I would pay a premium for boutique and ethically produced items. However very difficult to be a purist when it comes to electronics, let alone ones with internal batteries.
What somewhat also bugs me though is the ‘I ordered a matrixbrute to try it out’ mentality of some consumers. They have it shipped to them, try it, don’t like it, and incur further carbon cost sending it back.
Mine too… Doesn’t mean the world wouldn’t be better if they never existed.
It’s a broad set of topics! Depends what you’re focusing on. Happy to give you a few quick pointers if you can narrow this down a bit.
Supply chains are notoriously murky (as previously said) and plenty of companies will lie, greenwash, or simply refuse to say anything. Second hand would be better but I prefer to avoid most personal interactions these days. So from an environmental perspective, simplest option seems to be to try and limit my consumption; and if I simply must consume, then at least aim for something that is likely to last a long time and then make an effort to look after it.
As for the rest of CSR, if something crosses my radar that I find troubling then I will certainly take it under consideration. But I no longer demand that manufacturers align with my own various ideological values because that shit got way too exhausting.
As i’ve discovered and i’m finding it extremely hard to find one particular issue amongst them all which will be really focused on the manufacturing of music technologies and not just technology in general. Such as the use of SMT vs key-hole, vactrols, lead free solder or a report on how consumers of these technologies make their decisions when purchasing something new and if there is any processing of ethics and sustainability within that decision or is it purely based on the price tag. I really want to do a report of the issues of the supply chain and its environmental ramifications, but thats far too deep and seems almost impossible.
Interesting stuff. I don’t have enough experience in the electronics component sector to go that deep I’m afraid. Most of my work has been in agri/food, garments, energy (upstream and midstream) plus digital human rights in tech (state surveillance, freedom of expression and opinion etc). There is overlap in some aspects (a factory is a factory from an audit perspective) but I don’t know enough about electronic component manufacturing human capital/environmental risks. Consumer purchasing sentiment stuff is interesting and I have looked at this in other sectors but not in an electronics/music tech context.
Any further information on consumer purchasing information and how to quantify such a survey? What size should I be looking at, etc?
The big industry research houses like Gartner and IDC look at sustainability-focused purchasing habits in technology. Most of their stuff is subscription-only but you may find some public domain output. In terms of size, look for large consumer panels (2,000 respondents per country as a minimum) and multiple country surveys.
There is also a lot of academic research published on this topic. You could, for example, have a look at the Journal for Consumer Research or comparable outlets.
Other suggestions:
Hassan, S. M., Rahman, Z., & Paul, J. (2022). Consumer ethics: A review and research agenda. Psychology & Marketing, 39 (1), 111-130.
Schamp, C., Heitmann, M., & Katzenstein, R. (2019). Consideration of ethical attributes along the consumer decision-making journey. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 47, 328-348.
which is why I love small boutique modular firms as many like Noise Engineering try to do their social part to benefit others.
Corporations/companies are devoid of ethics. I think anything else of the sort is exploiting your feelings/marketing to persuade you into connecting with and/or buying their products.
What about B-Corps?
A while back I was talking to a friend about how I don’t use Uber because their business practices are so abysmal, and he seemed to sum the whole thing up well:
“I miss the old days, when we had no idea about the evil shit most companies were doing.”
Ah, the 20th Century, when you had to give a whole town cancer for anyone to notice that maybe your company sucks.
Well, to be fair - if every single purchase you ever make for the rest of your life requires a full moral assessment, that does become rather exhausting. I can see why people prefer not to do it.
I am quite sure that people are more than happy to outsource this moral assessment to others, which makes consumers an easily co-optable group, should one wish to pursue that sort of thing.
Thank you, mate :). But what I’m focusing on is how musicians make decisions as consumers of these products. However, these journals may be helpful.
I do not really and you already mentioned the reason why: I cannot feel myself considering where the border between “that many deaths/suffering is okay” vs. “from here on it is not”. We have to live with the fact, that our western luxury is based on the backs of many other countries and their citizen. Trying to differentiate here (in my opinion) talks down problems you accept over others. And to be fair: What happens in resource-gathering for silicon products is way worse than everything that might come after that.
Hehe
I think it is better to be some hypocrite, than to be always wrong 
i try to make the most sensible and emphatic decisions possible when it comes to consumption. on the basis of the information that is available to me at a certain point in time or that i can obtain. sometimes i would make such decisions differently in retrospect - because the information situation has changed or because my understanding of a matter has changed.
however, i am convinced that every consumption decision implies the responsibility to examine and question this decision.
in this context, the aforementioned actions and statements by vlad kreimer are highly irritating - i would therefore not currently buy any products from SOMA, to name just one example.