Calculating the cumulative mass of all the smartphones bought each week.
Weight Not, Want Not is a Twitter bot created by Adriaan Odendaal.
Waste Not, Want Not is a bot that tweets the amount of phones we as consumers collectively buy from the 3 biggest vendors each week (the data is taken from average weekly phone sales for each company over the four quarters of 2017). However, this bot does not tweet in the ‘quarterly-report’ measure of ‘units sold’, but rather in terms of how much material mass has been consumed (and by extension, produced). This becomes increasingly pertinent as the rising numbers in the quarterly-reports of the ever-growing tech-behemoths is underlined by a mass-production model founded on planned-obsolescence and a fetishization of ‘cutting-edge’ technological novelty and upgrade successions.
The purpose of this bot is to hint (however lightly) at what our digital devices fundamentally are: commodified material goods mass produced from increasingly limited natural resources.
