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A review by dkatreads
Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara
4.0
3.5 If I’m honest, this book was one long experience of wanting to scream and rage and grieve for the violence that the cobalt industry is wielding against the people of the Congo. There is no accountability. Our collective society has deemed these image bearers as cannon fodder for our modern lives. It is a true horror.
The lesson: Capitalism is a scourge. The lack of a path toward human dignity is not a result of any individual’s choices—it is impossible to create a system that produces flourishing in the midst of such brute and destructive resource extraction without a fundamental reordering of the economic incentive structure of the industry. We need a new imagination for how we live together, and in this world which holds its treasures out for us to grab and wield, or perhaps, cherish.
I’m grateful for the stories that make these atrocities real to those of us in the west who bear responsibility for our insatiable appetite for consumption. Our consumer demand kills. We enable the degradation of human life across the world in a scale that would crush us if we encountered it with our own eyes. We must learn to see this. And we must choose joyful non-participation, resistance, and generosity instead.
This book is important, and I have so much respect for the author’s years long dedication to researching for it. But, as for its form, I feel it was haphazardly assembled. The author often relied on cheap, cheesy transitions and cliff-hanger hooks which felt a little inappropriate for the context. It read like a very long Atlantic article but with less insight. I’m grateful for the historical context, but I did want more. Also, I would’ve benefited from a better explanation of how consumer facing tech companies utilize cobalt in their production, and I think it would’ve been better served at the end to provide a kind of “what to do next” after reading. Finishing this book left me feeling despoiled of hope for the Congo—but perhaps this the most accurate window Kara could provide of the life of an artisanal cobalt miner in the DRC.
The lesson: Capitalism is a scourge. The lack of a path toward human dignity is not a result of any individual’s choices—it is impossible to create a system that produces flourishing in the midst of such brute and destructive resource extraction without a fundamental reordering of the economic incentive structure of the industry. We need a new imagination for how we live together, and in this world which holds its treasures out for us to grab and wield, or perhaps, cherish.
I’m grateful for the stories that make these atrocities real to those of us in the west who bear responsibility for our insatiable appetite for consumption. Our consumer demand kills. We enable the degradation of human life across the world in a scale that would crush us if we encountered it with our own eyes. We must learn to see this. And we must choose joyful non-participation, resistance, and generosity instead.
This book is important, and I have so much respect for the author’s years long dedication to researching for it. But, as for its form, I feel it was haphazardly assembled. The author often relied on cheap, cheesy transitions and cliff-hanger hooks which felt a little inappropriate for the context. It read like a very long Atlantic article but with less insight. I’m grateful for the historical context, but I did want more. Also, I would’ve benefited from a better explanation of how consumer facing tech companies utilize cobalt in their production, and I think it would’ve been better served at the end to provide a kind of “what to do next” after reading. Finishing this book left me feeling despoiled of hope for the Congo—but perhaps this the most accurate window Kara could provide of the life of an artisanal cobalt miner in the DRC.