iPhone caused suicide? Great article on the ethics involved in modern electronics
by John Biggs on July 22, 2009
Every once in a while you get a story so strange and horrible that it takes awhile to sink in. I’m talking about the suicide of a Foxconnemployee who wascaught doing something with an “iPhone prototype” and jumped out ofthe window.
Matt wrote:
So the story goes that a 25-year-old manat Foxconn - where iPhones are born - was to send 16 iPhone prototypes to Applefrom the Chinese factory, but one was lost somewhere. The Foxconn securitydepartment then proceeded to illegally search the man’s apartment andinterrogated him. But that was too much for the man that might be responsiblefor leaking a prototype of the next iPhone.
A few days ago on July 16, he jumped froma 12-story building because of the incident. It’s probably not out of therealm of possibilities that he not only was roughed up, but also lost his jobeven though that’s not mentioned in the report.
This means two things: that there is aniPhone prototype floating around (a highly dubious proposition considering thatthey would not have “mailed” any prototypes to Foxconn nor doesFoxconn particularly need prototypes from Cupertino - they only need plans andsomeone from Apple to supervise the manufacture) and that the CE industry isbuilt on false promises and exploitation. It’s financial exploitation,physical exploitation, and psychological exploitation and we’re all partof it. Human beings make the stuff we buy. We may imagine a graceful ballet of robotswelding and soldering, untouched by humans, but someone - probably a youngwoman from a rural province - is actually snapping the final parts together andtesting the screen. She sits there all day. She has a set of requirements thatshe has to check. Let me put it this way: in the 18th century watches werebuilt in factories using parts milled, piece by piece, by farmers in the Swissmountains during the winter. These pieces were sent to major cities wherehumans put the devices together. They were then sent to jewelers who put theminto cases. The process of making an iPhone is essentially exactly the same.The process of manufacturing delicate machinery has not changed since the 18thcentury and at ever step there is some sort of exploitation. The farmers werepaid pennies, the movement assemblers were paid a few more, and the consumerpaid much, much more.
Every once in a while I get a commentabout how bitter I am against the CE industry. It’s because I’vebeen watching crap float by my transom for almost a decade and I have a generalidea about what will succeed and what will fail and what failure costs in humanand economic terms. The majority of what you see is rebadged OEM garbage. YourDell netbook is the same as your HP netbook is the same as your ASUS netbook.The case and some features are different but in the end, you’re buyingpermutations of parts over and over again, ad infinitum. When we get excitedabout something it’s because it’s different.
We fall into these traps, too. We lovegadgets. We really do. But we need to gain perspective.
Today’s latest phone istomorrow’s landfill. Yet companies like Apple hide this fact by dressingtheir products in a veil of desire. Apple isn’t the only company thatdoes this but it’s the company that’s best at it. Their contractswith Foxconn clearly include absolute security and now those requirements bitthem. Perhaps the worker was deranged. Perhaps we don’t know the wholestory. What we do know is that someone died for an iPhone and that’sridiculous.
Fake Steve writes:
We all know that there’s no fuckingway in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV setsand everything else at the prices we’re paying for them. There’s noway we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyonegets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused — what we’retalking about here is our way of life. Our standard of living. You want to“fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you. Becauseeverything you own, it’s all done on the backs of millions of poor peoplewhose lives are so awful you can’t even begin to imagine them, people whowill do anything to get a life that is a tiny bit better than the shitty onethey were born into, people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in theworst of all cases, pay with their lives.
This is absolutely true. The disparitybetween the real cost of gadgetry today as compared to the 1970s and 80s isimmense. When I was growing up a TV was a major investment. Now I can go downto Best Buy - not Circuit City and CompUSA, right? - and pick one up for apittance. It’s this race to the bottom that is killing our ability tojudge when enough is enough. These things cost something. They cost lost jobsat home and draconian labor policies abroad. They cost water and energy andfossil fuels. They cost in psychological distance.
I am the guiltiest party here. I’vemade my living telling you guys about technology. I’ll keep doing it,too. For every one hundred stupid iPod docks that float by there is somethingthat will change the way we live. I’d like to be on hand to tell you aboutthe next breakthrough and to do that I have to tell you about the nextsushi-shaped USB drive. But I’m sickened by the thought that a man diedat a factory that makes the one device that I truly think has changed the waywe think about cellphones. He died to keep the next generation of that phonefrom your prying eyes. This is a reason so mundane and trivial that the mindreels.
So let’s go back to chasing thePalm Pre or the HTC Hero or the iPhone 4GS or whatever is next. Fine.It’s fun and it’s a distraction. But can we get a littleperspective? Can we accept that this stuff costs us in ways we don’t see?It costs us in terms of environmental damage and human exploitation. It costsus in terms of connections with real, living people. It threatens to turn ourchildren into e-addicted ciphers. I’m cynical and hyperbolic now becausethis is important.
I’d like your input on what kind ofcoverage you’d like to see from CG when it comes to the manufacture andsale of these gadgets. I’m planning a trip to China this summer to see allof this first hand - more on that later - and I’d like to do a littlemore on this than just run the latest press release from Anycorp on theiramazing new widget.