RadioShack and Smartphones

Technological convergence and dematerialization's impact on energy and materials

In 1991, the electronics retailer RadioShack ran an ad in the paper for the devices it sold.  Today in 2025, the ad seems like an artifact of a bygone era, as the ubiquitous smartphone has replaced all those electronic gadgets.

Technological convergence, or device convergence, is when multiple once-separate tools or devices are replaced by a single device that can perform all the previous functions. Books like Andrew McAfee's More from Less: How We Learned to Create More Without Using More, and those from the likes of Ray Kurzwiel, Peter Diamandis, and Kevin Kelly, discuss technological dematerialization from combining multiple devices into one.  It seems to be an environmental win and cause for optimism.

The smartphone replaced the camera, tape recorder, desktop radio scanner, GPS unit, alarm clock, camcorder, calculator, CB radio, and much of the old RadioShack catalog.  It's also cheaper. It leads to more from less, many argue, or more benefits from less materials and energy. This kind of convergence reduces the amount of physical material needed to deliver a given function.  True.  But it's not the whole story. For that, we must take a systems approach.

Smartphones are far more complex than their predecessors.  They require more elements like platinum, gold, lead, silver, lithium, and chromium, each obtained from long global supply chains. Advanced devices also rely on ultra-high-purity silicon and many of the rarest earth elements, including yttrium, lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, and lutetium. 

These minerals are found at extremely low concentrations in Earth's crust, so mining them requires more energy and more pollution.  More overall material needs to be mined—about 75 pounds for a 1/4 pound smartphone—which means more land use, more tailings, and more contamination of soil and waterways. Then, refining is much more energy-intensive to isolate the desired elements since so much rock needs to be sorted through. Refining begins with a series of mechanical and chemical processes known as beneficiation. Acid leaching and concentration using toxic solvents, such as cyanide, is part of the process, and those inevitably end up polluting the environment.

Energy and resource intensity changes, too.  The complex chip fabrication, ultra-pure water production, ultra-clean facilities, and precision manufacturing carry enormous embodied energy at every step of manufacturing.  This is the necessary cost of producing a small multifunctional device that fits in our palms and replaces the RadioShack catalog.  Sure, $1,000 for an iPhone seems incredibly cheap for what it does.  Its cheapness is a function of incredible amounts of cheap energy used in production (which technology and machines enable) rather than human labor.  And the labor involved is offshored to less developed nations, whose labor is cheap.  The unseen infrastructure to produce an iPhone is much more resource-intensive than a suite of RadioShack gadgets.  A smartphone is light in the hand, but has a heavy industrial footprint.

Convergence also triggers a rebound effect, or Jevons paradox.  By making functions cheaper, easier, and always available, smartphones cause people to take more photos and videos, use regular GPS routing, and rely heavily on cloud-based services.  Even if each function is efficient, the sheer increase in total use multiplies the energy demand of the digital ecosystem.  Everyone didn't own everything in the RadioShack catalog, as everyone owns a smartphone today.

Cloud-Enabled

Since all of our digital information is not magically floating around in the luminiferous aether, an immense amount of energy is now used by data centers, server farms, and network infrastructure rather than the devices themselves.  Cloud-based data storage and processing are very energy-intensive—so intensive that the tech titans are installing their own solar arrays and power plants to run their data centers.  Microsoft even struck a $16 billion deal with Constellation Energy to revive the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, which formerly powered 800,000 homes.  And those enormous racks of server hardware require the same long, complex, resource-intensive supply chains to incorporate mined rare earth metals into their microchips, just as surely as the smartphones themselves.

Cloud computing is usually far more energy-efficient per computation because hyper-scale data centers operate at high utilization with optimized hardware and cooling.  A task performed in the cloud may use only a fraction of the energy the same task would require on a local server or personal computer.  However, because cloud services enable far more total computing—continuous backups, streaming, AI, remote storage, instant synchronization—the overall system-wide energy footprint grows.  Local computing wastes more energy per operation but naturally limits the total amount of computation people perform.

Cloud computing is also much more material-intensive at the infrastructure level, even though it goes unseen by us smartphone users.  A huge data center requires vast quantities of high-purity silicon, copper wiring, rare earth elements, miles of fiber optic cable, massive power infrastructure, steel racking, cooling equipment, and batteries.  The per-user material intensity is hidden because the hardware is centralized and amortized across millions of customers.

It's the same dynamic for embodied energy, or the energy required to manufacture the hardware.  Cloud computing has much higher embodied energy per unit of hardware, because data center servers and networking gear use cutting-edge chips fabricated through extremely energy-intensive processes.  Based on my back-of-the-envelope math, a single GPU takes on the order of several hundred kilowatt-hours of electricity to manufacture.  Data centers also require immense embodied energy in their concrete foundations, steel structures, HVAC equipment, and power systems.

Smartphones typically last three to five years, not because they physically fail, but because batteries degrade (and are not replaceable), software ages, and performance expectations go up when a new device comes out.  Several companies, including Apple, have been accused of, and admitted to, having planned obsolescence in their devices.  The old RadioShack gadgets were relatively simple in their construction.  If something broke, you could take it to any number of electronic repair shops to have it fixed.  My grandfather operated a shop like that.  But today, electronic technology is so complex that nobody can repair a smartphone when something malfunctions inside.  There are too many transistors, they're too small, and manufacturers don't sell replacement parts. 

Besides that, the cost of devices today is so low that it's not worth bothering to fix them.  Just buy a new one; call it an upgrade.  And the old phone? The rare earth elements are mixed tightly together in the complex chips and composite materials in ways that make recycling unfeasible. Instead of many simple objects that were relatively easy to disassemble, we now have a few highly integrated objects that are nearly impossible to process at the end of life. While our devices may be small, their material and energy throughput from cradle to grave, mine to landfill, is enormous.

The net effect of technological convergence depends on the scale you examine.  Measured per function, convergence produces extraordinary dematerialization.  Measured per person, it reduces the number of gadgets we own—sort of (we'll come back to this in a moment).  Measured across the entire economy, however, the total energy and material footprint rises.

As the cost of smartphones comes down, more people can afford them.  Technological democratization means more people own these complex devices.  That means more users generating data, which means more data centers.  Smartphones enable the digitization of all the prior RadioShack products.  Instead of buying a camcorder and radio, we have a digital video camera that stores videos in physical servers around the world in the form of 1s and 0s, and we have a Spotify app that accesses music from similar remote servers. Those tens of thousands of photos and videos on your phone are stored and accessed from somewhere—and it's not the luminiferous aether.

Smartphones make other technologies possible.  Third-party developers create apps we download at little to no cost.  Nearly every free app, website, and social platform makes money by selling advertising space.  What are ads designed to do?  Sell stuff.

I wasn't around in 1980, but I'm not aware of anyone who coveted the latest iPhone back then. They didn't want it because it didn't exist.  Even if it did exist, it's really hard to desire a new gadget if you don't know about it.  But our always-handy smartphones, combined with free search engines and social media, provide a vector of direct access for advertisers to constantly show us new stuff and make us want it.

Several studies show that American adults spend well over 2 hours a day on social media.  A Gallup survey found that this figure is 4.8 hours for teenagers.  That's not including TV, gaming, or other computer use.  That's an awful lot of exposure to full-color, high-resolution marketing messages crafted by highly-paid professionals.  These ads are designed to hack our dopamine systems and make us want to buy the product being featured, suggesting that our lives could be better if we just buy XYZ.

And what types of things are being offered?  Much of it is other products made possible by the technological infrastructure that also makes the device in your hand possible.  When I open an internet browser from an anonymous account using a VPN and go to a random dictionary website, five different random ads are popping up.  These are companies paying Google for my attention.  One ad is from Target claiming itself the "tech gift hub," one from Dell for gaming PCs, one from Amazon showing a variety of headphones and other tech gizmos, one for an HBO TV subscription, and one for a Ford F-150.

So not only do Smartphones run on energy and material-intensive remote data centers, they provide a vehicle to sell more technology that relies on similar data centers.  The old RadioShack tape recorders, Walkmans, and calculators couldn't sell us Ring doorbell cameras, AI-powered home assistants, and wifi cat feeders.

Okay, if it's too much of a digression to discuss how smartphones and other tech perpetuate consumerism, consider solely the devices themselves.  The first computer, the ENIAC, came out in 1945 and weighed 54,000 lbs.  Fast forward to the first commercial Apple Macintosh in 1984, which weighed 16.5 lbs.  Apple shipped 372,000 of these computers, totaling 6.14 million pounds of "computer material."  In 2024, Apple shipped over 22 million Macs.  Even if we assume all units were the weight of a MacBook at 3.3 lbs, versus the much heavier models, that's 72.6 million pounds of "computer material."  But as we've seen, this modern computer material is significantly more energy and resource-intensive on a pound-for-pound basis. And that's only one company.

This is a classic case of Jevons' Paradox.  As a technology becomes smaller, lighter, cheaper, and more efficient, it becomes accessible to more people.  Demand expands faster than efficiency improvements.  The increased adoption leads to an overall increase in material and energy usage, even though each unit may use less.  Dematerialization begets democratization, which leads to a net increase in materials.  Now, over 1.2 billion (with a "B") smartphones are sold annually.

These days, RadioShack has become a trifle compared to its glory days, as the products it sold became commoditized and sold by bigger competitors.  It still sells electronics, and we can see the later stages of technological democratization in low prices for cheap stuff, available to anyone before going to the landfill.

Technology and computing is just one manifestation of how human civilization increases in complexity and energy and material-intensity over time.  Technology builds on technology.  The amount of energy available to a civilization determines what's possible for its technology. As we've increasingly mechanized the process of energy and material extraction from the Earth by using more energy, the scale has increased and pushed prices down. Every step of the process, from rock-in-ground to device-in-hand and server-on-rack, has benefited from economies of scale and innovation. The result is cheap, ubiquitous smartphones with more functionality than most of us will ever use.

Technological convergence promised a less energy and material-intensive economy, and in a very narrow sense, it delivered. A smartphone does replace a desk full of RadioShack electronics. Measured per function, it is a marvel of dematerialization. But zoom out to the systems level to include background infrastructure and supply chains, and we see a different picture.

Convergence makes technology cheaper, easier, and universally accessible, and that triggers the rebound effect. Billions of people who once owned a handful of simple devices now carry supercomputers that encourage constant use, continuous data generation, and permanent connection to vast energy and material-intensive remote infrastructures. The physical objects in our hands shrink while the industrial systems behind them grow. Rare materials and advanced manufacturing are needed to make the semiconductors and chips required in modern smartphones and their supporting data centers. That has driven up energy use and pollution from mining, refining, fabrication, and maintenance. Convergence dematerializes the device but rematerializes the system.

This is the dichotomy of modern technology. The more we compress functions into sleek, multifunctional devices, the more demand expands across the entire economy. Efficiency at the device level enables adoption at the population level. Democratization magnifies consumption. And the hidden architecture of silicon supply chains, gigantic servers, fiber networks, and more, demands far more energy and materials than the RadioShack era ever did. When we go from the narrow boundary of the device to the wide boundary of the system, sometimes “more from less” is really just “more from more”.

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