Listen.
No, seriously, listen to this. I just did on a two mile run, on my iPod. Yes, this last detail is important. And I'm sitting here and I should shower but I'm kind of stunned.
We think we all know these things--where our stuff comes from. We think we know it, in at least a kind of academic detail. We're not ignorant. We're up on our facts. We know.
We don't know anything. And for the most part, I don't think we feel. What happens when people are made into things and all they're worth is what they can do, how much work you can squeeze out of their muscles and bones and blood, until they're used up and thrown away. We don't use people like that in this country anymore, not for the most part. Now we don't have to look at it. It's far away, and we still get our nice things.
We need to look. We need to feel.
Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
It strikes me that one of the problems that I think we in the relatively rich, relatively comfortable First World have when we try to imagine these kinds of working conditions is that we actually often get it all wrong. We think "barbaric" and we think squalid, low-tech, mud floors and kids in filthy clothes working in bad light that blinds them, and sleeping in slums. And that happens. But that's not the whole story. And in a way, I think it's not the worst story.
What this image of electronics manufacturing in China presents us with is clean, orderly, high-tech, efficient, regulated, predictable, and rational. It's very neat. It's very tidy. It's modern.
One of the things I've been noting in all the reading on barbarism in warfare that I've been doing for my exams is that the worst barbarism, the worst mass killing, isn't frenzied. Frenzies exhaust themselves. If you want to kill a few thousand people, okay, sure, get hateful and attack them with machetes and Cold War-era machine guns. It'll be bloody and it might even be effective. Sort of. It might last a few months.
But if you want to murder millions?
You build factories.
While I'm in-country a worker at Foxconn dies after working a 34 hour shift. I wish I could say that's exceptional, but it's happened before. I only mention it because it actually happened while I was there.
I go to the dormitories--I'm a valuable potential future customer; they will show me anything I ask to see. The dormitories are cement cubes twelve foot by twelve foot, and in that space there are thirteen beds, fourteen beds, I count fifteen beds. They're stacked up like Jenga puzzle pieces, all the way up to the ceiling. The space between them is so narrow, none of us would actually fit in them. They have to slide into them like coffins. There are cameras in the rooms. There are cameras in the hallways. There are cameras everywhere.
And why wouldn't there be?
You know, when we dream of a future where the regulations are washed away and the corporations are finally free to sail above us, you don't have to dream about some sci-fi dystopian Blade Runner 1984 bullshit. You can go to Shenzhen tomorrow. They're making your crap that way today.
When I leave the factories I can feel myself being rewritten from the inside out. The way I see everything is starting to change. I keep thinking: How often do we wish more things were handmade? Oh, we talk about that all the time, don't we? I wish it was like the old days. I wish things had that human touch. But that's not true.
There are more handmade things now than there have ever been in the history of the world.
Everything is handmade. I know. I have been there. I have seen the workers laying in parts thinner than human hair, one after another after another.
Everything is handmade.
This entry was originally posted (with
comments) at my Dreamwidth.
We think we all know these things--where our stuff comes from. We think we know it, in at least a kind of academic detail. We're not ignorant. We're up on our facts. We know.
We don't know anything. And for the most part, I don't think we feel. What happens when people are made into things and all they're worth is what they can do, how much work you can squeeze out of their muscles and bones and blood, until they're used up and thrown away. We don't use people like that in this country anymore, not for the most part. Now we don't have to look at it. It's far away, and we still get our nice things.
We need to look. We need to feel.
Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
It strikes me that one of the problems that I think we in the relatively rich, relatively comfortable First World have when we try to imagine these kinds of working conditions is that we actually often get it all wrong. We think "barbaric" and we think squalid, low-tech, mud floors and kids in filthy clothes working in bad light that blinds them, and sleeping in slums. And that happens. But that's not the whole story. And in a way, I think it's not the worst story.
What this image of electronics manufacturing in China presents us with is clean, orderly, high-tech, efficient, regulated, predictable, and rational. It's very neat. It's very tidy. It's modern.
One of the things I've been noting in all the reading on barbarism in warfare that I've been doing for my exams is that the worst barbarism, the worst mass killing, isn't frenzied. Frenzies exhaust themselves. If you want to kill a few thousand people, okay, sure, get hateful and attack them with machetes and Cold War-era machine guns. It'll be bloody and it might even be effective. Sort of. It might last a few months.
But if you want to murder millions?
You build factories.
While I'm in-country a worker at Foxconn dies after working a 34 hour shift. I wish I could say that's exceptional, but it's happened before. I only mention it because it actually happened while I was there.
I go to the dormitories--I'm a valuable potential future customer; they will show me anything I ask to see. The dormitories are cement cubes twelve foot by twelve foot, and in that space there are thirteen beds, fourteen beds, I count fifteen beds. They're stacked up like Jenga puzzle pieces, all the way up to the ceiling. The space between them is so narrow, none of us would actually fit in them. They have to slide into them like coffins. There are cameras in the rooms. There are cameras in the hallways. There are cameras everywhere.
And why wouldn't there be?
You know, when we dream of a future where the regulations are washed away and the corporations are finally free to sail above us, you don't have to dream about some sci-fi dystopian Blade Runner 1984 bullshit. You can go to Shenzhen tomorrow. They're making your crap that way today.
When I leave the factories I can feel myself being rewritten from the inside out. The way I see everything is starting to change. I keep thinking: How often do we wish more things were handmade? Oh, we talk about that all the time, don't we? I wish it was like the old days. I wish things had that human touch. But that's not true.
There are more handmade things now than there have ever been in the history of the world.
Everything is handmade. I know. I have been there. I have seen the workers laying in parts thinner than human hair, one after another after another.
Everything is handmade.
This entry was originally posted (with
comments) at my Dreamwidth.