Buying stuff is like voting (except with money, they’re more careful with the counting). Buy a company’s product, and you’re implicitly endorsing the choices they made to get that product to market at a particular price.

Hence the furor over blood diamonds, or, as some call them, “conflict diamonds”, or as the diamond industry calls them, “post-excitement diamonds”. The focus of a recent big-budget movie, the proceeds of conflict diamonds help to fund brutal civil wars and hideous human rights violations. A years-long awareness campaign is finally penetrating the public consciousness: buy conflict diamonds, and you’re supporting murder.

But as a recent web-exclusive article from the magazine Foreign Policy makes clear, lots of other products come at the expense of human suffering and environmental damage. Their list of particularly dubious products includes some that are near and dear to my heart (and a few I could easily live without): gold jewelry (toxic pollution, human rights violations), chocolate (child labour), teak from Burma (the brutal Myanmar dictatorship), shower curtains (toxic pollution) and cell phones (buying into the violence and turmoil in the Congo).

They say cell phones, but they really mean all kinds of consumer and business electronics, relying as they do on coltan and tin. Those products include, ahem, computers. Like the ones you and I are using right now.

As much as I’d like to kid myself that tech is a nice, clean, high-karma sector, it isn’t. And it’s worth reflecting on the high cost that others pay for the low, low prices we do.