Of all the titans of our new Gilded Age, the only one to attain the
status of culture hero was—and still is—Steve Jobs. This wasn’t simply a
function of his personal magnetism, though he certainly outshone such
apparently amiable schlubs as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and the
cipher that is Jeff Bezos. It was also because, unlike his fellow
creators of cyberspace, Jobs produced the tactile, palpable portals into
cyberspace. He made things—handheld objects that changed people’s
lives.
And yet, few of his fans think of Jobs as a manufacturer. Certainly,
his biographer, Water Isaacson, doesn’t. In his lengthy 2011 biography
of Jobs, there’s only one glancing reference to the massive Chinese
factories where iPhones and other Apple products are assembled—a stray
remark that Jobs once made to President Obama, saying that “Apple had
700,000 factory workers employed in China.”
If those 700,000 were employed directly by Apple, of course, then
Apple would be the world’s largest manufacturer. Instead, Apple conceals
its factories—and responsibility for the working conditions
there—behind two Chinese walls. First, it subcontracts its production
work to Foxconn, a Taiwan-based company. Second, as Joshua Freeman notes
in Behemoth, his fascinating history of factories from
18th-century Lancashire to 21st-century Guangdong, the massive factories
of Foxconn City in Southern China are off-limits to journalists and
other prying eyes. It was only the wave of worker suicides there in 2010
(many committed by workers hurling themselves from the roofs of their
dormitories, which Foxconn sought to counter by installing nets beneath
the roofs) that brought, however briefly, this immense complex of
factories to public notice.
Read the full story at The Prospect - Is Manufacturing’s Future All Used Up?
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