Digging into the archives, one finds a strange yet impacting commercial that launched Apple as gateway to the future of a world that is not like George Orwell's dystopia.
“We are looking at a 1984 that’s the opposite of what George Orwell predicted”, was roughly the message broadcast by the iconic Apple commercial. It was aired during the Superbowl.
In 1984, Apple had claimed to be the harbinger of a new world, liberated from the shackles of a Soviet-style autocracy.
In hindsight, it seems like Apple was showing us a future where technology has the power to rescind the Berlin Wall.
While the Berlin Wall was subsequently rescinded, more by the will and aspiration of the masses, than by the advent of the Macintosh, the commercial still reverberated with the potential of liberation.
But what path has Apple, a company that has strong counter-cultural roots, traveled, since the airing of the commercial in 1984.
Some say that Apple itself has paved the way for a new kind of 1984, where technology does liberate—the iphone is said to have been a catalyst for many anti-autocratic movements in the Middle East, for instance—but it also re-shackles or escorts us back to conditions reminiscent of an Orwellian dystopia.
I agree with the reader who writes in his letter to the Editor in The New York Times that Apple has, over the years, become an agent of oppression.
The letter is in response to a Times story on why iPhones are assembled and manufactured in China and not the U.S.
According to the story it's not cheap labor that motivates the outsourcing of almost all iPhone labor to China (especially the province of Shenzhen). It's the ability of Chinese workers to work 12+ hours a day shifts at minimal pay.
The factories in Shenzhen are modern but the labor laws are antebellum. Workers live in dormitories inside the factory premises and are woken up at odd hours (like in a military boot camp) if a call from Apple bosses in America and their local Chinese vendors require their services.
Indeed as is pointed out by many, China has become the equivalent of the cotton and tobacco fields of the pre-civil war era American South.
Just as it is said that America would not have experienced a surplus economy during the time of slavery had it not been for free labor got from the slaves, so it could be said that Apple would not have become the most "valued" company of the globe, had it not been for the eerie amenability of the Chinese to working under atavistic labor laws.
The difference though is that the Chinese get paid—somewhat. But I'm sure that today's $7/week for 12 hour day shift is the same as yesterday's unpaid labor.
Slavery is a place holder for regressive laws or the absence of laws that encode respect for workers and their labor worldwide. In this sense Apple and slavery can be uttered in the same breath.
Has Apple set into motion an age of iSlavery?
