Butterflies
DOnate YOur Computer
Something something environment computer.
Computers are good. They’ve transformed the way we live, work, slack off and masturbate. They’ve allowed millions of Pongs to be Pung, helped plumbers diversify their skillsets, and spellcheked are grammar good. With the arrival of the Internet they brought billions of people closer together, helped misinform racist uncles everywhere, and facilitated the rise of fascism because Mark Zuckerberg got cucked. Computers are mostly good. Maybe we should ban them.
Naturally, we’ve brought our usual dipshittery to the digital revolution. In addition to the whole fascism thing, more than half the world’s population lacks access to the Internet, and gender inequality means women and girls are less likely to be digitally literate and far less likely to work in software development and computing. Meanwhile, on the over-indulged side of the world we complain about obsolescence and replace our computers every 40 minutes, sending them to landfill as part of the 50 million metric tons of electronic waste we crap out every year. Happily, there is a solution to all of these problems.
We can donate our old desktops, laptops and tablets to people that recondition them and send them out into the world to do good. In Europe we can give to Computer Aid, which takes donated computers from companies and individual human people and sends them to community projects in more than 100 countries. It reckons it’s shipped more than 260,000 computers, reaching 14.5 million people. We can give to the Turing Trust which does much the same in different places, taking desktops, laptops, tablets, peripherals and cables, and shipping them out to community projects in Africa and throughout the UK. Or we can check the Restart Project’s big list of local community groups and send our shit to one of them. In Americee, you can give to Computers With Causes who’ll refurbish your old computer and give it to a bunch of community groups and organisations including zoos and aquariums, and I for one would like to see an octopus playing Fruit Ninja.
Once they’re out in the world your ex-computers will be doing some full-on proper good. They’ll help bring people online, improve their digital literacy, smash the digital patriarchy and, unfortunately, help millions of gullible CHUDs be redpilled by Q-Anon batshittery. If your computer is too old to be useful it’ll be dismantled and recycled, reducing the amount of electronic clag we send to landfill and giving Wall-E more time to sexualise his workplace relationships.
That’s all good stuff. Go do it.
Donate your computer
Get someone online
Change their life
Photo credit: The Zero
Environmentalism
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