Apple and Utopia

Apple Devices Image credit: TechGenie

Call me slow, but until today I hadn't read the two New York Times pieces that have been in the news lately. The first was about Apple's manufacturing getting off-shored and whether medium skill manufacturing jobs (the ones that created the American middle class) will ever return to the US (short answer: No). The second was about Apple's supply chain and worker conditions in factories in China, that are, to put it mildly, inhuman. Workers work 70 hour weeks routinely, make hardly any money, have workplaces and working conditions that would make any Westerner scream and any Indian grimace (is true!), and have alarming suicide rates.


I must ask you, gentle reader, to first read these pieces in full before proceeding. Yeah, I'm a long-form kind of guy. Seriously, off with you... shoo!


So how did the world react to these 'exposes', that to the informed person merely brought a light to bear on what was well known - or at least very well suspected? The first article was met with the usual election year responses over in the US. Some chitchat about manufacturing having left American shores, noises about 'new economy' jobs not filling up the resulting vacuum quick enough, and so on. The second was met with outrage (as well it should), even as the cognoscenti acknowledged that Apple was an industry leader in policing and bringing to light such abuses, and really... unless we want an iPad to cost several hundred dollars more, nothing can be done about it...


What was my reaction? Multi-faceted...

First, let me say that clearly the only reason the NYT is writing about Apple is because they are the biggest fish out there in the Manufacturic Ocean. With profits in Q411 that exceed most companies (including Google's) revenues, they're quite certainly the Blue Whale. Another great factoid was that Apple, the company is now worth more than Greece, the country! 


The article also makes clear that Apple (or their suppliers when it comes to the poor working conditions) aren't unique and the same stuff would apply, perhaps at smaller scales, given lower production and sales to any major manufacturing company being serviced by suppliers in China. Walmart comes to mind for example, as another corporation fueling manufacturing while keeping margins extremely tight for suppliers and therefore 'encouraging' employee abuses. I have no problems believing Apple is a conscientious company that tries to do the right thing... within limits. In that they are no different from any corporation that wants to make a bigger profit or survive in a marketplace.


My problem however is that as with all things, I zoomed out and tried to see this in perspective. There is a very clear temptation here to indict modern, consumerist society as being what is responsible for a situation where a repressive government can create an economic boom on the backs of the largest 'subjugated' population the world has seen. 


There are connections here to the global financial crisis as well - excess liquidity that fueled the 'irrational exuberance' in financial markets was ultimately what enabled what Niall Fergusson called 'Chimerica' - that cycle where American demand for cheap goods leads to a Chinese manufacturing boom, which leads to Americans taking on (credit card) debt to purchase Chinese goods - and where the Chinese government fuels this on by buying American dollars, ad nauseum. So perhaps I should simply blame capitalism, and the flawed monetary model based on nothing but confidence for this mess? 


The connection that has me nonplussed however is not an immediate (or perhaps even  relevant or applicable) one. I'm thinking of Pharaoh and his Pyramids.


Pampered teenager wants a bigger obelisk/ pyramid/ city than has ever been built - and Daddy puts a million slaves to work in quarries. Replace 'bigger' with 'cooler', 'obelisk/ pyramid/ city' with 'device', 'Daddy' with 'Entrepreneur' and 'quarries' with 'factories', if you please...


Here, laddies and gentlewomen, is the most godawful truth of them all; nothing ever changes. Humanity continues to be just as shitty as it always has been. We continue to have every historical evil that has ever existed - perhaps in morphed form. It is no coincidence perhaps that the Egyptians were fascinated with the Pyramid, or ancient Indians with the caste system. The dirty truth of civilization is that for a few to be happy and coddled, millions more must suffer.


You want genocide? We still got it. Empire? You bet! Meaningless war? Sure - highly profitable, as ever!  Slavery? Check! Prostitution and human trafficking? Of course! Religious nut-jobs running amok? Watch out! Everything's a little less severe, perhaps slightly better packaged. We (supposedly) have self-rule and democracy in a large part of the world now. We have an information superhighway. The trouble is this - we still have ourselves. Same shit, glossier package. Seven billion and counting, and we still haven't figured out how to live with each other.


So where to from here? Anyone who reads history and looks at broad swaths of it to try and divine a pattern (inspired perhaps by the fictional Hari Seldon as imagined by Isaac Asimov) will become in the end, a pessimist or a humorist. What shall it be then?


A proper Marxian explosion? Revolucion! Lo, the proletariat rises up and throws off this bourgeois yoke of oppression and moves toward a post-industrial Utopia! Perhaps Marx and Lenin and Trotsky were all just firing a bit early? Perhaps the Arab Spring will be followed by a Chinese Summer, an American Fall, and an Asian Winter (preferably non-nuclear)?


A cataclysm of some sort leading to a return to the pastoral societies of times past, to once again start the slow then rapid build up of pressure?


Will we crack the space riddle and go and populate (infect) the stars?


Or will our better angels prevail and we will come to our senses and think of that which we have not yet realized is the solution, and then do it?


Seriously, I don't care. I suspect when something does happen, it will be temporary. Just another phase in this cycle that was so goddamn boring the Mayans stopped caring enough to count beyond 2012. One thing I'm sure of though - when it does happen, there will be a know-it-all like me will be sitting in some corner going, "Oh is it that time of the millennium again?"...


After all, though Moses led his people out of Egypt, they still use iPods in Tahrir Square don't they?