Mike Daisy and the Truth

The big exposé of Apple's practices at that notorious Foxconn factory in China turns out to have been, at least in some large part, fabricated.

Back in January the radio program This American Life, produced by a public radio station in Chicago, ran an excerpt from a one-man show by Mike Daisey. The full one-man show was known as "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," and it purported to tell the story of Daisey's personal investigation of the way in which iPhones and other iStuffs are manufactured.

The pertinent excerpt that served as an episode of This American Life, titled "Mr Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory," aired in January 6, 2012. It had a huge impact. In podcast form it was downloaded 888,000 times. Heck, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show jumped on board the bandwagon, just ten days after that radio broadcast. [To be clear: Stewart's segment on Foxconn/Apple/China makes no specific reference to Daisey, or to the specific elements in Daisey's story I discuss below.]

Turns out some people were wondering about Daisey's veracity as soon as they heard his tales. One of the wondering ones was Rob Schmitz, the Shanghai-based correspondent for Marketplace, a publication of American Public Media.

Rob Schmitz knew China and knew something about Apple. But he did more than wonder about Daisey, he found and spoke with the Chinese woman who served as Daisey's interpreter on his trip to China. Her name is Li Guifen, although her professional name (when working with westerners) is Cathy Lee.

At any rate, Ms Lee says that some of the key conversations in the monologue, included in the radio excerpt, didn't happen. For example, Daisey claimed to have met and spoken (through his interpreter!) with workers who had been greviously injured by a neurotoxin, N-Hexane, while working on the assembly line.

Schmitz asked her whether she and Daisey had in fact met with workers who met Daisey's description of the injured interviewees. She said simply, No." He followed up, had anybody talked to them about Hexane?  Says that interpreter: "Nobody mentioned the Hexane."

When Daisey was confronted about such matters by Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, he admitted that he had lied to Glass before the broadcast. He has offered various justifications for his lies. In the stage monologue, the original context, they aren't lies he says because that is art. The lies he told to get them on This American Life, persuading Glass that it was all literally true, well, he sounds a bit like Truman Capote who also took liberties with fact in his infamous book, In Cold Blood, which deliberately straddled fiction and non-fiction. But one has to be clear which of those one is doing. The straddling is the problem, not a justification!

Jack Shafer puts it well.

"That would be an ideal subject for a one-man theatrical performance."

From the fact that Daisey stinks one cannot conclude of course that Foxconn, or Apple, are above reproach. Schmitz has been very clear about that. He has been interviewed on this point: Factory Working Conditions.

What Daisey seems to have done is to exaggerate actual problems for dramatic effect.  Let us not sugar coat it: There have been Hexane poisonings in China. And in factories that are part of Apple's supply chain, too. The fact that they weren't at the factory Daisey visited doesn't make them unimportant. Still, it makes his dishonesty, if anything, more culpable than it might have been if it had been made up out of whole cloth. If you're going to expose something because you think in doing so you're making a difference: get it right.

I'll give Schmitz the last word: "From what we know these are rare occurrences in Apple’s supply chain. Life at factories that make Apple products is not all hunky-dory, but the truth is much more complicated than how Daisey’s portrayed the situation."

Final Quote From Isaacson's Bio of Jobs

I've noted in this blog before that biography is a complicated art form. How to even begin telling a life?

With the subject's birth? Or is there some crucial context to set first? or should you, rather, start by talking about what makes this subject worth a biography? how to start doing that?

Isaacson begins with a discussion of "how this book came to be," wherein he discusses Jobs' solicitation of his services a biographer. Jobs began looking for someone to write his life's story only after Jobs became aware that his cancer was terminal. This allows Isaacson both to begin and to end the book with the consciousness of death.

Here is the ending:

He admitted that, as he faced death, he might be overestimating the odds [on a God] out of a desire to believe in an afterlife. "I like to think that something survives after you die," he said. "It's strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and then it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures."

He fell silent for a very long time. "But on the other hand, perhaps it's like an on-off switch," he said. "Click! And you're gone."

Then he paused again and smiled slightly. "Maybe that's why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices."

Apple and Power Sources

I have twice already quoted passages from the recent Steve Jobs biography in this blog.  Here is a third instance. Isaacson writes that when he was researching the book, he took a tour through Apple's product-design studio, guided by 'Jony' Ive, Jobs' right-hand man on design issues.

On the day of Isaacson's visit, "Ive was overseeing the creation of a new European power plug and connector for the Macintosh. Dozens of foam models, each with the tiniest variation, have been cast and painted for inspection. Some would find it odd that the head of design would fret over something like this, but Jobs got involved as well. Ever since he had a special power supply made for the Apple II, Jobs has cared about not only the engineering but also the design of such parts."

So this passage echoes back to the previous passage I quoted on that Apple II innovation. Still, it is quite different. The switching power supply innovation was functional. It was about controlling heat and the risk a build-up in heat poses to the inner workings of a machine. In the above passage, we are privy to aesthetic evaluations of foam models for electrical plugs.

Sounds odd to me, but then ... I'm not a genius and a multi-billionaire entrepreneur. I'm just a humble scribe.

This point in the book was where I decided it really ought to be reviewed by someone treating it as a novel. I'm still refining that idea.

More on Steve Jobs

Again, as I did on January 13, I'll bend your ear with a quote from the Steve Jobs biography.  This concerns the contribution of a nowadays unheralded engineer named Ron Holt to the development of the Apple II, the pre-macintosh breakthrough computer that went on sale in 1977. The simple version of the story of Apple II is that Steve Wozniak did the basic engineering work, and that Steve Jobs sold it to the world. Here's the wikipedia version of events.

But there is more to it, and Ron Holt is a big part of that more. Wozniak, whose passion was the circuitry, didn't concern himself with the issue of heat. But bringing into a PC the power necessary to keep all those circuits functioning can make for a lot of heat, and that can require a fan, a low-tech contraption in itself, to disperse said heat. Jobs thought fans an inelegant solution, and looked for someone who could come up with a better one.

"Instead of a conventional linear power supply, Holt built one like those used in oscilloscopes. It switched the power on and off not sixty times per second, but thousands of times; this allowed it to store the power for far less time, and thus throw off less heat. 'That switching power supply was as revolutionary as the Apple II logic board was,' Jobs later said. 'Rod doesn't get a lot of credit for this in the history books, but he should. Every computer now uses switching power supplies, and they all rip off Rod's design.' For all of Wozniak's brilliance, this was not something he could have done. 'I only knew vaguely what a switching power supply was,' Woz admitted."

Steve Jobs

I've been reading the new biography of Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson.

I'll just cite this one passage about Jobs' brief experience with communal living, for its obvious social-philosophy message.

"Alrthough the commune was supposed to be a refuge from materialism, [charismatic central figure Robert] Friedland began operating it more as a business; his followers were told to chop and sell firewood, make apple presses and wood stoves, and engage in other commercial endeavors for which they were not paid.  One night Jobs slept under the table in the kitchen and was amused to notice that people kept coming in and stealing each other's food from the refrigerator.  Communal economics were not for him. "it started to get very materialistic,' Jobs recalled. 'Everybody got the idea they were working very hard for Robert's farm, and one by one they started to leave. I got pretty sick of it.'"