In Ridley Scotts famous 1984 Superbowl commercial for the computer company Apple, proles in dusty uniforms march toward an auditorium to watch a screen lecture from a spooky-looking bureaucrat. A runner in red shorts appears in the distance, with stormtroopers in hot pursuit. Running into the auditorium, she winds up a Thor-like mallet and smashes the screen to pieces. The ad closes with these words: On January 24th, Apple will introduce Macintosh. And youll see why 1984 wont be like 1984.
Contrast Ridley Scotts ad from the PC Jurassic era with photographs last year from Shenzhen, China, of back alleys behind a factory said to belong to Apples Taiwanese subcontractor, Foxconn. After a rash of worker suicides, anti-jumping nets were strung under employee dorm windows at a number of its inland factories, according to an article in the Xinhua International Herald Leader.
The heavily guarded Foxconn plants operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, filling orders for Apples iPhones and Ipads, with overworked labourers earning a basic salary equivalent to $4.50 Canadian a day. One of the three suicides that occurred at the plant in 2009 came after guards beat an employee who lost a prototype of the fourth generation iPhone.
Bloggers have nicknamed the factories in the city of Shenzhen the Foxconn Suicide Express, while managers have set up a suicide hotline and even hired monks to exorcise evil spirits, according to a 2010 report in The Daily Mail.
With a market capitalization of $353 billion, Apple is now the second most valuable firm in the worldgreater than Oracle, Microsoft, or even Google. The blonde amazon with the prole-liberating hammer has turned into a dominatrix in a power suit, standing astride the music and mobility market like a colossus. Has Big Brother turned out to be Big Sister?
For three decades, the firm has created and marketed stylish devices that seamlessly unite form and function, thanks to twinned competencies in hardware and software. Apple-addled artists and designers sold on the creative dimensions of Macintosh computers ended up pestering friends, family, and coworkers, as unpaid techno-evangelists for the firm. Its been the kind of street cred (and snob appeal) money cant buy. And unlike Microsoft, Apple has been unblemisheduntil recently, at leastby accusations of monopoly capitalism and aggressive tactics to reign in competitors.
Yet critics are now saying that the company is turning into the very thing it was out to destroy in its foundational myth: a monolithic technology that exploits its manufacturing base, corrals its users and intimidates its competitors.
The Foxconn troubles are only one side of the companys multifaceted PR problems. Apple is aiding police departments with an identification tool called MORIS. The Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System employs a retinal scanner and camera for scanning suspects and detecting criminals.
And if that isnt Big Brother enough, Apple is reportedly developing software that can detect when iPhone owners are using their cameras and disable the function. The technology would trigger an infrared sensor, like the kind that is often installed at concert venues, which would instruct the iPhone to shut off its camera, observes Nadia Prupis in a June report on Truthout.org. A kill switch technology in the hands of police or government would have massive implications for free speech and assembly, critics say.
The sensors could be installed anywhere from concert venues to police helmets, crippling the video and photograph capability of iPhone users.
Of course, this is minor stuff compared to suicidal workers overseasor at least, it should be. And it should be remembered that the exploitation of labour isnt limited to Apple. Foxconns other clients include Intel, Nintendo, Sony, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft and Amazon. British journalist Johann Hari has likened the working conditions in overseas electronic sweatshops to human battery farming. Without human misery in the supply chain, your nifty little iPhone or Android would probably cost at least 10 times more.
To Apples credit, a 2010 internal audit outlined offshore human rights abuses, including the violation restrictions on child labour. (Apple didnt name the suspected suppliers.) Now thoroughly integrated into the global military-industrial-entertainment complex, the successful firm would probably be considered too big too fail. But its not too big to feel the heat.
www.geoffolson.com
