that are designed to be mobile and used on a daily basis, significant degradation often occurs between eighteen months and two years, and not long after this the battery is unlikely to hold enough charge to make it through a typical day. Little more than a decade ago, most consumer microelectronics featuring lithium ion batteries contained user replaceable batteries. This was typically a tool-free process that enabled batteries on mobile phones, laptops or other devices to easily be replaced, therefore extending the duration the device remains functional.

Apple have often led the way in designing devices whereby users are unable to easily access and replace batteries, and this is now commonplace in devices such as smartphones, laptops and tablets. This means that from the first day of use, the clock begins ticking on a lifespan that is designed to last a few years at most. This exemplifies planned obsolescence, whereby corporations design goods to fail after a relatively short period, necessitating the purchase of replacement devices in the near future. Apple's competitors have largely followed suit in terms of design, meaning that aside from niche ethical devices such as the Fairphone, in 2021 it is difficult to purchase a smartphone with a tool-free user replaceable battery. Furthermore, in 2020 Apple were fined €25 million for deliberately slowing down old iPhones without communicating their actions to consumers, many of whom would have then purchased new devices because of the hamstrung performance of their existing devices (BBC, 2020). This is a particularly egregious form of perceived obsolescence, whereby manufacturers attempt to convince consumers that their current devices are no longer functional, a tactic that is commonly achieved through marketing campaigns, hyperbolic high-profile product launches or via inhibiting the functionality of old devices.

AirPods are designed to be impossible to repair, refurbish or replace parts with limited durability such as the lithium ion batteries. The popular consumer repair site iFixit, which conducts ‘teardowns’ that involve disassembling microelectronics devices with step-by-step instructions for how to do so, informing consumers how to repair devices and rating their repairability has given every version of AirPods a repairability score of zero out of ten (iFixit, 2016, 2019a, 2019b, 2021). This does not indicate that AirPods are extremely difficult to repair, but that doing so is not possible; Accessing AirPods internal components requires the casing to be cut apart and effectively destroyed. This entails that the lifespan of AirPods is dictated by that of the lithium ion batteries, with some reports that after a mere eighteen months of usage these socially, environmentally and economically costly artefacts are effectively unusable, as the degraded battery lasts for less than an hour between charges (Dans, 2019, Dempsey, 2019; Haskins, 2019; Woolfe, 2019).

Headphones are, of course, not a new type of product. In the earliest days of audio transmission equipment, developing a headphone speaker was understood as technically more straightforward than a loudspeaker, so devices such as Clement Adler's ‘Theatrophone’ from 1881 used over-ear cups containing speakers which audience members placed to their ear (Brandenburg et al., 2016: 2). Over a century ago, sensitive headphones, such as those produced by Brandes, were commonly used within the radio industry (Traynor, 2017). Common to these relatively straightforward, wired designs was an understanding that headphones would last for many years or even decades. If a component malfunctioned or failed, the headphones could be disassembled and repaired. Comparisons to other wireless earbuds reveal AirPods irreparable design to be a choice rather than an inevitability associated with wirelessness. For example, Samsung's Galaxy Buds Live received a repairability score of 8/10 from iFixit and were praised for their modular construction, easily accessible and replaceable batteries and for a using clips rather than adhesives, which enables non-destructive opening procedures (iFixit, 2020). While the social and environmental justice issues surrounding procuring materials for production are still present, at least these devices are designed to be repairable and long lasting. Unlike other headphones, AirPods are a disposable commodity, designed to function for a brief period before the user is expected to upgrade them for another socially and environmentally damaging device. AirPods represent a luxurious yet toxic form of wasteful upgrade culture.

Contrasting the period in which AirPods function with the duration of the chemical, biological and ecological effects these devices have foregrounds the temporal disjuncture that exists between contemporary capitalism and the planet. This incongruity is at the heart of the entangled ecological crises that exist today. While AirPods are designed to function for just eighteen to thirty-six months, the materials that were required to produce them are the results of geological processes that required hundreds of thousands or millions of years. For example, the acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, silicone, polycarbonate and polyimide plastics that are used for the casing, tips, circuit boards and flexible circuits are synthetic polymers derived from petroleum oil. Petroleum oil is a fossil fuel whose source material is ancient organic material such as plants, plankton and algae that were submerged in water and could not decompose aerobically. Over time, the process of diagenesis saw this organic material become kerogen, which typically forms at depths between ten and a thousand metres. As sediments continue to accumulate, further burying the kerogen inside the Earth's crust it slowly became transformed into petroleum oil by geothermal heat from within the planet over durations ranging from thousands to millions of years (Schobert, 2013: 104–110).

A further temporal discrepancy is evidenced when we turn our attention towards what happens to AirPods after their batteries fail. The various plastics used in AirPods are not biodegradable, they do not organically decompose and they are not reintegrated into ecosystems. Instead, they fragment into increasingly small pieces, eventually becoming micro and nano plastics (Thompson et al., 2004). The proliferation of anthropogenically produced plastics, their accumulation and the harms they cause to biological and ecological systems is well documented and has become a significant public concern (Gabrys et al., 2013; Jambeck et al., 2015; Rochman, 2015; Thompson et al., 2009). Plastics were an invention of the twentieth century, with mass production originating around 1950. As plastics take hundreds or thousands of years to degrade, ‘all of the conventional plastic that has ever been introduced into the environment still remains to date unmineralised either as whole items or as fragments’ (Barnes et al., 2009). Certain materials needed for AirPods required millions of years to form and they will linger in the environment for centuries or millennia.

Equally, AirPods contribute to issues surrounding electronic waste. This involves the accumulation of toxic materials that have been found to detrimentally affect the health of workers involved in artisanal recycling alongside the ecosystems and communities present in these areas. Detectible harms include elevated levels of lead in children's blood (Guo et al., 2014), decreased lung function (Zeng et al., 2017), DNA damage (Liu et al., 2009), elevated levels of endocrine disrupting chemicals such as bisphenol a (Zhang et al., 2020), and the production of persistent organic pollutants such as dioxins and furans (Basel Action Network, 2002). It should be noted that the global production of electronic waste is far from equal, with some countries in the global South producing under half a kilogram of electronic waste per capita, whereas others in the global North produce over 40 times as much e-waste per person (Forti et al., 2020).

Conclusion

AirPods have been criticised as irreparable devices that exemplify planned obsolescence on numerous popular repair and journalistic websites. In 2019 Vice magazine published an article discussing the environmental and labour impacts of AirPods entitled ‘AirPods are a tragedy’ (Haskins, 2019) which led to significant discussion. Within this media dialogue, OneZero, a tech blog received a response from Apple, who argued that criticisms aimed at AirPods were not unique to Apple's product and that this focus should instead be directed towards larger microelectronics devices that compose a greater proportion of the mass of e-waste generated. Apple's position here contains more than a grain of truth but requires some consideration.

Of the 53.6 million metric tons of e-waste produced in 2019 (Forti et al., 2020), AirPods, which weigh just 5 grams per earbud, comprise a minuscule quantity. Even when considering that the overwhelming majority of waste associated with the material footprint of consumer microelectronics is generated producing devices, not their disposal (Lepawsky, 2018), AirPods are not a significant fraction of the overall mass of e-waste. As we have seen, thinking ecologically about consumer microelectronics devices requires situating them within the vast planetary infrastructures that are required for them to function as intended, and within these planetary sociotechnical assemblages AirPods are a tiny and materially insignificant element of digital technoculture.

The reasons for foregrounding AirPods within discourses of digital technology, environmental sustainability and labour rights are both symbolic and material. As we have seen, AirPods are largely responsible for the popularity of the true wireless hearables market and so drive a new mode of consumption which entails additional production, additional consumption and an additional waste stream. Producing novel types of popular digital device is a key component of Apple's market valuation, but this practice necessitates supplementary forms of consumption that are incompatible with a reduction in carbon emissions and material usage. Furthermore, AirPods are prominent symbols of digital technology as conspicuous consumerism and social capital; these are devices that are extremely unlikely to be available to those who suffer the social and environmental costs of extraction, electronic waste and climate change. AirPods exemplify the logics of planned obsolescence and irreparability – it is possible to make wireless earbuds with removable lithium ion batteries, other manufacturers such as Samsung have already done so – despite Apple being a corporation who frequently proclaim commitment to environmental sustainability (Vonk, 2018). Were sustainability really a significant concern for Apple then the four versions of AirPods that are available by 2022 would never have made it to market.

Nevertheless, AirPods are not solely or uniquely responsible for the labour and environmental impacts of digital technologies. They do, however, aptly symbolise the chasm that exists between rhetorics of corporate social and environmental responsibility and a reality where they exemplify the toxic throwaway culture of digital capitalism. While large-scale infrastructural and regulatory change is undoubtedly necessary to address the broader problematics associated with digital technology, extractive industries, energy and material use, and electronic waste, AirPods are in certain ways akin to single use plastic bags and incandescent light bulbs in representing a toxic and totally unnecessary form of consumption that poisons people and the planet.

The wave of legislation banning plastic bags (Farrelly et al., 2021, Macintosh et al., 2020) and the European Union's RoHS directive which banned the use of toxic materials including lead, mercury, hexavalent chromium and certain plasticisers from microelectronics devices (Selin and VanDeveer, 2006) demonstrate the potential for policy makers to effect changes that significantly improves outcomes for environments and workers through prohibiting the production and sale of items that unnecessarily contribute towards socio-ecological harms and crises. The successes of these legislative interventions predominantly derive from intervening in the design and production of objects, rather than seeking to alter end-of-life waste management practices which has been the focus of legislation such as the Basel Convention and EU Waste Electrical and Electronics directive, neither of which have been as effective as hoped (Davis et al., 2019; Khetriwal et al., 2011; Taffel, 2019). Pending legislation surrounding repair, such as the European Union's Circular Economy Action Plan (European Commission, 2020) could be useful vehicles for altering the practice of producing irreparable digital devices such as AirPods, insofar as establishing a ‘right to repair’ presupposes that devices are repairable. While the existing literature on repair foregrounds ways that proprietary systems of closure inhibit and limit repair work (Houston and Jackson, 2016), AirPods demonstrate an extreme example whereby design makes repair an impossibility. Legislation focussed on design and production potentially becomes a tool for unmaking material entanglements that promote socio-ecological harm (Büscher, 2021) and which enables democratic oversight of production, rather than abdicating such responsibility in favour of the aberrant logic of self-regulating markets and consumer choice.

Unlike plastic bags and incandescent light bulbs though, AirPods are specifically designed for wealthy consumers. They illustrate the material culture of the Capitalocene, one where obscene levels of consumption associated with a relatively small proportion of humans and obscene levels of profit associated with a small number of corporations are constricting the possibilities for a pleasurable life for humans and nonhumans both today and for future generations. Similar to plastic bags, AirPods are a visible yet relatively easy to resolve part of a far greater and more complex issue. Indeed, focusing purely on AirPods may result in a myopic form of ethical consumerism which relieves the consciences of wealthy liberal consumers but leaves the far more materially impactful issues associated with the planetary scale of contemporary advertising-fuelled, computational capitalism intact. While AirPods are easily replaced with more sustainable alternatives, they comprise a tiny percentage of the overall social and ecological harms associated with digital technologies. The problem, then, is not simply AirPods, but the exploitative, growth-based socio-economic system that produces and promotes them.

Highlights

AirPods exemplify the Capitalocene, where the actions of a privileged minority are primarily to blame for multiple ecological crises

The ongoing expansion and growth of digital technologies has significant social and environmental harms that are rarely acknowledged.

Right to repair legislation should address irreparable devices and planned obsolescence

Commodity fetishism and advertising obscure the harms associated with AirPods