Some thoughts on seeing The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs for the second time

photo by Robert Cheng/CNET

I saw this sign posted in a CNET News live blog about the new iPhone, and I couldn't help but think that 34 hours is the same amount of hours a worker at Foxconn worked in a row before dying, as discussed by Mike Daisey, who was in China while this occurred, in The Agony and The Exstasy of Steve Jobs, which I saw on Thursday at The Public Theater. And I think that's exactly the connection is meant to be making in the wake of seeing the show. First let me say that I'm in now way a theater critic and am just sharing my own highly subjective thoughts on seeing the piece on two random nights in two different cities, Berkeley, and New York, and, in what I believe are two slightly different climates.

The connection to me seems especially apt because one of the sub-themes of the show, next to Steve Jobs' career ascent and Apple's rise and fall and rise, and the working conditions as Foxconn, is the culture of fandom Apple created, as evidenced by Daisey's personal story and, if anyone's been reading any of the gushing tributes to Jobs, many, many fans. It's hard to look at the 14-year-old girl in my People magazine and not think of the 14-year-olds described in the show.

I barely knew a thing about Steve Jobs' life and am not all that interested; the most irksome aspect of the coverage I've seen is the disgusting, outdated use of "illegitimate child" by mainstream media to describe his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs, as if we are not living in 2011, which solidified for me the extremely central place heterosexual marriage continues to have in determining who is worthwhile, and who isn't.

I'm also not one of the aforementioned Apple fans; I use Apple products, namely my MacBook Pro, which I purchased in January in Emeryville one day after seeing the show, so that I could use Skype, and my iPhone, but I would certainly call myself more an Apple user than an Apple fan. I was curious to see the show again both to see how it had changed and to perhaps instill in myself some sense of what I can do in terms of this issue. We bought our tickets several weeks ago, so before Steve Jobs died, and that certainly added a different twist to the show. I would also recommend attending with someone who's been to China and Shenzhen, as I did, just for a little extra detail, not necessarily related to the labor issue.

So there were two major things I noted that were different, and again, these may or may not be what anyone else took away as the salient points, but they struck me. I don't have the world's best memory so the things that stand out for me after a performance are usually either overall impressions or precise lines, and two that I remember from the first performance were Daisey asking, "Do you really think they don't know?" (or perhaps it was "Apple doesn't know," but that is indeed the "they" he is talking about). To my recollection, in January it was delivered not so much as a question but rather an extremely angry taunt to the audience, after we'd just heard about some of the horrors of the working conditions. If anything it was almost rhetorical, as if anyone who could legitimately answer "No, I don't think they know" were simply ignoring the obvious. This time, the question was asked more softly, but no less genuinely. It turned the query back onto the audience, prompting us to genuinely consider whether a company so careful about every other detail could have overlooked things like its own supplier responsibility reports. The question took on added weight now, with even more press in the subsequent nine months about these working conditions. Both deliveries were effective, but I think the quieter tone, one similar to the one used in the new ending I saw, about Jobs' death, is more eerie, more haunting. It's perhaps more weary, but it is a question I think is at the heart of the show and this issue, with the next unasked question being if Apple does know, what, if anything, they plan to do about it, whether they plan to think differently than their business peers who've also set up shop in China (or Brazil, or wherever, though the show is focused on China), or not.

Speaking of which, another target of the show that obviously didn't exist in January was Wired's Joel Johnson March 2011 cover story on Foxconn, which, while noting the suicides, generally summed up the issue by saying that it sucks to work at a factory, but this factory not so much more than any other (my summary). I vaguely recall the tech press coming in for a bit more scrutiny in January, but I can't say that for sure.

The other line that I recall extremely clearly from Berkeley was Daisey telling us that if he shared everything he heard in Shenzhen, we would close our ears. That too was delivered with ire, almost as if he were upset about suppressing whatever he was holding back, and I think that statement is something that can apply to almost any injustice being spoken about. There is a limit to our being able to take in this kind of information, and I don't think that is all down to greed or indifference. I think there are many reasons we, and I'm speaking beyond a theatrical audience but to we as humans, would close our eyes and ears. I don't say that to absolve myself from all that I'm not doing, but simply to say that there is a point where we all have to choose to focus on either a single set of issues or one particular issue or our immediate lives to the exclusion of even issues we care about.

But still that line stayed with me, and the question of whether Steve Jobs "closed his ears," whether he either didn't know, or knew some things, or knew and didn't do anything about it, or some other option that hasn't been publicly revealed yet, is a question, though perhaps the more relevant question is what Apple and other electronics companies will now do. One criticism I've seen repeatedly is that Apple is not the only huge corporation in China utilizing workers under such conditions and that people are lining up for and eager for these jobs. Both of those statements may be true but I don't think that even if they are they negate the issues of people dying of overwork or committing public suicides or being unable to claim their overtime. The show is an exploration of how these products are made, literally, in factories, as well as how they are dreamt up, at some of the vision behind their creation, and connects the two, and asks its audience to connect the two as well.

Regarding the "they'd close their ears," I wrote the above and then checked my post on that show to find that what I remember hearing is actually "you'd close your fucking ears" and I think my summary then is an apt summary for my thoughts know, except that I obviously did want to know more than I didn't want to, because I've been reading and following the story since then. I don't have much to say beyond that, but I do highly recommend seeing it, Apple fan or not (but especially for the Apple fans).

Coming on the heels of a story about a worker whose hand was fused together building an iPad, yeah, that's pretty chilling. It made me want to know and, I will fully admit, not want to know. I'm still pretty awed by the fact that there were no photos shown, nothing but words, but the images I was left with were frightening and sad and again, that dichotomy, that reality that even the LED screens lighting up the stage were likely made in the places being talked about.

Apple, labor, technology, consumer responsibility and The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs

Now through October 15th, there's a contest to win tickets to The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs at The Public Theater...and a $250 Apple gift certificate. The show is largely about the working conditions at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where numerous electronics are made, including Apple products, the company that's the focus of the show. I questioned @PublicTheaterNY on the (il)logic of that on Twitter:







I still think it's an odd choice, especially after one sees the show. Yet they are right; technology is part of most of our worlds, certainly anyone reading this. I had my iPhone on my trip to Vermont and one of my little cousins said, "You're on that thing a lot. It's like your friend." She was totally right. I don't know what I'd do without my iPhone or my laptop, how I'd work or communicate with people. I wasn't suggesting that nobody buy any Apple products, just that the juxtaposition struck me as off message.

From The Newcastle Herald:

Daisey reserves particular disdain for the Apple fanboys who accuse him of singling out Apple when the rest of the technology industry is just as guilty, and of ignoring the fact that the suicide rate at the Foxconn factories is lower than the reported official average in China.

"These Apple fanboys have the most amazing moral and ethical equivalency that I've seen," said Daisey.

"All they would have to do is raise the blinders just a little bit and see with human eyes and they could be an enormous force for actually getting real change to happen. So when they choose instead to remain children playing with toys it's infantilism of the highest order."

He said the official suicide rate figures released by the Chinese government cannot be relied upon and that if there was a spate of suicides at a Western factory - as occurred at Foxconn recently - there would be a mammoth public outcry.

"It's an unbelievably pathetic defence to say my company's responsible for atrocities but so are other companies," he said, adding Apple should lead the industry into a more ethical approach.

"Apple has long prided itself on being a leader, it speaks constantly about being a leader in the field, they're very proud of that and they take huge advantage of it in their PR. Well, this is what comes with being a leader ... suck it up and start acting like one."

I'll be posting more about my reaction to seeing the show in January, and why I'm seeing it again, and if you're in New York, I strongly encourage you to see it (use the code iFriend for $50 tickets). It runs from October 11th to November 14th. The vividness of the imagery about the working conditions, lack of union organizing and underage labor is hard to ignore after you've seen the show.

But the idea of awareness makes me wonder what we, as consumers, are meant to do about this issue, aside from thinking about it. Thinking about it is important, but part of my impetus to see the show again is to figure out what to do with that information. It's not The Public Theater's or anyone else's job to tell me what to do with that; I have to figure that out. I've brought it up with people who were considering buying iPads, wondering about the delays.

I will say I have been thinking about it ever since I saw the show, especially when I wound up buying a new laptop at the Apple Store in Emeryville the next day. It was an uncomfortable feeling, like I was directly supporting those kind of working conditions. At the same time, I know that so many of the products I wear, use, consume, are likely made in awful conditions. Sara Bongiorni wrote a memoir, A Year Without "Made in China": One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global Economy, I haven't read yet, but that's about precisely this:



I don't know the answers, or any answer. I don't think ignorance is an answer, but what to do with that knowledge is a tougher question.

See also:

Today's New York Times interview about the show

"Why Apple is Nervous About Foxconn," Bloomberg Businessweek

From "Fire Breaks Out at Foxconn Plant," PCmag.com, about a different Chinese Foxconn factory:

The fire was first spotted by a microblogger at Chinese Internet portal Sina.com and picked up by Sina's news service. Coincidentally the day before, Chinese officials ordered police to engage more in "public security microblogging" but only through government-monitored channels.

In the last 12 months, Foxconn's reputation has taken a nosedive thanks to reports of explosions, worker suicides, and alleged slave-like working conditions. In May it briefly shut down operations after a deadly explosion in Chengdu, prompting Foxconn and its partners to pledge to make a number of reforms at the manufacturer's facilities. A recent report from watchdog group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM), however, found that most employees are working long hours for little pay, battling exposure to dust and harmful chemicals, and undergoing "military style" training sessions.

And Foxconn suicides has its own Wikipedia entry, separate from Foxconn. From 2009, about the suicide of Sun Dan-yong: "Fell from apartment building[18][20] after losing an iPhone prototype in his possession.[21] Prior to death, he was beaten and his residence searched by Foxconn employees.[21]"

Joel Johnson wrote a cover story for Wired about visiting Foxconn and summarized it with a response I've seen a lot of: it's not as bad as other jobs in China.

That 17 people have committed suicide at Foxconn is a tragedy. But in fact, the suicide rate at Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant remains below national averages for both rural and urban China, a bleak but unassailable fact that does much to exonerate the conditions at Foxconn and absolutely nothing to bring those 17 people back.

But the work itself isn’t inhumane—unless you consider a repetitive, exhausting, and alienating workplace over which you have no influence or authority to be inhumane. And that would pretty much describe every single manufacturing or burger-flipping job ever.

For me, though, the key point in that article was this one, which I think says infinitely more about what Foxconn thinks of their workers than any other detail in that piece, bolding mine:

Although the company disputes some cases, evidence gathered from news reports and other sources indicates that 17 Foxconn workers have killed themselves in the past half decade. What had seemed to be a series of isolated incidents was becoming an appalling trend. When one jumper left a note explaining that he committed suicide to provide for his family, the program of remuneration for the families of jumpers was canceled.

So, no, I have no answers. I do think awareness is important, but as I type this on the laptop I bought in Emeryville in January, I don't know that my awareness is moot if I'm not trying to be part of the solution.