The iPad goes on sale in the UK tomorrow, and there will doubtless be countless smug faces like the one above, leaving Apple stores with new devices that will enhance their lives and make everything go so smoothly and swimmingly.
So spare a thought for the exhausted workers who make these devices for us in conditions so bad that there have been a number of suicides at the Foxconn factory producing them.
Talking and music are banned during shifts, which last at least 10 hours. Workers must perform a certain number of repetitive operations per shift, under the eye of allegedly harsh military-style supervisors.
“Foxconn’s management is totally inhuman,” one worker told the Reuters news agency. Another said: “They don’t treat workers as humans.”
As I noted in the previous post, “the more machine-like we make ourselves, the more like machines we will treat one another, and the more of us will end up consigned to skips and rubbish dumps as broken people.”
Apple’s taxonomy has been based on the compounding of ‘i’ with it’s devices: iMac, iPod, iPhone… It’s mission is to fuse the self with its technologies, but appears to have ignored the tragic by-product of that fusion: machines that make the Western self more productive are produced by Eastern selves that are treated as machines, and cheap ones at that. I mean, what machine could you build that would run for 30p per hour?
This is the shadow that haunts every cheap device you buy, the footprint that follows us as we make calls and update our statuses. It is time we paid fair wages to people who make our lives better. In current form, this is slavery by a different name: virtual reality.
Comments
5 responses to “SuiciPad | Expensive Machines Made by Cheap People”
an excellent post!
I want to explore “leaving Apple stores with new devices that will enhance their lives and make everything go so smoothly and swimmingly” some more. I find it interesting that we are investing in these devices, justifying them to ourselves to the point of endlessly discussing their ‘magical’ properties, fetishizing them to the point we don’t even have to surf pr0n on them anymore to reach climax. We go into huge personal debt to do so, in many aspects–money, time, attention, dignity, faith, conscious. We are so clearly at the end of an empire, consuming at an offensive and unsustainable rate, we haven’t realized yet that the Big Mac is gone and we have already eaten half of our own arm.
Just to put things a little bit more into perspective. Foxconn has more then 483.000 employees. And Apple is only one of many companies producing products with them and among all the others one of the most transparent about their very strict vendor guidelines which one can follow here: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=107357&p=irol-govHighlights
Having said that, I definitely think that we have to get a much better feeling for the complete life of our products, where they come from and who was involved creating them. As much as we should understand what’s happening with them after we throw them out.
Disclaimer: I’m writing this on my new iPad which arrived today. My perspective may be biased.
Hm, my comment above might come over cold against the ten suicide victims that Foxconn had this year. I think every single one of them is a disaster and Foxconn is doing all the wrong things to stop these actions from happening.
So right.
And yes, Johannes, I’m aware they’re a huge corporation. It’s just that with all the media hype here in the UK (which has probably passed in the US) it’s rather grotesque knowing that the conditions of those who’ve made these products are so bad. It is a fetish, an obsession…