For a while, I didn't really understand how optical mice worked. A ball mouse - outdated as it is - is pretty easy to grasp. The ball rotates some shafts with discs on them, and an encoder reads the discs. Even if you have zero grasp of electronics, it's not too difficult to understand what's going on mechanically.
But an optical mouse is solid state - nothing's moving around. I watched a video recently that explained how it worked, and it turns out the little optical mouse sensor - is a camera. A very low resolution, black and white camera, but still. A combination of special optics and computer vision algorithms track minor imperfections in the surface the mouse is resting on, and can determine how far it's moved as a result.
I bring this up because, on the face of it, that's a pretty complicated way to do things, right? It makes sense, and honestly I'm not sure it's possible to do it any other way, but the idea that every optical mouse is a tiny camera and computer vision processor bundled into a package the size of my thumbnail seems, wrong, in a way. Like that can't possibly work at scale.
And yet, at my local electronics store, a cheap, wireless optical mouse can be had for like, $5. Five dollars! That's not just the sensor - that's the sensor, a printed circuit board and supporting components, a wireless receiver, the injection molded housing for the whole thing, the packaging.
All that, for $5.
Something I've really come to appreciate in art are authorial marks. I bought a painting from a local thrift store - something made by a local artist who presumably needed to get rid of it - and found myself fascinated by the physicality of the paint. You could run your finger over the surface and feel the peaks and valleys of the material, carved by brushstrokes. And it's fascinating to me to feel that and consider the history of the piece. Printing technology is so advanced that seeing a huge image rendered onto a poster is completely unremarkable, it divorces the effort that went into designing the image from the final result, to some degree. Here, there's clear, physical evidence of the work that went into creating the piece - at one point, human hands touched this, here's what they did.
In modern society, almost everything we interact with is a printed poster - in the sense that, the work that went into creating it is harder to grasp. Not impossible, but it's easy to take for granted the fact that people make things.
Assembly lines can be almost entirely automated, and I don't doubt a lot of machinery was involved in making that optical mouse I mentioned before. But even if robots did 99% of the work, there's usually human workers around to fill in the gaps, and that's assuming they are using robots to make it. Even ignoring that - someone had to have designed the mouse. Somewhere in the world is a CAD file of the mouse's body, printed circuit, and packaging.
Yet elsewhere, some team had to trace out the logic of the integrated circuits involved in the chips on the mouse. Software was written at some point to interface with a computer's USB port - it's probably the same software shipped on every wireless mouse, but it had to have come from somewhere. Someone was responsible for overseeing the milling of the tool used in the injection mold, a crew was involved in producing the resin used in that mold - it keeps going back and back.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, didn't have a human involved in the creation process at some point.
A while back, I read a story in Make magazine about the 'TV-B-Gone'. It was a novelty TV remote with a single button - you press it, and it cycles through hundreds of infrared codes, blasting every 'turn off' signal it can to try and shut down whichever TV you have it pointed at. It's advertised purpose is to shut down TVs in places you don't want to see them. Baby's first Flipper Zero.
The article in question talked about how the creator took the concept from a prototype, all the way to full scale production, and tips aspiring inventors could follow to do the same. But one particular image stood out to me. There was a photo of the factory where TV-B-Gones were assembled, and it showed a line of workers sitting at a table, assembling components of it - all wearing clean suits, hair nets, that sort of thing.
Seeing that image, something felt... off. In my head, this sort of gimmicky product was something that just... happened. Something like a Staples easy button, fidget spinner, cheap plastic toy, they all just, existed. Or maybe robots made them. But somehow, the wires had never crossed in my brain to suggest - no, people make these things. (Usually people in China, or some other country where labor costs are cheap as hell.)
No disrespect towards the creator of the TV-B-Gone, but I think it's fair to say it's not an essential thing. It's a bit of a gag item. Annoying as it might be, if you seriously go around shutting off the TVs in restaurants and sports bars, people probably won't take too kindly to it. It's a perfect little novelty you can whip out to show off a neat trick.
But despite that - how non important it might be in the grand scheme of things - it still had people, human beings, making them at scale.
I think about e-waste a lot. Not just in terms of the stuff we throw out - but products that seem destined from day one to become garbage. That little 'flashlight' keychain you get at a conference, cheap crappy earbuds, knock-off game consoles that all play the same 100 bootleg NES games. People like Dankpods have made careers out of fishing out the last decades crap, and showing off just how crappy it is.
But it's gotten hard for me to not... sympathize? With these items, a little. The cheapest, most useless, bottom of the barrel garbage you can buy, still probably had more work involved in its creation than we'd give it credit for.
This isn't me saying this makes them valuable - the opposite, honestly. Why are we wasting our collective effort on these things? What forces of the economy creates a niche for people's lives to be spent manufacturing garbage? How many lifetimes have been wasted, toiling in a factory, making things meant to be unloved?
In college, I took a manufacturing class, where we learned how to use a milling machine, lathe, do some welding, various machine shop tasks. I'm not sure I have the patience for it, long term, but it still fascinated me. I'd also held a longstanding interest in 3d printing, up to that point, and the world of plastics manufacturing wasn't completely alien to me.
Nowadays, when I buy something, my mind almost always wonders what went into it. Looking for where the sprue was cut off from the injection molded plastic, imagining the machinery and man-hours spent making it.
That $5 optical mouse has no real note of authorship. There's a company, but it's not a known brand - and even then, there's a good chance they're just repackaging something someone else made. If you open up a select few electronics - like the Framework laptop I'm writing this on - you might find a list of people involved in it's creation printed inside somewhere, as a little easter egg, almost.
But that's only for important stuff. High end products by startups trying to change the world, one wifi-enabled juicer at a time. No one cares who made the cheap gadget. No one cares who made the e-waste.
Maybe they should.