Posted by Evan Osnos
Apple’s recent troubles have reached the Stewart threshold. When “The Daily Show” did a send-up of working conditions at Foxconn, the mammoth Apple manufacturer in China, Jon Stewart pointed to the news that some Foxconn workers had staged a protest and threatened to commit suicide en masse. Judging by the audience reaction to Stewart’s “Fear Factory” bit, his recent focus on the issue is in step with a dawning American sense of ickiness about what goes into the electronics we love.
The “Daily Show” piece was part of a crescendo that has plucked longstanding questions about Apple’s supply chain from the business and tech pages and thrust them into the mainstream. The radio program “This American Life” excerpted a version of “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which the monologist Mike Daisey performs his impressions of boarding a plane to Shenzhen, hiring a translator, and trying find out who made his Apple products. On Sunday, the Times subjected Apple to an exercise in economic archeology, holding up the iPhone like a shard of pottery from which to reconstruct the decline and fall of American manufacturing. (In many of these cases, Apple’s traditional refusal to respond in substance does not come off well. The approach used to appear stylishly aloof; now it just looks embarrassed.)
All of this makes it especially strange to hear that Apple had to shut down sales of the iPhone earlier this month after mobs of shoppers (and scalpers) went berserk at the store in Beijing. Huh? Is this the sweatshop-equivalent of the cognitive dissonance that allows working-class conservatives in America to imagine that Newt Gingrich has their best interests at heart?
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