The Last Word On Nothing

Over the weekend, I listened to the latest episode of This American Life.  The segment was titled, “Where Your Crap Comes From” or “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.”

The entire show was devoted to an adaptation of Mike Daisey’s monologue, the Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Daisey is a self-professed technophile and Apple aficionado, and his TAL story recounts his journey to the Chinese city of Shenzhen, where his favorite Apple products are made in giantic factories. You know what comes next.

Even if you haven’t heard Daisey’s show or read Joel Johnson’s story in Wired about the string of suicides among workers at the Foxconn factory, you probably aren’t surprised by the revelations they contain. Some part of you knows that behind the shiny gadget in your pocket there’s a story that will break your heart. An ugly hole in the ground where the exotic materials were mined. A layer of oppressive smog above the factories. A low-paid, overworked laborer with a throbbing repetitive stress injury acquired by installing some doohickey on technodevices like yours.

Daisey’s account includes reports of long hours, oppressive working conditions, low wages, and on-the-job injuries. But the most poignant moment in his monologue comes after he describes some under-aged workers* he sees coming and going from a factory.

“Do you really think Apple doesn’t know? In a company obsessed with the details — with the aluminum being milled just so, the glass being fitted perfectly into the case — do you really think it’s credible that they don’t know? Or—are they just doing what we’re all doing? Do they just see what they want to see?”

Those last two sentences have stuck with me. Not just because of the whispered way that Daisey delivered them (listen here— the quote is at 23:09), but because they describe a fundamental human tendency.

We see what we want to see –the story we’ve told ourselves. Most of us want to believe we’re compassionate beings, and yet our decisions ultimately are driven by self-interest. We do the things that benefit us, and we overlook the harms our behavior inflicts on other people or society at large.

Put into an equation, the human behavioral decision process would something like this:

B (benefits to me) – C (personal costs to me)=D (decision)

If D is greater than zero (the benefits outweigh the costs), we do it —we buy the shiny gadget or take the carbon-emitting vacation or flip on the air conditioning. If D is less than zero we don’t.

In the case of Daisey’s technogadgets, it comes down to, what’s more important to us? Making sure that the human beings who produce our devices are treated fairly? Or having access to cheap crap?

The answer, of course, is cheap crap. (I’m no better than anyone else—I listened to the episode on my iPhone.)

This doesn’t mean that the users of iPhones (or any other gadgets — the problems Daisey describes were at a factory that makes products for numerous companies) are unwilling to help factory workers. I’d certainly petition Apple to improve working conditions for its factory workers, and you probably would too. I would also pay more for a device made under humane conditions, and I’d pony up extra cash for a product produced in an environmentally sustainable way — if such a method could ever be found.

But ultimately, my reasons for doing these things remain selfish — I want to silence the cognitive dissonance I felt while listening to Daisey’s story. I can do that either by seeing what I want to see (the awesomeness of my smart phone) and disregarding the rest (the plight of the factory worker).  Or I can do it by figuring out a way to ensure that my gadget purchases do not violate my values.

In the most simplistic terms, the choice would seem to be between having cheap stuff on the back of a (perhaps willingly) exploited worker or paying the true cost of that technology. Factories could cut shift hours, allow employees more breaks and institute other policies that would improve the welfare of its workers. But doing so would increase labor costs, thereby upping the price of my shiny new gadget. Perhaps they’d move the factory to a country with even cheaper labor, but surely the cost would still rise. And if an iPhone cost a thousand bucks, I’d probably decide that it was an expensive want, not a need. That might be good for the environment (I haven’t even touched on the environmental impacts of technocrap), but bad for the workers who’d be put out of work by slowing demand. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has argued that sweat shops can actually lift people in the developing world out of poverty.

And therein lies a difficult truth. Calculating the social costs of global trade is such a big, complex and confusing problem that for most of us, it’s easier just to look the other way. I listened to Daisey’s story from start to finish and was sufficiently heartbroken and enraged. But by the end of his story, my most overwhelming feeling was paralysis. I care deeply about the issues Daisey presented, but I still didn’t know what the hell I should do.

*The staff of This American Life fact-checked the allegations that Daisey makes in his piece. According to the show–listen to it here–the facts checked out, except for one. They couldn’t confirm that Foxconn or factories like it knowingly employed under-aged workers (though Apple’s own reports say that auditors did find some under-age workers in at least one facility during the time that Daisey was in China). But the harsh working conditions he described–long hours, cramped quarters and repetitive stress injuries –did check out. Apple has a supplier responsibility code. Is it enough? I don’t know.

**

Photo: by Bobu via Flickr