MikeDaisey
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Daily Update for April 9, 2012
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
Marketplace reporter visits Foxconn factory in China
Marketplace's China correspondent Rob Schmitz is known as the man who uncovered the falsehoods about Foxconn factory conditions being told by Mike Daisey in his play, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. As a follow-up to the report, Schmitz got an inside look at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen. You can watch his teaser video and visit Marketplace's website for additional details about his visit.
Foxconn won't sue This American Life, Daisey
Late last week, radio show This American Life retracted an episode published in January that showcased Mike Daisey's performance of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (our review). The show was removed when TAL discovered inaccuracies in Daisey's account, one of which suggested Daisey himself met with workers who were poisoned by n-hexane. A report from Reuters confirms Foxconn will not sue This American Life or Daisey, even though these bogus claims were hurtful to the company. Foxconn spokesperson Simon Hsing told Reuters, "Our corporate image has been totally ruined. The point is whatever media that cited the programme should not have reported it without confirming (with us)." He added, "We have no plans to take legal action... We hope nothing similar will happen again."
Talkcast tonight, 10pm ET: New iPads, theatrical revelations, and special guest Christina Warren
The green beer taps may have run dry, but that's no cause for despair: the TUAW Talkcast is here to soothe your headache and recommend you take it easier next year. Tonight, of course, we want to talk about the new iPad -- so if you've got one, come on over and flaunt it! We'll also review Friday's bombshell announcement from Ira Glass and This American Life that the show has retracted its January episode featuring excerpts from monologuist Mike Daisey's Apple-centric show. Several of the more dramatic stories included in the show turn out to be of questionable veracity. And, of course, we'll talk about the surprise financial call scheduled for tomorrow morning. We're also pleased to welcome a special guest this week, our friend and former TUAW contributor Christina Warren, now covering the entertainment world over at Mashable. Let me just say it right now: you all are not ready for this. Brace yourselves. Your calls and questions help us make the show the best it can be. To participate on TalkShoe, you can use the browser-only client, the embedded Facebook app, or download the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, for maximum fun, you should call in. For the web UI, just click the Talkshoe Web button on our profile page at 4 HI/7 PDT/10 pm EDT Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (yay for free cellphone weekend minutes!): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 -- during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8. If you've got a headset or microphone handy (you know those headphones that came with your iPhone?), you can connect via the free Zoiper, X-Lite or Blink SIP clients; basic instructions are here. Talk to you tonight!
Daily Update for March 16, 2012
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
Whoopsie Daisey: This American Life episode on Foxconn's iPad factories 'partially fabricated,' retracted
Last month, we reviewed Mike Daisey's "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs", a monologue in which the storyteller opines on his trip to China and his time with workers in a Foxconn iPad plant. Daisey's story was the basis of an episode of PRI's "This American Life," and now the show has retracted that episode when additional fact-checking revealed that a number of Daisey's claims were fabricated. This American Life host Ira Glass was understandably upset, saying that "Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn't excuse the fact that we never should've put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake." You can read the show's full transcript here. Daisey isn't as quite as repentant, claiming that his work was "not journalism" and therefore "operates under a different set of rules and expectations" from a journalistic endeavor like This American Life. This American Life noted two of the worst fabrications in Daisey's monologue -- first, where he claimed to have met a group of Foxconn employees who were poisoned by n-hexane in Shenzhen, China. Apple's factory audits have uncovered a similar occurrence, but it happened over a thousand miles away in Suzhou. The second, and much more egregious, fabrication was about one of the most dramatic sections of Daisey's work. In this section, Daisey talks about meeting a factory worker whose hand was mangled on an iPad production line, and showing the worker a finished product that he had allegedly never seen. The interpreter who accompanied Daisey told a fact checker that she never witnessed anything like that encounter. You can read Daisey's response to the retraction of the show here.
'This American Life' issues retraction episode over Foxconn report
This American Life is airing a new episode today titled "Retraction." The title and show are a direct response to the January 6th edition of the popular public radio program titled "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory," an adaptation of a one-man show that helped put Cupertino's involvement with Foxconn back in the public spotlight. "Regrettably," the show's producers write in the description of this week's episode, "we have discovered that one of our most popular episodes was partially fabricated." The hour-long show has been dedicated to clearing up some of the misconceptions, including an interview with Mike Daisey to discover "why he misled This American Life during the fact-checking process." For his part, Daisey responded on his personal blog, explaining, "What I do is not journalism." Daisey adds: My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity.An MP3 file of the episode will be made available for download on Sunday.
Mike Daisey's "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" available under an open license
Mike Daisey is making headlines with The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a stirring monologue about his love of Apple and disappointment with working conditions in Apple's supplier factories. Daisey's monologue details his trip to China and his time with workers from Foxconn's Shenzhen plant. If you want to read the monologue yourself, you can now do so at Mike Daisey's website. The well-known storyteller released the text of his performance under an open license which lets you not only download the piece, but perform the work yourself. Daisey writes that his work "may be performed by anyone, anywhere, royalty free." The text is moving, but it doesn't compare to a live show which infuses energy and emotion into the words. Our own Mike Rose attended one of Daisey's performances, and you can read about his impressions in an earlier post. Now that the text is available to the public, I look forward to derivative works which capture a different aspect of this stirring account. [Via The Verge]
Mike Daisey's "The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" is funny, forceful agitprop (Update)
Update Mar 17 2012: This American Life, after additional reporting, retracted the episode featuring excerpts from Daisey's show. Some of the assertions Daisey made in his monologue, including a key passage about encountering workers injured by n-hexane exposure, are now acknowledged by Daisey to be the product of "dramatic license" rather than facts. Our review of the performance itself remains below, but readers are cautioned that Daisey's credibility as an observer of conditions in China is now in tatters. The final NYC performances of the show at the Public Theater, scheduled for this weekend, will proceed as planned, although an April performance in Chicago that was to be presented by TAL and WBEZ (the station that produces the show) has been cancelled. --- If you're looking for coverage of working conditions at Foxconn and other Apple manufacturing partners, there's plenty to go around. The drumbeat of sharply critical stories continued today with CNN's interview of a Foxconn worker; this follows a scathing New York Times story from late January that explores the gulf between electronics companies' best intentions regarding working conditions at contract facilities, and the incessant pressure to innovate and squeeze costs out of the process. Fairness, though, requires a few reminders. There's social and political argument over the ultimate value of sweatshop labor conditions in developing countries, with the pro-sweatshop side citing enormous economic benefits for countries that can capitalize on an inexpensive and inexhaustible labor force. Even if you buy the hypothesis that cheap labor isn't necessarily good for China, it's true that Apple isn't the only Foxconn client by a long shot, and the electronics manufacturing sector may actually be one of the brighter lights for worker's rights in China. Nevertheless, the company's high-profile and highly profitable products combined with its longstanding penchant for product secrecy have made it a lightning rod for "Applerousing" activism and anger. Apple CEO Tim Cook, the man most responsible for assembling Apple's supply chain into a strategic advantage for the company, reportedly sent a very strongly worded email to all Apple hands, noting that "any suggestion that we don't care [about the welfare of workers in our supply chain] is patently false and offensive to us.... accusations like these are contrary to our values. It's not who we are." In addition to the company's annual Supplier Responsibility Reports and auditing programs, Apple has recently taken another couple of steps that put it out in front of other consumer electronics firms; it released its supplier list for the first time, and it's the first sector company to join the Fair Labor Association. These changes should, in theory, make it easier for third parties to look into workplace issues within the Apple supplier universe. You can get a very different take on the relative impact of Apple's policies, and the human cost of making insanely great products for entirely sane prices, by spending an evening at the Public Theater in New York City with monologuist Mike Daisey watching The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Be warned, however, that it is not so easy to leave the show with the same nonchalance about Apple's products and their origins as you might have when you arrive. The first thing that audience members will notice as they take their seats before the start of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is the cubical and spare set. With rectangular frames in a back LED wall and a glass/chrome desk atop a glass platform, there's a definite echo of a familiar retail aesthetic; it's as if the designer was instructed "Make it look a little like an Apple Store, but don't spend much." The mood is also evoked, carefully, with sound. The music playing before the show includes both the OS X Leopard post-installation track "Exodus Honey" and Jonathan Coulton's geek anthem "Skullcrusher Mountain." Coulton's song even gets a nod during the monologue itself, when Daisey refers to Apple as a company full of "mad geniuses" who, after Steve's involuntary departure in the 1980s, could finally realize their plans to combine a monkey with a pony. The next thought, as the show begins: Mike Daisey is a large, loud, sweaty dude who sits in a chair and talks at you for two hours. Although this may sound like a rough session of detention with an angry phys-ed teacher, or an afternoon with your conspiracy theory-obsessed uncle, the performance Daisey delivers is heartfelt, intelligent and ultimately completely watchable. His show, which was excerpted on the January 6 episode of the public radio program This American Life [and subsequently retracted –Ed.], recounts both his decades-long fascination with Apple, including the unforgettable arc of the late co-founder Jobs, and also Daisey's half-cocked but surprisingly effective gonzo investigation of labor conditions at Foxconn and other electronics manufacturing contractors in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. Referring to his handwritten notes as he goes -- the performance is extemporaneous, so there is no canonical scripted text and the narrative has evolved over the 18 months that the show has been touring -- Daisey wants to make one thing abundantly clear. If you cut him, he would bleed six colors. To establish his bona fides as a true member of the Apple faithful for a civilian audience, he claims that sometimes after a show he relaxes by "field-stripping my MacBook Pro into its 43 component parts," cleaning each one before reassembling the laptop. "It soothes me," he purrs, stroking his chest with his fingers. While I don't know that many Mac geeks who relax by taking apart their MBPs, it's evident from Daisey's frequent, coherent technical asides that he isn't putting on airs (or Airs). His heartfelt memories of his family's first computer (an Apple IIc, considered so pricey that it merited its own "computer room") will resonate for plenty of TUAW readers of a certain age. I may have been the only audience member who involuntarily nodded and muttered "yes, of course" when Daisey shared his favorite Mac of all time, but that was only because his choice, the compact yet powerful (for its day) SE/30, was so obviously right. It's Daisey's love for all things Apple that makes his perception of the company's fall from grace all the more stinging. Starting with the inadvertent leak of several testing photos taken on the iPhone assembly line, Daisey's curiosity about the process and the people behind Apple's products drove him to research the circumstances of where all our stuff comes from. In 2010, Daisey traveled to southern China and literally drove up to the gates of the massive Foxconn plant in an effort to talk to production line workers; he was in country shortly after the cluster of Foxconn employee suicides and during the incident when a Foxconn employee died of exhaustion after a multi-day workshift. He posed as an American industrialist to gain access to other companies' facilities (including dormitories with beds crammed to the ceiling), and also met with labor rights activists and workers who, despite enormous legal and personal risks, have tried to form labor unions in Chinese factories. Daisey's recounting of his conversations with these workers is sometimes poignant and often shocking. He met laborers exposed to the neurotoxic solvent n-hexane (now banned from Apple's supply chain, but originally used as an iPhone screen cleaner) who now shake so badly they cannot hold a teacup. He spoke with underage workers outside the plant gates, although follow-up investigations by This American Life indicated that the hiring of minors is far less prevalent than it once was and that Foxconn is relatively well-positioned on that score (some independent organizations dispute this, noting that audits are easy to deceive). Daisey's own translator wonders if all these people can possibly have been through what they say, expressing shock that so many tell the same stories of mistreatment, forced/unpaid overtime and bad working conditions. As Daisey has performed this piece around the country over the past two years, he might have been considered a lonely voice in the wilderness. (TUAW interviewed Daisey at Macworld Expo 2011, while he was performing the show in Berkeley, CA.) Circumstances have changed quite a bit since he began, however. The radio broadcast was a turning point in the show's reception, according to a flyer handed out by ushers after the performance; it was the most downloaded episode in TAL's history and, Daisey's flyer claims, was heard by many Apple employees and their families. This created what Daisey's sources call "a morale situation" within the company, and he asserts that this internal circumstance was a factor in Apple's subsequent decision to join the FLA and open its supply chain to additional scrutiny. It may not be as simple as Daisey wishes for Apple to effectively address the condition of a massive Chinese labor force that, in the final analysis, does not actually work for the Cupertino company. His suggestion of a 'dividend for change,' where Apple would directly invest five billion dollars of its cash reserves into the supply chain, would certainly be worthy of a company founded by a Zen-loving college dropout who urged customers to think different -- but it's surpassingly unlikely. Still, public awareness and action on the question of humane labor overseas (whether contracted by Apple, HP, Asus, Sony or any other company) will make a difference in the months and years to come. As Daisey says in his online response to Apple's recent moves toward further supply chain glasnost: If Apple would spend less energy finessing its public image, and instead apply its efforts to real transparency and accountability, it could be a true leader for the electronics industry. Apple today is still saying what it said yesterday: trust us, we know best, there's nothing to worry about. They have not earned the trust they are asking for." Mike Daisey's monologue The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs continues through March 4, 2012 at New York City's Public Theater. The show runs approximately two hours and is performed without an intermission. Tickets and information: http://www.publictheater.org
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs previews early
We reported on Mike Daisey's monologue The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs earlier this year. The play was (and is still) scheduled for a run at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre from January 14 to February 27, 2011, but due to popular demand, the monologue will now preview for one night only on April 22 at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York. The play is a monologuist piece that "dives into the epic story of a real-life Willy Wonka whose personal obsessions profoundly affect our everyday lives." You know, usually plays show longer "due to popular demand," not open nine months early. Just goes to show when you slap Steve Jobs' name or likeness on anything, you can sell it to people. On the other hand, Daisey's a pretty funny guy, so if you go see it I'm sure you'll enjoy yourself. And if you do see it, drop us a line to tell us what you thought!
Life of Steve Jobs to be a play
The Berkeley Repertory Theater is producing a play titled The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. The play will be a monologue monologuist piece that "dives into the epic story of a real-life Willy Wonka whose personal obsessions profoundly affect our everyday lives" The play isn't all roses in it's portrayal of Jobs, though. It follows the trail to China where millions toil in factories to create iPhones and iPods – something Apple has been under pressure for lately. The play's monologue is written by and staring Mike Daisey. Daisey is best known for leaving Amazon to become an actor. In 2001 his book 21 Dog Years, an account of his time working for Amazon.com during the dotcom boom years, thrust him into the limelight The play will run from January 14 to February 27, 2011 and is directed by Jean-Michele Gregory. UPDATE: I have corrected the piece after speaking with Mike Daisey. He is a monologuist, so he doesn't play people - he does a monologue about them. "The monologue is about Steve Jobs, industrial design, Apple, and is woven against where our tecnology is made, and at what cost," Mike told me.
