This is a slightly edited version of text I wrote some years ago. It was at the beginning of my PHD and I tried to wrap my head around some concepts. I posted this one on my old last website, but it probably benefits from some editorial cutting. So here it is again.
A few days ago I received a late birthday present: A Pinephone, a still very experimental smartphone, running almost exclusively open source software. Part of tinkering with such a device is reading a lot of forum discussions. Reading through the PinePhone forums, I came across a link to a video of the phone's production lines in Shenzhen which made me reflect on the topics of this post.
If you ever dare to open up one of those shiny devices of yours, you will quickly realize that there is far more manual labour involved in putting them together than you would originally think of such a wondrous thing made of of metal, plastic and glass. It sits before you as if it was never apart, as if it was cast in one swift movement of an autonomous robot, standing in a white clean room on its own. But once you had to claw you fingernails or a credit card into the side of a device like that, to open its backside, or after you maybe even turned two or three (or fifteen) little screws to lift another layer, you can see more and more of the steps a human hand had to perform to put it together. One quickly realizes: There is crooked duct tape holding my ereader's internals together, there are random dabs of glue fixing the display onto my smartphone and somebody had to plug my laptop's WIFI card onto that mainboard manually. Read more…