Technoculture

The iPad is here. But the question on everybody’s lips – “Is it any good?” – is maybe a little understated. Ask yourself this… is it worth dying for? Because people are. Let’s take a stroll into the dubious world of Apple – because it is ultimately our own.

“It’s Magical™”

(Steve Jobs)

This week, Li Hai, a 19 year old Chinese factory worker, began another 15 hour shift, as he had done every single morning this year, meeting the frenzied demands of Apple’s hungry cult of technology. It had been a “good” year for his company, Foxconn, after scoring the contract to be the main producer of the latest Must Have™: the “revolutionary” and (let’s not forget) “magical” iPad. You could easily presume that these magical devices form in rose petal cocoons upon golden clouds in a cybersky, their freshly glossed screens glistening in the sunlight, waiting to revolutionise the life of yet another middle-class Westerner. But, in fact, it is the hundreds of thousands of Chinese factory workers, like young Li, who deliver us our 21st century Salvation™. Li’s factory, in the province of Hunan, is home to 300,000 such workers. They slave tirelessly through 7 day working weeks – forbidden from talking or listening to music, most not even given a stool, and under military-style supervisors armed with iron bats – and all to earn less than what most us make checking facebook in between lunchtime and clock-off (building an iPad earns you around 50 cents per hour). They are not given a magical device for themselves, nor could they dream of affording their own. They are the faceless, hidden cogs of the Apple Machine™. And they are dying.
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