Fanboy goes after Apple, late Steve Jobs
Daisey, a monologuist in the vein of Spalding Gray and a recovering "Apple fanboy," hasn't upgraded his phone since flying to China to investigate how those smooth, beautifully designed hand-held gizmos are made.
What he found was horrific labour conditions, impossibly long hours and the use of crippling, repetitive motions. He met very young factory workers whose joints in their hands were damaged because they performed the same action thousands of times a shift.
"I was woefully ignorant most of my life. Even though I love the devices deeply, I never had any idea how they were made and never thought about it in the least," says Daisey, who had assumed robots put together his iPad and iPhone.
"I know that people in charge know about these things and chose not to address them," he adds. "And that's hard to swallow when you see the damage it does and you know how little it would take to ameliorate a high degree of human suffering."
Daisey's undercover investigation forms the backbone of his latest monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," which he began working on 16 months ago and has had to alter to acknowledge the death this month of the Apple co-founder.
"In a profound way, this will reinvent the monologue," Daisey says. "The context of it shifts so much that it will be like blowing a wind through it. I think it's going to stir up a lot of things."
While the piece specifically targets Apple, most of what he discovered is applicable to all high-tech manufacturers. Daisey has performed the new monologue for some 50,000 people from Seattle to Washington, D.C., and it is now at The Public Theater until mid-November.
The death of Jobs hasn't prompted Daisey to pull any punches. While he considers the man a visionary, he also calls him a "brutal tyrant" who "failed to think different about anything."
"When the design is really good, it connects to the human and actually creates empathy with the devices, so it's really absurd how there's no empathy between the people running the company and their own workers," says Daisey.
Jean-Michele Gregory, Daisey's frequent director and also his wife, says her husband's sense of betrayal is heightened by his great respect for Apple and his belief that Jobs could have fundamentally changed the lives of his workers but chose not to.
"Steve Jobs really was a hero to Mike and I think there was a part of him that really hoped that perhaps the fact of this monologue might actually cause Steve to change the way that he practices business," she says.
Daisey's eyes were opened when, posing as a businessman, he travelled to the Chinese industrial zone of Shenzhen and interviewed hundreds of workers outside the gates of the secretive Foxconn Technology Group, the world's largest electronics contract manufacturer.
A string of suicides at the heavily regimented factories have drawn attention to conditions faced by workers inside. Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard have all announced intentions to look into Foxconn's working conditions.
Daisey isn't holding his breath. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak saw the monologue and apparently cried, but Daisey says Apple hasn't changed its practices. And Daisey says that Tim Cook, Jobs' hand-picked successor, is part of the problem. "Tim Cook is personally responsible for the deals with Foxconn and the way things are set up today," he says.
Having to confront how his beloved devices are assembled has profoundly changed Daisey, who, simply as a way to relax, used to strip his MacBook Pro down to its 43 component parts and then reassemble it.
"It ruined my hobby," says Daisey. "It died the way that things we love often die: We still go through the motions, but fundamentally the connection is not what it was. And so I don't take the pleasure that I used to from my devices at all."
To those who argue that improving conditions for workers will only jack up the costs of our phones and tablets, Daisey shakes his head. "The labour cost of an iPhone is about $8," he says. "Eight dollars! We do this thing to ourselves where we make excuses for why we don't do anything, why we don't hold anyone accountable."
Daisey, who performs his monologues seated at a desk and using notes, has previously tackled everything from dysfunctional dot-coms to the international financial crisis. A movie has been made of his monologue "If You See Something Say Something" and Daisey recently pushed the boundaries of his art with a 24-hour performance in Portland, Ore.
His work, which combines personal insight, historical digressions and gonzo journalism, has propelled him across the world, from the South Pacific island of Tanna to the site in the New Mexico desert where an atomic bomb was tested. His style is pugnacious, but he's also funny and touching.
"I see my job is to search for the things in my life that I'm obsessed with and look for things that are in collision in the world and then look for things that I think my society isn't talking about," he says.
The burly former Maine native says he doesn't judge his audience, even if they decide to pick up the new iPhone 4S after the show. Daisey says he'd be perfectly satisfied if everyone who buys a high-tech gadget knows how it was made.
"My job is to shine a light on and through something," he says. "My job isn't actually to stop people from buying devices. My job is to ensure that these circumstances are part of the conversation."
He hopes one day all factories that make devices will be open to inspectors and that the world of technology will follow the lead of the organic food movement and demand changes in the way goods are manufactured. After all, a cage-free egg is more expensive to create than a cage-free iPhone.
"I do believe that, in time, there will be the electronics version of a sweatshop-free certification," says Daisey, who adds that it also makes good business sense.
These days, Daisey upgrades his software but won't shell out hundreds of dollars for a new iPad or iPhone. He knows this stance can't last forever, but there's a silver lining.
"I have to say, all the mourning for my hobby aside, there's a real joy to being freed from the infantilism of the tech world. There's a real infantilism in being obsessed with just how fast you can render a web page," he says. "I never really appreciated how imbedded I was until I stepped out of it."
Source:680news
