[nickelpro]

Reading this I constantly find myself asking, so what? It feels like each little vignette ends before managing to substantiate its point, consider the concluding sentence in the early section on lithium mining:

> Your smart-phone runs on the tears and breast milk of a volcano. This landscape is connected to everywhere on the planet via the phones in our pockets; linked to each of us by invisible threads of commerce, science, politics and power.

This purple language is evocative of, something? Like ya, we live in a globalized economy, things are connected, what of it? Is this supposed to be a brilliant insight or just a poetic restating of the obvious?

[parksy]

I am so used to articles with a meaningless header image that I totally skipped that the map they're talking about is right at the top of the page. My brain filtered it out. After going back and looking at it, I think the map is pretty cool and would be great if it were dynamic and navigable in a leaflet container or something of the sort.

But I agree I got tired of the prose about a third of the way in. I appreciate it, and can tell what they are getting at but I think regular hacker news readers are in a demographic that is already keenly aware of the interconnected nature of raw material extraction, supply chains, applied and theoretical sciences etc. I mean it's in our nature to process these thoughts because we're always looking for some missing connection, a forgotten or undiscovered niche, (edit to add, not to forget the human and environmental impacts of all of this as another user mentioned) etc etc.

I do think there's plenty of folk who might see this as eye opening, especially the average consumer for whom devices just materialise out of money. I imagine the philosophical angle would be more thought provoking for someone who hasn't sat down and thought about it a whole heap.

(second and final edit to add - on more thought I think if they made the map dynamic, and put the prose on little markers, that would be way more impactful to me at least as I think the spatial context would add a ton of value).

[uoaei]

If it feels obvious, you may be missing the point. Or else, you may simply be rationally contemplating the existence of the lesson without actually considering the lesson itself.

If the document is "supposed" to be anything, it is as an entryway into contemplative empathy with the full-scale complex system we inhabit, the wonder that a civilization can be organized to the point where this is possible, and the explicit recognition of what experiences a loss when you want a gain. It is to understand that the comforts we've come to feel entitled to are built by extractive processes, whether material (mining, etc.) or otherwise (labor exploitation, opportunity costs, etc.).

[kelseyfrog]

The real point of it for me is the framing. It's the idea that any object, tangible or intangible, and be analyzed in this way because everything has multiple dimensions of relations linking it to every other thing eventually. It's the equivalent of being able to pick up the graph of human relations by a single point and letting all other relations branch from that point like a tree. There's obviously root nodes that are more interesting than others just as there are more spanning trees more interesting than all the others.

[jart]

It's a Factorio prerequisite chart of all the things you need to build before you can build Alexa. Although the pentagram plus seemingly unrelated fractal and u.s. wage diagrams make it look a bit strange. Needs more quantum mechanics and Gödel.

[beaconstudios]

It seems it's supposed to evoke how everything is causally connected. Unfortunately, just pointing that out doesn't really do much without other things to connect to; "everything is connected" is just a truism without tying it back to something that flies in the face of that fact. Cybernetics is cool, but it's meant to be applied, not some hypothetical interesting factoid like pop-sci quantum mechanics.

[elie_CH]

Do you really think that child slavery for sourcing cobalt is "obvious" to most iPhone users? I doubt that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJ8me22NVs&list=PLnUeRIXMDq...