The Horrendous Photos The Technology Industry Doesn’t Want You To See

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The technology industry is growing at a faster rate. Almost all aspects of our lives are gradually depending on it. But as we continue to digitize our lives with the latest technological gadgets, we should bear in mind that it comes at a cost that is likely to derail the progress we have made as a society if we fail to regulate the activities of the tech industry.

Whereas the big players in the industry such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, IBM, HP, Cisco among others are busy accumulating huge profit, our atmosphere, our water, indigenous populations, and in the long run, our economy are all in danger.

By the help of the author, Robert Gibson on Usuncut.com, we have documented some of the awful photos the technology industry doesn’t want you to see. Their actions and activities which are geared toward only wealth creation without regard to the dignity of the human life are killing their direct and indirect employees. They are polluting water bodies, the atmosphere and robbing our economy of huge sums of monies. The following photos and commentaries will give you better understanding of the situation.

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This is happening in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in Africa. The country since colonial days has been badly exploited by French and Belgian colonial administrators. The country is rich in natural resources. Minerals like cobalt, copper and coltan which are very vital to the tech industry are available in abundance in the DRC. And due to the high demand by the tech industry, rebels and even the country’s armed forces are engaged in heinous ways to get these minerals to sell and buy arms.

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Both the armed forces and rebels conscript children by force to work in the mines. More than 40,000 children are said to be forced to mine the minerals for our smartphones and laptops. Currently, 16.9 percent of the children between ages 5 and 14 work in the Congolese mining industry. The International Labor Organization has said mining is one of the worst forms of child labor due to the numerous health risks associated with it.

Les FARDC et la MONUSCO renforcent leur présence à l'intérieur de Goma et ses environnants suite à un deuxième jour 921 mai 2013) de combats entre le M23 et les forces nationales de défense. © MONUSCO/Clara Padovan

Apart from the armed groups using children for this tedious work, they also engage each other for control of mineral rich areas. This has resulted in loss of many lives and properties. And despite the secret lobbying by the tech industry to keep these crimes from the public, the United Nations boldly reported in 2001 that the American tech companies purchasing the exploited minerals serve as “the engine of the conflict in the DRC.”

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From Africa, let’s see what is happening in Asia, China to be precise. It is said Apple’s contract manufacturer; Foxconn is China’s largest private sector employer. The company manufactures majority of Apple’s iPhones and iPads. It also makes electronics for Dell, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia and Sony. But it will surprise you to learn that working conditions in the company are so bad that employees are committing suicide.

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Workers work many hours but are paid little. In 2010 alone, 14 workers committed suicide at the company’s Shenzhen plant by jumping from the storey building. Between 2010 and 2013, 7 more workers committed suicide. Another worker also jumped to his death in August 2015.bThe company responded by putting barriers on windows of the factory dormitories where the 300,000 to 400,000 workers live to prevent workers jumping to their deaths. But this has not solved the problem.

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The company is now forcing workers to sign contract that forbids them from committing suicide. Even as the company has increased salary recently, the average worker earns around $293 a month. Meanwhile, Foxconn CEO, Terry Gou has a net worth of $5.9 billion.

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Workers are fined just for talking at work. Security guards patrol the assembly lines to listen to workers breaking the no-talking rule. It is said due to poor working conditions, five percent of its workforce, about 24,000 people quit every month.

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“Hundreds of people work in the workshops but they are not allowed to talk to each other. If you talk, you get a black mark in your record and you get shouted at by your manager. You can also be fined”, Chinese government investigator, Zhu Guangbing told The Telegraph.

Apart from exploiting human resources, in Northern China, close to the Mongolian border, about 95 percent of the rare earth minerals used in Smartphones and laptops are produced in this region.

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And the waste from those mining operations gushes out of pipes in Baotou.

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The GIF image shows the multiple pipes ejecting sludge from a tech mining site into an artificial lake. The five-mile lake has now become poisonous.

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Moving now to the United States which is the home of the World’s tech giants, it will probably anger you to know that the biggest tech companies are some of the country’s biggest corporate tax avoiders. And looking at the illustration on the chart, the tech industry’s median tax rates are some of the lowest out of all industries. New York University professor, Aswath Damodaran studied the data of over 7,000 publicly-traded companies and discovered that while the retail automotive sector pays a median effective income tax rate of 32.7 percent, the computer software/services sector and the internet sector pay just a 10.1 percent and 5.9 percent rate respectively.

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It is said the five biggest tech companies in the country, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Cisco have over $430 billion stashed overseas. Apple alone has $158 billion overseas. If brought back to the US and taxed at a 35 percent rate, that $430 billion would provide $150.5 billion in revenue. That could create 600,000 public sector jobs for 5 years at $50,000 a year per job.

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Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the activities of wealthy tech workers have pushed living cost so high that poor bus drivers have to sleep in their buses due to high cost of accommodation. Employees of Google, Twitter and Facebook are said to be flocking to San Francisco and Oakland. It is said Silicon Valley tech companies shuttle workers from their downtown apartments to their workplaces using private bus services. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that an average one-bedroom apartment now costs $2,186 in San Jose, $2,469 in Oakland and $3,361 in San Francisco. The bus drivers cannot afford this and are therefore sleeping in their buses.

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33 COMMENTS

  1. Youve shown something terrifying and horrific. Now that the problem is addressed what should I do to help minimize the blood on my hands? How do you guys deal with knowing about shit like this?

    • Buying second hand stuff is a good start.

      Most electronic components, solar panes and else, could be refurbished, but it requires research and costs more than buying fresh rare earth from China. So it’s not for today!

    • How right you are. Many “computer journalists” come off as some kind of heroes for collaging a montage of photos about one theme or another. They don’t actually expose anything new or raise any new issues. All the pics. in this report are old news and somebody else’s work. The picture of the “dead lake” I have seen before in connection with the story that went along with it. The story there is about the nasty “tailings” arising out of the mining of magnetite, the mineral critical in the construction of wind turbines. It’s the super dirty little secret of the “environmentally friendly” wind farms.
      But the journo who posted this couldn’t be bothered to paste in some details. Which leads me to believe that he’s no more than an element of “controlled opposition”, i.e. expose a scandalous fraction of the story but don’t burden the reader with the larger picture, which might tip that reader into active opposition.

  2. Global capitalism at it’s very best and when the corporate rights agreements arrive under free trade agreements it will only get worse!

    • “Even as the company has increased salary recently, the average worker earns around $293 a month. ”

      Know what the cutoff for extreme poverty in the world is? It’s $700 a YEAR.

      The capitalism that you hate so much is what’s bringing people worldwide out of poverty. But I’m sure subsistence farming under the crushing foot of local bureaucrats is better to appease naive, out of touch first world socialists like you, Mikey boy!

      • You’re joking? If someone’s naïve it’s the working class people who believe capitalism to be the saviour of man. Just like Dan said; “[…]capitalism made people poor in the first place[…]”. Of course we can’t only blame capitalism for what’s wrong with the world, but it sure as hell is a big part of what’s ruining the world around us.

        The fucking greed.

        The fact that people use their [insert brand of clever communications device here] for 12 months before throwing it away for something just marginally better.

        I just as guilty as the next guy. I could say what I do to try and make it better, but that wouldn’t make you listen to me any more than if I just left this page blank.

        Take care of yourself and please, try to take care of the world around you.

  3. I have found some very interesting documents. During next week I will have access to that computer again. Where can I send them?

  4. I get a kick out of this story, they tell us how bad the pollution and labor is with the tech industry then there is an ad for anon loot for Sale that’s made over seas. What?

  5. These corporate f**kers are rapeing the planet and molding the laws in their favour and enslaving us in the proces we should boycot as much as possible of what they produce
    live without those gadgets and start living more in touch with our planet like before. start by buying from your local farmers and small local stores help the small business even if that becomes more expensive for you cause they will listen to your feedback and do their best for you just to keep you as a client avoid big brands most of them have trojans in them good luck!

  6. This article shows tech companies to be socially irresponsible, tax-evasive perpetrators of inequality and oppression.

  7. “The company is now forcing workers to sign contract that forbids them from committing suicide. ”

    Now that’s one fucking stupid company. So what if someone signs on the dotted line. Is that going to Re-Materialise them seconds after they hit the pavement. Or bring them back to life because there is a signature on a piece of paper? HAHAHA fucking hell humans are the dumbest thing in the universe.

    • That’s not how it works in China. The contract will have broader repercussions on his whole family. In other words, “kill yourself and we will punish and impoverish as many people you love as we can find” even if you survive the attempt or are stopped.

      That works in China. Has done for Centuries. Even before Communism. Shaming your family in this way is even worse than thoughts of suicide.

      But then I don’t really expect you to understand this in any meaningful way. But you are right some humans are pretty dumb. But not all thankfully.

    • you are so right but we also are humans and we are not dumb as them
      they are in drugs man( a way of saying) the greed and the profit
      from which they get high make them the dumbest of all humans and that’s
      why they cheat, mold law, abuse, enslave and all that dumb shiet dumb people
      do. because they cant do something smart, all the smart things are made by the same slaves they have. the brainwash of capitalism maintain such state of slavery
      that boost the dumbs industry of make money,misery, and world annihilation.

    • We all need to start marching the streets yesterday…. Power in numbers and not one thing will change until we UNITED will spark the fire!!

  8. This is disgusting… So many people live in poverty and don’t have enough food to feed themselves, yet they store hundreds of billions of dollars off sea… Would be nice to start seeing them give back to people rather than employing slave labor to build a phone they charge $600+ for, meanwhile it costs them pennies on the dollar to make it. Fucking greedy people…. All that money out of circulation is why this is such a problem. No money in circulation, no money for people.

  9. And yet tech brought us these pictures.
    When it’s all said and done electronic media is the greatest sunshine, the greatest disinfectant that there is. In the long-run, it continually increase awareness and saves the planet.

  10. There was a tv documentary about this not so long ago and ever since I’ve trying to put people off apple ,I got to say annonymous we can feed the public all the bad doings in the world but what are we going to do about it (action speaks louder than words brothers and sisters ).

  11. At first someone built a computer then another one managed to give to this computer an os. Later the war was raging between DOS, TRAMIEL OS, AMIGA, APPLE and so many other OS with small machines.
    Computers were so different one from each other…

    Later an ugly system named Windows appeared but it was so bad looking with it’s Hercules monochrome graphics compared to the GEM which was in ATARI systems.

    The commercial machine ran so fine that $crosoft growed bigger each year, Apple started to dive. During all this time when one $ntel or $MD were in a no mercy war, the os editor was replying to the last fsstest processor with a heavier os including more and more crap in it. When the editor made his os so heavy, no way to workaround the problem without buying another processor or computer. When the computer bought, let’s have the latest top os with much more useless crap in it…AND SO ON, the show must go on.

    Now i saw someone saying buy second hand, this is an intelligent way to reduce all this. Another way is to stop the race for the power or speed in computer, after all this for what ?
    Is you f* spreadsheet making some more magic than older ones ? What more are you doing with your stupid Office Pack ?
    All that for what ??? Playing silly games or having a not less stupid windows 10 ?

    Recycle your old computers and use linux instead. They are other games with Linux 🙂

  12. The corporations will almost always do whatever benefits them the most, it is government’s job to control them and enforce laws to protect people and the environment. This is a management issue. We have a form of government that rewards sell-outs and bribe-takers and punishes the ethical. That is the problem. If you were able to launch a 100% effective campaign to put the companies doing this out of business, guess what would spring up to fill the void and do exactly the same things and enrich exactly the same politicians. When your government sells out the whole system breaks down. Fixing that isn’t going to be easy, when there’s so much money involved they will fight to keep their insane little orgy going.

  13. And the citizens of the united states are paying $4 a bag to dispose of organic garbage and even more for metal scrap at the dump. Everything is upside down.

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