Magic has its costs
Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory, which was originally titled Where Your Crap Comes From, is a monologue adapted for radio from Mike Daisey’s The Agony and Ecstacy of Steve Jobs. It explores his visit to Shenzhen, China and his revelations about the origins of his iDevices.
In Against Nostalgia, an op-ed published the day after Steve Jobs’ death, Mr. Daisey relays this experience:
I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in the production of electronics. I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he’d never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, “It’s a kind of magic.”
Mr. Jobs’s magic has its costs.
This unearthing of what I knew to be true but pretended didn’t exist is a shock. The existential angst it produces is almost incomprehensible — that this is a story being told about people on the same planet boggles the mind.
It seems Apple is trying to help improve this situation, but it is such a giant mountain to climb. The lack of basic human rights these Chinese citizens have is appaling, yet it seems many of them are grateful for the opportunity. Or maybe we just tell ourselves that.
After all, magic, like life, is merely an illusion.
