It's that last sentence that should give us pause. In a front page NY Times article today, In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad, Charles Duhigg and David Barboza report at exhaustive length on the often abysmal working conditions in the Chinese factories where Apple's products are manufactured.
The timing of the piece does not seem accidental considering the focus on creating domestic manufacturing jobs in Barack Obama’s state of the union speech on Tuesday and a concerted spate of news coverage about companies, like Keen shoes, that are doing just that through "insourcing."
But Apple got to be America's most valuable company through a very aggressive approach to outsourcing, which is well documented in the Times article. The problem is, so far there hasn't been a compelling business reason for them to really change their practices, "Ultimately, say former Apple executives, there are few real outside pressures for change. Apple is one of the most admired brands. In a national survey conducted by The New York Times in November, 56 percent of respondents said they couldn’t think of anything negative about Apple. Fourteen percent said the worst thing about the company was that its products were too expensive. Just 2 percent mentioned overseas labor practices."
As compelling as the Times reporting is, I found the recent episode of This American Life, Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory, far more revelatory on the emotional aspects of our relationship to Apple (and to technology in general) and its dark industrial underside. Mike Daisey is a monologist and an unabashed Apple fanboy. He's the kind of Apple geek that follows macrumors.com like sports fans play fantasy football. He says, "the best way I know to describe it is to say that I am at the level of geekishness where to relax after performances like this one, sometimes I will go back to my apartment and I will field strip my MacBook Pro into its 43 component pieces. I will clean them with compressed air, and I will put them back together again. It soothes me."
And, like millions of other enthralled Apple customers, he would have happily remained "a worshiper in the cult of Mac," but for an article on an Apple news site about the accidental inclusion on a new iPhone of some content no one was ever intended to see. The writer of the article discovered when they powered up their new device that there were four photos on the camera, and the writer posted them online. They were, in themselves, unremarkable pictures. Apparently, part of the testing process when each unit is completed involves taking a few random pictures to make sure the camera works—and then deleting them—before the final polishing and boxing is done. But these four photos hadn't been deleted. When Mike Daisey saw the pictures, he was transfixed. Not because they showed anything overtly horrific. They didn't. But because they brought his attention to the existential fact of the people who make the products that he so loves.
What followed for Daisey, as told in The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a one-person show that was excerpted and adapted for This American Life, was a journey of finding out for himself who these people are and what their working conditions are like. Whereas the Times focused on work weeks longer than 60 hours, exposure to toxic chemicals and factory explosions from volatile aluminum dust, Daisey remarked on the surprising amount of handwork that goes into the products, "in a place where the cost of labor is effectively zero, anything that can be made by hand is made by hand. No matter how complex your electronics are, they are assembled by thousands and thousands of tiny little fingers working in concert." Countering our first-world fetishism for the handmade, Daisey describes the physical reality of the workers, "I talk to people whose joints in their hands have disintegrated from working on the line, doing the same motion hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times. It's like carpal tunnel on a scale we can scarcely imagine. And you need to know that this is eminently avoidable. If these people were rotated monthly on their jobs, this would not happen."
This American Life host Ira Glass puts Daisey's perspective on Apple in context. He quotes economist Paul Krugman and talks to NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff, both of whom say that on balance, the world is better with sweatshops than without, but that's not really the debate that interests me. What interests me is how this kind of content effects public opinion, and what happens when something that is wildly popular begins to have a negative undertow.
Just as the price of oil doesn't take into account the true environmental costs associated with its manufacture and use, so too do the prices of Apple products not account for the moral costs associated with their making. And Americans are unaware of these costs by a wide margin. But what is the potential emotional cost to Apple of their labor practices? Their great success has come from feats of emotional design that make people admire, desire and acquire their products.
Let's visualize this as if it were a geometry proof:
Imagine a downward pointing triangle, with three vertices, A, C and B.
Let A=Apple and C=Consumers, and let the line A-C represent the growing number of happy Apple customers.
Let B=“But how are they made?" and imagine that A-C runs horizontal at the top edge of the triangle and that B is at the bottom of the figure.
Right now, the top edge of that downward pointing triangle is floating at the waterline of consciousness. We see Apple. We see growing millions of happy customers. We see innovation and economic growth. We don't see what's beneath the brushed aluminum surfaces of the iPad and iPhones and we don't see the social cost (below the waterline of our cognition) of what it takes to make them.
In the emerging field of quantum computing the equivalent of a bit (called a qubit) can be either on, off or BOTH on and off. Let's imagine that all of these negative associations with the manufacture of Apple products are a qubit that has so far been in the off state and all of the positive stuff, our love for Apple, has been in the on state. Listening to Mike Daisey you can understand, emotionally, what happens when those two bits are both on at the same time.
And that's the place that we're in. We're in a twist, a lover's triangle. The competitive pressures that create the horrific working conditions are also what enables Apple to come out with new and improved products every year at prices that are expensive, but still within the bounds of mass consumption. If an iPad was twice as expensive, we wouldn't love it quite so much because it would feel unjustifiably elitist. We would think twice about upgrading to the new iPhone if it cost as much as it would if manufactured in a way we could love as much as the iPhone itself.
