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The second AI-generated tsunami is at the back end; a stream of used equipment. AI is driving faster server innovation, particularly in chip design, and the latest AI chips such as the Nvidia H100 have had so many billions advanced against their manufacture and are in such short supply that they are even being used as debt collateral and made available for rent.

While this refresh rate will be key to improving efficiency it will also – in tandem with the rise in capacity – increase the scale of e-waste. E-waste is one of the fastest-growing waste streams in the world. By 2030, annual e-waste production is on track to reach a staggering 75 million metric tons.

While green energy solutions often rely on new technology, MIT students who took the MIT-SHASS class STS.032 / Energy, Environment, and Society in fall 2020 discovered that even many promising innovations share a downside — electronics waste (e-waste).

“We’ve been using energy technologies that work well for our needs now, but we don’t think about what happens 30 years in the future,” says Jemma Schroder, a first-year student in the class who learned that waste from solar panels, for example, is on the rise. The International Renewable Energy Agency has projected that, given the current rate of accumulation, the world will have amassed 78 million metric tons of such waste by 2050.

Covas do Barroso, Portugal – Paulo Pires walked up the hill with his flock of sheep and dogs on a warm day in August, as a stream of water gushed down an ancient irrigation channel that has been maintained by local communities over many generations.

“There is a lot of wealth here,” said Pires, now resting in the shade of an oak tree by the flowing water.

It’s sunny times for solar power. In the U.S., home installations of solar panels have fully rebounded from the Covid slump, with analysts predicting more than 19 gigawatts of total capacity installed, compared to 13 gigawatts at the close of 2019. Over the next 10 years, that number may quadruple, according to industry research data. And that’s not even taking into consideration the further impact of possible new regulations and incentives launched by the green-friendly Biden administration.

Solar’s pandemic-proof performance is due in large part to the Solar Investment Tax Credit, which defrays 26% of solar-related expenses for all residential and commercial customers (just down from 30% during 2006–2019). After 2023, the tax credit will step down to a permanent 10% for commercial installers and will disappear entirely for home buyers. Therefore, sales of solar will probably burn even hotter in the coming months, as buyers race to cash in while they still can.

The use of renewable energies for decarbonization replicates the extractives model of fossil fuel production. Both practices destroy the environment, harms plants and animals, and displaces indigenous communities from their ancestral lands in the name of market and economic interests. As a result, climate change mitigation based on the transition to renewable energy has become complicit in condoning ecological degradation and perpetuating violent conflicts and unjust patterns of colonialism, racism, patriarchy, militarization, and structural violence (Sovacool, 2021).

Electric vehicles, which do not emit carbon dioxide, have been presented by European and American governments as an example of their commitment to environmental protection. However, these vehicles require large amounts of lithium for their batteries. As a result, mining companies and electric car manufacturers promote lithium extraction as environmentally benign and climate-friendly, and therefore a gift for the countries that extract it (MacMillen et al., 2021). However, lithium mining destroys the delicate balance in places where plants and animals survive under extreme conditions.

In 2020, Apple agreed to pay up to $500 million in a consumer-fraud lawsuit that alleged that it had issued a software update to intentionally slow down the batteries in older phones.1 In some cases, this caused the phones to completely shut down, which rendered them useless.2 The suit alleged that the slowdown was intended to frustrate consumers into discarding their existing phones and purchasing new phones.3

If the allegations in the suit were accurate, then Apple was engaged in a strategy of planned obsolescence.4 Planned obsolescence is a business strategy where a product is intentionally designed to have a limited lifespan and to become obsolete within a designated timeframe. 5 This strategy encourages (or in some cases, forces) consumers to replace their existing products with newer models, leading to repeat purchases and increased revenue for the manufacturer.6 In designing products to fail within a designated timeframe, manufacturers are engaged in the mass production of intentionally useless objects.

20 March 2024, Geneva / Bonn - The world’s generation of electronic waste is rising five times faster than documented e-waste recycling, the UN’s fourth Global E-waste Monitor (GEM) reveals today. The 62 million tonnes of e-waste generated in 2022 would fill 1.55 million 40-tonne trucks, roughly enough trucks to form a bumper-tobumper line encircling the equator, according to the report from ITU and UNITAR.

Meanwhile, less than one quarter (22.3%) of the year’s e-waste mass was documented as having been properly collected and recycled in 2022, leaving US $62 billion worth of recoverable natural resources unaccounted for and increasing pollution risks to communities worldwide. Worldwide, the annual generation of e-waste is rising by 2.6 million tonnes annually, on track to reach 82 million tonnes by 2030, a further 33% increase from the 2022 figure. E-waste, any discarded product with a plug or battery, is a health and environmental hazard, containing toxic additives or hazardous substances such as mercury, which can damage the human brain and coordination system.

The phone or computer you’re reading this on may not be long for this world. Maybe you’ll drop it in water, or your dog will make a chew toy of it, or it’ll reach obsolescence. If you can’t repair it and have to discard it, the device will become e-waste, joining an alarmingly large mountain of defunct TVs, refrigerators, washing machines, cameras, routers, electric toothbrushes, headphones. This is “electrical and electronic equipment,” aka EEE—anything with a plug or battery. It’s increasingly out of control.

As economies develop and the consumerist lifestyle spreads around the world, e-waste has turned into a full-blown environmental crisis. People living in high-income countries own, on average, 109 EEE devices per capita, while those in low-income nations have just four. A new UN report finds that in 2022, humanity churned out 137 billion pounds of e-waste—more than 17 pounds for every person on Earth—and recycled less than a quarter of it.

There are numerous factors that contribute to, and drive, extractivism, production, consumption and waste, including wider capitalist and regulatory incentives, or indeed regulatory capture and failure. Another significant aspect is product or planned obsolescence, which creates demand—by design—to produce new products and contributes to the extraction of new raw materials and a steady stream of waste (Satyro et al. 2018; Brisman and South 2014). There are four types of product obsolescence: technological or functional where a product becomes obsolete due to enhanced technology; style obsolescence where products are designed so the consumer purchases a more fashionable product; systemic obsolescence where a wider system is altered so it is difficult to use or maintain services for a product; and, product failure and breakdown (Guiltinan 2009; Rivera and Lallmahomed 2016). Forms of product failure or breakdown are an explicit design strategy to shorten the lifespan of a product so it becomes non-functional. As a result, consumers purchase new replacement products and thus contribute to extraction, production, consumption—all required to fuel the growth of the capitalist economy.

Planned obsolescence can also involve intentionally designing for limited repair opportunities so products must be replaced entirely rather than fixed (by the consumer, manufacturer or a third party). The first, and perhaps most (in)famous, case of planned obsolescence is the intentional design of a lightbulb so that the filament has a limited lifetime and eventually becomes useless requiring complete replacement of the globe, where there are longer-lasting alternatives (Guiltinan 2009; Rivera and Lallmahomed 2016). Intentionally shortening the lifespan of products by design or intellectual property stipulations, especially electronic and digital devices, has significant environmental impacts as more waste is created and needs to be disposed of. New products are produced and these require the extraction of materials from the earth and the sea.

Veblen's contention that the common stock of technical or pragmatic knowledge must be preserved, developed, and shared also remains particularly relevant to the current discourse on programmed obsolescence. Interestingly, Veblen does not favorably view the use and expansion of intellectual property. For him, the joint stock of knowledge cannot be reserved for private interests:

The state of the industrial art is a joint stock of knowledge derived from past experience, and is held and passed on as an indivisible possession of the community at large. It is the indispensable foundation of all productive industry, of course, but except for certain minute fragments covered by patent rights or trade secrets, this joint stock is no man's individual propery. 53

The stories of obsolescence, planned or programmed, are inhabited by beliefs and collective narratives about technology. The dominant theme running through the chapters is that technology and its owners confiscate control over the use of a product, expropriating or reducing the capacity of the user to exercise command over it. Obsolescence becomes the diabolus ex machina. Technological objects make it difficult, if not impossible, for users to understand and repair their goods. Manufacturers of these products are in a position to program the use, the performance and the obsolescence of the goods, a power that they can use to trigger further consumption. In Veblen's account of the emergence of the industrial civilization, technology changes the nature of socio-economic relationships between actors of the industry. Owners of the means of production become the de facto usufructuary and first beneficiary of the technical knowledge. The knowledge once held by the community of craftsmen is concealed in the machine made by engineers who are hired by investors. In Veblen's words, "[t]he possession of the material equipment, therefore, placed in the discretion of its owners the utilisation of such technological knowledge and skill as the members of the given crafts might possess. The usufruct of the handicraft community's technological proficiency in this way came to vest in the owners of the plant". 2 Innovation processes are thereby internalized and the automated functions of machines make the worker's involvement and skills dispensable. Technical knowledge is bought and reserved for competitive advantages. It is used to design products in accordance with the specifications that the manufacturer sees fit with an eye for maximizing profits. This is perhaps the lesson of our investigation: the narratives of obsolescence omit to take into account how law, and in particular intellectual property law, grants power to owners of production means over the functionality of a product. After all, patents can be filed and obtained on improvements without being used. The GE case is indeed as much a case of unexploited innovation as it is one of monopolistic power. The technology for better and more durable lamps was available and patented, but it was more expensive to manufacture. More than an obsolescence story, the light bulb affair is a patent story. Through this prism, patent law is a perfectly legitimate retention mechanism. Indeed, some inventions will never be commercialized, however useful, socially or ecologically beneficial they may be. In the same way, copyright and trade secrets become strategies to prevent reverse engineering and are key instruments to control access to codes and algorithmic transparency. Settlements were an opportunity for Apple to escape intrusive evidentiary investigations into its internal operations. It is significant that Veblen himself, not a lawyer, became aware of the danger posed by intellectual property for the development of industrial society. On rare occasions, he shared his concerns on the nature of these new forms of property. In 1914, he wrote:

"[i]n more advanced state of industrial arts, where ownership and the specialization of industry have had their effect, trade secrets, patent and copyrights are often of substantial value, and these are held in segregation from the common stock of technology." 225 In 1919, he explicitly compared intellectual property to classical forms of monopolies such as conspiracy or the combination of ownership. Intangible property, he wrote, "represents a "conscientious withdrawal of efficiency," an effectual control of the rate or volume of output." 22 6

Technological obsolescence occurs when a product becomes outdated due to technological innovation. Technological obsolescence makes an otherwise working product undesired. It generally occurs when technology brings about a new product that can replace the previous version of the product, and which consumers typically view as superior. Consider, for instance, an audio cassette player, an icebox, gas lights, an analog TV, a video cassette player, or a typewriter. The near-constant progression of technology has made these (and many other) products obsolete. However, note the fundamental difference between this type of obsolescence and the previous ones. In contrast to the foregoing forms, technological obsolescence does not require any ill intention, planning, or malice to be a priori attributed to the producer. Obsolescence here is but a consequence of technological progress.

How should the law respond to intentionally useless things that are constructed from scarce resources and thrust into an already overcrowded world?39 To contextualize the theses offered here, it is helpful to first get a sense of the contours of the problem. The problem of planned obsolescence (and the e-waste that it causes) is a problem of scale and a problem of exponential growth.40 Consider this passage from Gile Slade’s 2006 work on planned obsolescence:

In 2004 about 315 million working PCs were retired in North America. These still-functioning but obsolete computers represented an enormous increase over the 63 million working PCs dumped into American landfills in 2003…

Innovations can be intentionally harmful, such as for example the atomic bomb, auto-matic rifles, electric chairs, or the 'Spanish donkey.' These innovations clearly cause great harm by creating new opportunities for individuals to more effectively carry out harmful intentions. More in general, the introduction of new technology can lead to 'revenge effects.' Pesticide and antibiotic use can create conditions where new super-weeds and super-bugs evolve, air-conditioning increases external temperatures, and expanding roads can increase traffic and lead to more congestion. Tenner (1997) sub-divides these revenge effects into rearranging, repeating, recomplicating, regenerating and recongesting effects. In some cases, the harm from innovation comes not from regular use but from unanticipated accidents, such as Chernobyl. In other cases, the harm is an unintended yet anticipated outcome that comes from proper use. This harm can be well-known or hidden. A known side-effect of the proper use of cigarettes is lung cancer. A relatively little-known fact about shale gas production is that it produces considerable amounts of radioactive waste (Warner et al. 2013). Even the truck drivers disposing of this radio-active waste are not aware that their truckload is radioactive (Nobel 2020). We have seen with digital technologies such as social media and machine learning, that things seen as dark sides - discrimination in applications and data sources or cognitive distraction - are part of the constitutions of technologies. It is convenient for innovators to label negative consequences as 'unintended', but they may be designed into the system - features, not bugs - or they may be deliberately unanticipated to avoid accountability (Stilgoe 2020).

4. Unanswered questions Three unanswered questions can be mentioned here. First, can government ever apply the precautionary principle (Stirling 2017) fast enough to protect against harmful side-effects on e.g. public health? Innovative substances and technologies are increasing artificial and complex, and their integration into society and the environment is often not well understood. Given that innovation is fundamentally uncertain and involves experimentation, there may be gaps in the regulation of moving from scientific discoveries to exploratory applications in the real world (e.g. applying exploratory new medical techniques on real-world patients in unethical ways; see Saemundsson and McKelvey, this issue). Second, if innovation gets us into this mess, can we expect innovation to get us out of it? Innovation may give us the virus, as well as the vaccine (although many may die in between). Or does innovation only lead us into ever increasing difficulties (e.g. road traffic no longer means horse manure on our streets, but exhaust fumes instead). We agree, for example, with the need to give subsidies to renewable energy R&D to reduce the harm from fossil fuels (Acemoglu et al. 2012), but alternatives that are, by almost any definition, improvements upon fossil fuels, are nonetheless bringing new problems: for example, wind turbine blades are piling up in landfills (Martin 2020), and there are problems of solar e-waste (Hansen and Nygaard, this issue). Third, accidents happen. What is the acceptable rate of 'normal accidents' such as Chernobyl? If it is above zero, innovation will be accompanied by catastrophes that are unpredictable and increasingly large (even if the setting-up of preventative procedures could sometimes help to avoid some catastrophes). If it is zero, then this 'risk-averse' stance could put an absolute halt on some types of innovation.

Like the ideology of improvement, the ideology of innovation is centrally concerned with the extension of private property rights. However, whereas improvement assigned juridical personhood and property-owning capacity based on contingent visions of physical labor and cultivation of the natural world, innovation assigns value and thereby property rights to those that engage in intellectual labor and produce information about nature in ways that can be alienated and enclosed through intellectual property rights. Intellectual property rights were developed to incentivize innovation and creation, and thereby grant limited monopoly rights to novel inventions. However, that which is recognized as novel and innovative is highly contingent on recognizing the value of those claiming creatorship. As Lilly Irani describes in her ethnography of social entrepreneurs in India, ‘those who pulled off the performance of innovation had to do enormous cultural work to establish the uniqueness and then authenticity of their productions’ (Irani 2019, 175). Critical intel-lectual property scholar, Anjali Vats, suggests that this is because ‘embedded in under-standings of Romantic creatorship are intersectionally inflected racial and colonial presuppositions about the value of white male knowledge and the value of people of color knowledge’ (2020, 6). Science and technology scholars have repeatedly shown that the recognition of what constitutes a novel technology or innovation is intertwined with racial assumptions about creatorship (Oldenziel 1999; Fouché 2006; Irani 2019).

In the context of food and agriculture, despite the fact that most biodiversity and plant genetic resources are in the Global South, most patents and intellectual property rights over agricultural technologies and plant genetic resources are held in the Global North. As Gates and other actors mobilize the ideology of innovation to extend intellectual property rights across the Global South, they reproduce racial regimes of ownership over knowledge. Indeed, across the African continent, the Gates Foundation and its grantees mobilize the ideology of innovation to promote regulatory reform to protect intellectual property rights to facilitate the development and marketing of proprietary technologies that will ‘modernize’ underdeveloped economies. To do so, they draw on two strategies. First, the Gates Foundation and its grantees directly promote the institutionalization of the intellectual property regime embedded within a network of transnational legal mechanisms, such as the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and other international treaties aimed at commercializing seed systems and the recognition of plant breeders’ rights (Pechlaner 2012). Second, they seek to stimulate demand for proprietary technologies by financing the development of these technologies and facilitating public-private partnerships to encourage the adoption of commercial inputs.

The politicians, bureaucrats, businesspeople, and academics that take part in the perpetuation of society’s obsession with innovation, all have in common that they view innovation in very positive terms—arguably, too positive—and seem to believe in an almost magical capacity of innovation and entrepreneurship to create jobs, grow the economy, solve sustainability challenges, and make life better for everyone. This overconfdence has metamorphosed into “innovationism”, a belief system or ideology that is conceptually distinct from innovation in a real or technical sense (Valaskivì 2012: 133). Innovationism has no intrinsic capacity to improve anything. Quite the opposite: It entails a strong appeal to national or regional identity (Chap. 5), combined with a constantly invoked message of competitiveness. This means that on a very subtle level, it risks turning its overpositive message into a rhetoric of fear of falling behind in the highly competitive and globalized knowledge economy. Innovation is often presented as the only means for national (or regional) survival in a hostile world. It is not uncommon for this to be summarized with the catchy but rather intimidating phrase “innovate or die” (Hasu et al. 2012: 90). In this sense, innovationism is fundamentally dishonest, as it pretends to play on feelings of optimism but breeds a worry of being left behind (Vinsel and Russell 2020: 11). Such a rhetoric of fear, especially if indirectly deployed using grandiose slogans and a dazzling surface, is arguably counterproductive both on overall societal level, in the long run, and specifcally in relation to those young minds that are necessary to encourage and stimulate to innovate.

Other destructive consequences of innovationism, and of society’s obsession with entrepreneurship and growth, are of course more plain and concrete. Among the most obvious ones—already hinted in previous chapters—are wasteful spending. The huge and centrally planned programs of “the entrepreneurial state” (Chaps. 2 and 5), have been amply criticized on theoretical and empirical grounds. Especially questionable is the seeming lack of effciency with which the programs launched under the auspices of the entrepreneurial state ideology do actually support technological development and sustainability transitions (Harford 2011; Karlson et al. 2021; Wennberg and Sandström 2022; Larsson 2022). Similarly, the entrepreneurship industry (Chap. 4) seems to be a formidable source of free money for those capable of selling a product of service to these would-be-entrepreneurs. Veblenian entrepreneurship—amounting to the “conspicuous consumption” of such products or services to maintain a particular lifestyle (Hartmann et al. 2020)—becomes really problematic when taxpayers’ money or private capital are spent to support such lifestyles, under the pretext that it is spent to support the development of the economy (Brattström 2022: 148).

Symbolic actions are highly visible, so they can be communicated easily internally or externally for legitimacy. We found two types of actions:

1. Symbolic hybrid activities such as:

Breznitz's case studies convincingly illustrate that some successful innovation paths have little to do with charismatic CEOs or media-friendly “a-ha” moments. The heroes of his story are experts, working within international supply chains, introducing incremental innovations at stages of design and production that are more or less invisible to outsiders. There are traces of a Brandeisian worldview that conceives of local jurisdictions as laboratories, where officials in the public and private sectors play with “novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Breznitz believes that if they understand the nuances of their local innovation ecosystem, and invest accordingly, they will be on their way to channeling the power of innovation to “foster inclusive prosperity.” This sounds good, as far as it goes. But before getting carried away with the how of regional innovation policy, it would be wise to ask why—or whether—innovation-based growth should be at the top of regional policymaking agendas. Let me lay out one suggestion for how to be more inclusive with these types of initiatives, and two reasons we ought to question the value of putting all of our eggs in the “innovation” basket. First, I wish Breznitz had included the words “labor” and “unions” in his essay. One indication of Breznitz's alignment with mainstream U.S. political culture is the way his argument takes labor for granted and marginalizes organized labor. Just consider the appalling treatment of “essential workers” throughout the pandemic, those brave souls who held society together during the grimmest weeks and months of the last year and a half. They stocked groceries, delivered masks and sanitizer, and cared for the sick. And then, as some semblance of normal life returned in the summer of 2021, they feel as though they “went from heroes to zeroes quickly,” as the nurse Dominique Muldoon put it. There's no mystery here: many essential workers are in occupations that are typically perceived as low-status, and multiple studies have shown that a disproportionate percentage of essential workers are women and racial and ethnic minorities. Is it too much to ask for these workers and their families to be at the center of policies that seek to build inclusive prosperity? Sadly, it is not unusual for scholars or advocates who sing the praises of innovation to omit labor. This is one reason why Lee Vinsel and I sounded the alarm about “innovation-speak” in our recent book, The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most. As we describe there, actual innovation is the profitable combination of new or existing knowledge, resources, and technology. In many cases innovation can be a good thing, from emissions-reducing electric cars to life-saving medicines and vaccines. By contrast, innovation-speak is a sales pitch, typically cast in the language of fear and in the dialect of business buzzwords and jargon. A lazy but all too common mistake is to use “innovation” as a proxy for narrow values—such as efficiency, convenience, or simply novelty for its own sake. But not all innovations bring positive societal changes with them: some obvious examples include fentanyl and facial recognition. Simply put, it is a delusion to believe that innovation itself can cure our problems, which are not just technical but also social and political. And it should be equally obvious that undirected, brute innovation can be—indeed, has been—a significant driver of inequality, especially when it is not accompanied by the rules and regulations needed to curb its destructive potential. Finally, it is worth reflecting on the instinct within U.S. political culture to look to growth to solve our societal problems. Growth is the totem of modern economics, as is the central assumption that Breznitz rehearses: namely, that innovation-based growth automatically promotes economic well-being and inclusive prosperity. Our society urgently needs to find a way to dismantle these assumptions—and to embrace a vision of socioeconomic life that looks beyond mere consumerism and the profit to be gained by constant disruption. I am encouraged by social movements that are leading the conversation around topics such as sustainable development, Strong Towns, the care economy, and the circular economy (which reduces waste and preserves natural resources through tactics like reuse and repair). Economists contend that economies should grow at 2 or 3 percent annually. Even if we accept this premise, we will always need to devote more attention and resources to maintaining the overwhelming majority—97 or 98 percent of our economy!—that supports daily life. In other words, we need to pay more attention to the maintenance and care of what we have, rather than getting carried away with escapist fantasies about innovation and growth.

Granados & Ayala 23, [Cristian Granados (Professor at the Graduate School of Business and at Egade Business School, Master's degree, Doctorate, and Post-Doctorate from the University of Barcelona and the University of Cambridge, Research fellow at HEC Montreal and did a research stay at Harvard Business School), and Yarid Ayala (Research Professor at Egade Business School, Editorial Board of the Journal of Happiness Studies), "Fake It ‘Till You Make It?: The Innovation Theater," Egade Ideas, https://egade.tec.mx/en/egade-ideas/research/fake-it-till-you-make-it-innovation-theater, accessed 6-30-2024, 10/31/23] Mr.Mr.

Innovation is a top priority for companies today: activities such as workshops, innovation programs, labs, or corporate accelerators are increasingly carried out as part of their innovation process. However, these innovation-related activities do not always result in making organizations more innovative.