The Price of Progress: Modern Day Slavery is Alive and Well
- th1sandth8tcom
- Oct 9
- 11 min read
The Price of Progress: Modern Day Slavery is Alive and Well
The Blood Behind The Battery – I Killed a Congolese Child Writing This
T&T Curated Resources on Cobalt Red:
Clip Spotlight: Siddharth Kara on JRE 'The Disturbing Reality of Cobalt Mining for Rechargeable Batteries'
Article Spotlight by The Guardian: Apple and Google named in US lawsuit over Congolese child cobalt mining deaths
Book Spotlight: Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
"Throughout the whole history of slavery, going back centuries, never in human history has there been more suffering that has generated more profit and was linked to the lives of more people around the world than what's happening in the Congo right now." — Siddharth Kara
Table of Contents:
Prologue — The Weight of a Battery
Slavery still exists and death is ubiquitous in the cobalt mines of the Congo.
I. The Thunderbolt
Siddharth Kara’s 2018 discovery, the scale of global cobalt dependency, slavery rebranded through modern supply chains.
II. The Invisible Chain
Life inside the mines—child labor, toxic exposure, and displacement; “clean cobalt” as corporate myth; the moral distance between Silicon Valley and Kolwezi.
III. The Architects of Silence
How tech giants conceal complicity; public-relations theater versus ground reality; the continuity between colonial extraction and modern capitalism.
IV. The Simple Math of Cruelty
One dollar a day versus a billion a day; China’s monopoly on cobalt refining; indifference elevated to policy.
V. The Mirror
Consumer complicity reflected through history; parallels to eighteenth-century abolition; the possibility of a digital-age emancipation.
VI. The Weight of Truth
Media silence and systemic apathy; Kara’s rejected op-eds; truth as both burden and beginning of reform.
VII. The Choice
Corporate willful blindness; moral responsibility of consumers; outrage as the seed of meaningful change.
Epilogue — The Reckoning
History’s verdict on progress; the moral cost of convenience; acknowledgment as the first step toward abolition.
Abstract
Every charge of a phone, laptop, or electric car is powered by invisible suffering. Beneath the promise of “clean energy” lies an industry built on coercion, poverty, and child labor. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, hundreds of thousands of human beings dig for cobalt—the essential mineral in every lithium-ion battery—under conditions indistinguishable from slavery. Drawing on the book Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara, his 2023 Joe Rogan Experience interview, and investigative reporting from The Guardian (all linked above), this essay exposes how the global tech economy has reinvented colonial extraction for the digital age. It argues that human slavery has not vanished from Earth but has actually evolved: the plantation became a pit and the cotton became cobalt. The piece concludes that the world’s “green revolution” will remain stained with blood until corporations confront their complicity and consumers reclaim their conscience.
Prologue: The Weight of a Battery
In the southeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a tunnel collapses at least once a week. Fifty men and boys—caked in red dust, lungs scorched by cobalt and copper—vanish into the abyss. There are no rescue teams, no headlines, no records of the dead. The mine owners will call it an accident, if they call it anything at all. Within weeks, the cobalt those men died digging will be refined in China, packed into lithium-ion batteries, and shipped across oceans to power the world's most glamorous devices. Their deaths will charge our phones, our laptops, our electric cars. The story ends in our pockets. That is the quiet miracle of globalization: tragedy converted into technology. And it is the hidden cost of progress.
I. The Thunderbolt
When Siddharth Kara, author of Cobalt Red, first visited the Congo in 2018, he expected to gather data for academic research. Instead, he found something so grotesque and urgent that he abandoned neutrality altogether. "Never in human history," Kara revealed, "has there been more suffering that generated more profit and was linked to the lives of more people than what's happening in the Congo right now."
The statistics are staggering: Seventy-five percent of the world's cobalt comes from this one region. Tens of thousands of people—many of them children—dig through toxic earth for a dollar or two a day. The mineral they unearth is indispensable to every lithium-ion battery on the planet. There is no smartphone, laptop, or electric vehicle that functions without it. The world's clean-energy transition, that great promise of salvation from climate catastrophe, is being built on a foundation of human misery.
We are accustomed to thinking of slavery as something conquered and buried, a dark chapter closed by enlightenment and law. Kara's research suggests it never left; it merely changed form. The slave ships became supply chains, the auction blocks became employment agencies, and the whip became the poverty line that forces parents to bring their children into the pits.
II. The Invisible Chain
Cobalt gives modern devices their efficiency and endurance. It is the bloodstream of the digital world, the secret ingredient that allows batteries to hold their charge through countless cycles. Without it, the entire infrastructure of "renewable energy" collapses. Yet in the Congo, the process of extracting this miracle mineral looks less like the future and more like the thirteenth century.
There are no machines in the artisanal mines, no protective gear, no regulated shifts. Men dig with rebar and shovels through tunnels that stretch hundreds of feet underground, following veins of cobalt by candlelight. Women and children sift gravel with bare hands, searching for the telltale blue-green tinge that signals payday. The youngest workers are sometimes five years old, their nimble fingers perfect for sorting ore, their bodies small enough to squeeze into spaces where adults cannot reach.
Entire villages have been displaced to make room for the pits. The air reeks of metallic dust that burns the throat and scars the lungs. The water runs green with chemical runoff, poisoning the soil for generations. Every week, another tunnel caves in. Every day, another body disappears beneath the earth. The casualties are not counted because the dead have no documentation, no birth certificates, no proof they ever existed beyond the memories of those who mourn them.
And above this carnage, the world's most powerful corporations polish their reputations. On paper, Apple, Tesla, Samsung, and Google all have "zero-tolerance" policies for child labor. They publish glossy sustainability reports and pledge allegiance to international human rights standards. In reality, their supply chains snake straight into the Congolese soil, through a deliberately opaque network of middlemen and refineries designed to obscure the origin of their materials.
"Clean cobalt" is an utter illusion—a marketing phrase designed to ease consumer guilt while changing nothing on the ground. Kara calls it the greatest public-relations lie of the modern era. The companies know exactly where their cobalt comes from. They have satellite imagery, audit reports, and local contacts. What they lack is not information but incentive.
The distance between Silicon Valley and Kolwezi is not just geographic; it's moral. It's the space between quarterly earnings calls and quarterly tunnel collapses, between diversity statements and disposable lives.
III. The Architects of Silence
Corporate silence is rarely ignorance. It's strategy.
When pressed about their cobalt sources, tech executives deploy a choreographed response: expressions of concern, commitments to investigation, promises of reform. Then nothing changes. The same mines operate, the children continue to dig and bodies continue to disappear. The cycle continues because disrupting it would mean confronting uncomfortable truths about the entire architecture of modern capitalism.
To fix the problem would mean slowing production, confronting shareholders, and admitting that every innovation they've sold as "sustainable" is drenched in blood. It would mean acknowledging that their green revolution is powered by brown children dying in holes no different from cattle in a slaughterhouse. So they say nothing substantive. They issue another glossy DEI statement, fund another ineffective audit, and hope the news cycle moves on. "The truth," Kara told Joe Rogan in a conversation that should have shaken the world awake, "is that not one entity up the chain is doing remotely enough to ensure the human rights of the people in the Congo. They know. They just don't care—because they are poor, wretched Africans that no one cares about."
It is a sentence that lands like a thunderbolt because it strips away the corporate euphemisms and reveals the continuity of history. The same logic that fueled the transatlantic slave trade still animates global capitalism: maximize profit, externalize pain, and disguise exploitation as efficiency. The only difference is that today's slavers have better PR departments.
King Leopold II once ruled the Congo as a personal colony, mutilating those who failed to meet his rubber quotas. Today's colonizers wear Patagonia vests and speak at climate conferences. They don't cut off hands; they cut off villages from their ancestral lands. They don't brandish whips; they brandish contracts that no one can read. The extractive principle has never changed; only the branding has evolved.
IV. The Math Behind The Cruelty
The arithmetic of this atrocity is almost too obscene to comprehend.
A Congolese miner earns roughly one dollar per day. Apple earns about one billion dollars per day. You could multiply every miner's wage by ten and barely dent the company's quarterly profits. The cost of providing protective equipment, building schools, ensuring clean water, and paying living wages would amount to what Tim Cook makes in a morning. Instead, billions are spent on advertising campaigns celebrating "sustainability" and "diversity," on lobbying governments to look the other way, on constructing elaborate supply chain obfuscations that provide plausible deniability.
Meanwhile, the cobalt industry is effectively controlled by Chinese conglomerates such as Glencore and CATL, which refine three-quarters of the global supply. China controls 80% of the production of raw copper and cobalt and produces 75% of the world's supply of refined cobalt. CATL alone has one-third of the market share of cobalt batteries. They operate with minimal oversight, maximum efficiency, and zero concern for human rights.
The United States, despite its moral posturing about democracy and human dignity, has no mining presence in the region. Not a single American company operates a cobalt mine in the Congo. The absence is not technological - it's ideological. It's easier to outsource the exploitation and pretend it's someone else's problem. American companies can claim clean hands while their suppliers do the dirty work.
The cruelty is not the product of complexity. It's the product of indifference. Every executive who has ever flown over the Congo in a private jet could have stopped, could have looked, could have changed things. They chose not to. They chose quarterly earnings over human beings. They chose willful blindness over moral sight.
V. The Mirror
But we cannot outsource the blame.
Every one of us who owns a smartphone or drives an electric car participates in this chain. Every charge of the battery extends the lifespan of a system built on suffering. We are not perpetrators, perhaps, but we are beneficiaries. The cobalt that powers our conveniences is contaminated with blood, and we consume it daily.
It is tempting to look away—to argue that this is too big, too distant, too entrenched to fix. We tell ourselves that individual choices don't matter, that the system is beyond reform, that someone else will solve this. But history offers a different precedent.
In 1787, a group of ordinary citizens in London founded the world's first abolition movement. They were not wealthy or powerful. They were simply awake. They believed that if the public saw the truth of slavery, they would reject it. They organized, they agitated, they refused to let comfortable society ignore uncomfortable truths. Within decades, they had transformed the moral landscape of an empire.
We are overdue for another awakening—a digital-age abolition. The problem is not that we use technology; it's that we use it blindly. We've accepted a devil's bargain: infinite convenience in exchange for infinite cruelty somewhere else. But contracts signed in ignorance can be voided by awareness.
Kara proposes simple solutions that would cost these companies almost nothing: pay miners ten dollars a day instead of one. Provide basic protective equipment. Build schools and clinics. Limit working hours. Invest in the communities being stripped of their resources. These reforms would cost what Apple makes in a single day. Yet they remain undone because no one with power demands them.
VI. The Weight of Truth
Somewhere, right now, a tunnel in the Congo is collapsing. A mother is screaming for her son. A teenager is suffocating in dust. And somewhere else, a battery hits one hundred percent.
We tell ourselves that slavery ended, yet Kara’s expose shows it was simply redesigned. The plantation became a pit, the whip became hunger, the cotton became cobalt. The moral architecture remains intact. We've just gotten better at hiding it, at keeping the suffering at a safe distance from the consumption.
Progress without empathy is regression disguised as innovation. If the twentieth century was about speed, perhaps the twenty-first should be about conscience. The question is not whether technology can save us—it's whether we can save ourselves from what technology conceals.
When Kara tried to publish op-eds about cobalt mining during the pandemic—when demand soared and conditions worsened—major news outlets turned him away. "You're coming at companies that have too much advertising," he was told. The same publications that run endless features on corporate social responsibility won't touch stories that reveal corporate social destruction. The truth can be poisonous for business, and business funds journalism. But truth has a way of surfacing, like bodies from a collapsed mine. Every child who dies for cobalt, every family destroyed by displacement, every ecosystem ruined by runoff—these are not externalities. They are the real cost of our digital age, the price tag we've hidden from ourselves.
VII. The Choice
The executives know. They all know.
Kara has offered to personally arrange trips for CEOs to visit the mines. He's promised to introduce them to families, to show them the hospitals full of children with cobalt lung, to stand with them at the edge of a pit where five-year-olds dig for the minerals that power executive bonuses. Not one has accepted.
Because to see is to be responsible. To know is to be complicit. To witness is to be forced to choose between profit and humanity. And that's a choice they've already made, every quarter, every year, every time they look at their balance sheets instead of the bodies beneath them.
But we have not yet made our choice. Not fully. Not finally.
We can continue pretending our convenience is clean, that our progress is pure, that our batteries are bloodless. We can keep telling ourselves that this is just how the world works, that suffering somewhere else is the price of comfort here, that we can't change systems this vast and entrenched.
Or we can decide that Kara is right: that things would be different if we made them different. That enough outraged people can override indifferent corporations. That the same species capable of tolerating children being buried alive is also capable of stopping it.
Epilogue: The Reckoning
History will not judge us by the brightness of our screens but by the darkness we were willing to ignore. Future generations will not ask what apps we used but what atrocities we accepted. They will wonder how we could hold such sophisticated devices without feeling the weight of the hands that dug for them.
The blood of the Congo powers our lives. That is not a metaphor. It is a fact. Every smartphone contains traces of suffering. Every electric vehicle runs on exploitation. Every battery that promises a clean future is charged with a violent present.
But acknowledgment is the beginning of abolition. Sight is the start of solutions. The same connectivity that depends on cobalt can be used to expose its costs. The same platforms that profit from pain can be turned into tools of transformation.
The children in the Congo cannot tweet their suffering. They cannot post their pain. They cannot share their stories. They die in silence while we live in noise. But their silence is not consent. Their invisibility is not acceptance. They are waiting for us to see them, to say their suffering matters, to insist that progress without justice is not progress at all.
Main References
Kara, Siddharth. Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. St. Martin's Press, 2023.
"The Joe Rogan Experience #1914: Siddharth Kara." Spotify, 2023.
"Apple and Google named in U.S. lawsuit over Congolese child cobalt mining deaths." The Guardian, December 16, 2019.
Additional research and field reports by Siddharth Kara, Rights Lab, University of Nottingham.
*** See the spreadsheet system at the top with links to dozens of articles, papers, clips, podcasts, docs, etc on the Cobalt Red Crisis ***
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