What Now?

This American Life broadcast an episode in January called “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” where a writer, Mike Daisey, spoke about his experience in China at the factories building iPhones and iPads.  A couple weeks ago, This American Life broadcast another episode called “Retraction” where they explained the falsehoods in the January episode.  I listened to both episodes, became a little obsessed with the story (googling it everyday to find the latest development) and below are my thoughts.

Retraction, the 460th episode of “This American Life” is one of the most dramatic radio broadcasts I’ve ever listened to.  Although we are in a post-radio era, podcasts like “Radiolab” and “Wait wait... don’t tell me” are as popular among my friends in our adulthood as LPs of “The Lone Ranger” and “The Shadow” were for my father in his childhood.  And due to the portability of music in the aughts, my friends and I listen to everything all the time everywhere.  So when I say that Retraction is compelling, I’m stacking it against the plethora of radio that I pump into my brain all day.  We’re talking about fifteen-second silences between Mike Daisy and Ira Glass where for a moment, you wonder if your iPod is broken.  Ira questions Mike like a neurosurgeon, delicately shaving layers of a tumor, restrained and eloquent, exposing the reality that Mike Daisy lied.  He lied to fact checkers, he lied to reporters, he lied to the thousands upon thousands of people who listened to his story.

I am not writing this from an angry place.  I am writing because I feel awful for Daisey and (obviously) worse for the factory workers.  His intentions (the altruistic humanist ones as opposed to the successful writer/actor ones) were to light up the reality of where our beautiful, high-functioning gizmos come from not unlike Eric Schlosser or Michael Pollan exposing our food origins in Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  Although he stretched the truth, incorporating kernels of multiple stories into one giant episode, Daisey was trying to address the big picture.  There is child labor, repetitive motion injuries and 16 hour workdays in China.

Should I stop using my iPhone?  How come I never paused to think about what I was buying and why it costs so little compared to what it can do?  Did you know that if you want to buy a pair of pants, pants,  made by union members in America, it costs more than one hundred dollars?  The reason is because in this country, we pay people to work an eight-hour day with benefits and rotating responsibilities.  And the labor cost is only a small part of what raises the price.  The speed and cost at which China can produce one million iPads depends on multiple factories capable of immediate changes using a near-infinite number of overtime workers.

So if it took longer and cost more, would you still buy it?  How much would would you pay for pride let alone a clear conscience?

Like many, Daisy’s bent truth aimed at awareness has numbed me to the very real story.  It sounds awful, then it’s untrue, but the reality is still awful.  My brain can’t handle that back and forth.  There are nets around the walls of the Foxconn factory so that people cannot commit suicide by leaping from the roof.  There are people working by hand, repeating the same movement over and over all day, everyday to build your iPhone.  Their hours are horrible and their pay is a joke and they're working 70 hours a week in these conditions to save and get ahead.

Towards the end of Retraction, Charles Duhigg explains that we’re not only condoning the reality but are, by purchasing and using the product, creating the reality.  Although the facts, the fact-facts as Lewis Black calls them, aren’t as Hollywood-dramatic as Daisey presented, we must look at our consumption and daily routine.  The world is too small, too connected for us to ignore how our actions affect other people.  The question is: what do we do now that we know?

You can find both Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory and Retraction at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives.  I encourage you to listen to the original then listen to the Retraction.  It’s worth two hours of your time, I promise.

Dear Music

This weekend, I picked up a few albums I’ve been meaning to dig into for some time.  The latest Sufjan Stevens, the latest Dream Theater and a few in between.  As I walked through Carroll Gardens yesterday in the pleasant temporal nightmare that is Daylight Savings Time, I listened mostly (embarrassingly) to Dream Theater.  You know, I say embarrassingly but A dramatic Turn of Events is fucking out of this world.  Anyway, last night as I was going to bed, Sufjan.  This morning on the way to work, Panda Bear.  Now that I’m at work I've got the Chick Corea record that won a Grammy oozing out of my desk speakers.  The soundtrack of my life is varied and incredible and most importantly, always playing.

Picture a basic American Colonial house.  Got the shape?  Now paint it brown and scale it down to the size of a Happy Meal container.  Handle for a roof, six buttons on the second floor and a little plastic window right in the middle... what you’re picturing is my Cassette Player from the 1980s.  The most effective tool in my defense against the enemies of childhood: boredom, monsters and having to listen to my siblings.  Basically, if you took this image:

and photo shopped my Tape Player over the Teddy Bear, you’d get my nightly sleeping experience.

Like most parents, my folks would ground me now and then.  But it wasn’t about candy or phone-time or TV.  No, if they really wanted to punish me, my parents would take away my tape player for the night.  I’m not sure if they knew it was my Aragorn to the Boogeyman’s Voice of Sauron but they definitely knew I loved the thing.  And it had magical powers; a soul, even!  One night, while listening to the instrumental part of the Ghost Busters soundtrack, the curtains in my room blew open just a little during the creepiest section of the score.  I very nearly shat myself.  I don’t know if my tape player thought I’d enjoy the experience or if it was actually a sadistic anti-hero; a deranged defender sociopath who loved and hated me.  Whoa.

The first tape I owned was Pearl Jam’s Versus.  My older sister gave it to me and the first time I played it, I was terrified of the rock-awesomeness that exploded out of the single speaker.  I didn’t get it.  I didn’t like it.  I couldn’t stop listening to it.  Every night, I’d play it again and eventually realized I was in love with the album.  It took me fifteen years to fully embrace the lesson that sometimes you end up loving things you can’t stand on the first go around.

Eventually, I moved on to a “My First Sony”.  I couldn’t tell you what I listened to at night but Scott and Todd on 95.5 woke me up every morning.  The alarm could be set to one of four different sounds (including a coked-out woodpecker) or the radio.  Although I’m not a huge fan of morning radio DJs, WPLJ played a couple songs that always kick-started my morning (Jon Secada’s “Just Another Day”, All-4-One’s, “I Swear”, or Genesis’, “I Can’t Dance”).

Next up, a Sony Boom box, tons of CDs and leaving Top 40 radio for classic rock and jazz: Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin.  Then Phish, Miles' Kind of Blue & Coltrane's Blue Train... it’s amazing that the laser in the CD tray didn’t burn a hole through the discs I spun day in and day out.

Fast forward through CD players, iPods, a shower radio (really awesome) and I now have an iMac full of music, a Technics turntable and two boxes of LPs, a bunch of MFSL recordings, three pairs of headphones (Klipsch, Grado’s, and a pair of in-ear monitors) and an itching desire to snag a sweet pair of cabinet speakers for the living room.

I want to thank someone.  My sister Cate for that Pearl Jam album.  My sister Jen who taught me not to “kill a record” by overplaying it.  My dad for the time we listened to “Gimme Shelter” in the garage even though we were already home.  My mom for encouraging me to sing along to Tina Turner in the car.  Kyle & Congdon for writing music, Drew & Greg for playing music, the wind-up, Skidmore.  So many people gave me so much music that really, I want to thank Music itself.  Victor Wooten says Music is a woman and she's all about communication.  If that’s the case, she’s most incredible woman who’s ever walked the earth.  I want to thank her for letting me play and work and create and listen.

Meanwhile, back to work for me.  But not before queuing up LCD Soundsystem and turning the dial on my desk speakers a little further to the right.