"This American Life" and the Daisey affair

You may have heard that the public radio program "This American Life" retracted an entire episode that it aired last January based on portions of Mike Daisey's one-man show "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs". The radio program focused on a visit by Daisey to Chinese plants that manufacture Apple's iPhone and iPad, and the allegedly bad work conditions he found. I won't rehash the entire story, but Daisey lied about a number of key events that he either witnessed or participated in during his trip to China.

After the "This American Life" episode aired, Rob Schmitz, the China correspondent for the public radio show "Marketplace", became suspicious about the story. He tracked down and interviewed Daisey's interpreter, who said that many of the things that Daisey told "This American Life" and said in his one-man show were partial or complete fabrications. For his part, Daisey lied to the host and a producer at "This American Life" about the name of the translator, and said that he could no longer reach her mobile phone number.

Here's an incomplete list of Daisey's alleged or acknowledged fabrications:

• Daisey said that the guards at the entrance to the Foxconn plant were armed; both Schmitz and Daisey's interpreter said that only the military and police are allowed to carry guns in China, not security guards. Daisey's interpreter said that the guards were unarmed.
• Daisey claimed that he spoke with a Foxconn worker who admitted that she was underage--13 years old--and that other workers he spoke to at the same time were 12 years old. The interpreter said that some of the workers who Daisey interviewed might have looked young, but that none of them were underage or admitted that they were underage. For his part, Daisey sticks by his story, but in his defense, he said that one or more of the workers spoke fluent English to him, a statement that his translator denies and that Rob Schmitz found to be extremely unlikely.
• Daisey claimed that he spoke with a group of workers who had been exposed to n-hexane, and that every person in the group was shaking from nerve damage. His interpreter said that the meeting never happened, and Daisey admitted under questioning that he fabricated the entire incident.
• Daisey said that he spoke with a man who was so injured by repetitive work building iPads that his hand had become claw-like. His interpreter said that Daisey met the man, but the man had never worked building iPads, and the entire episode where Daisey showed him a working iPad for the first time never happened.
• Daisey said that he visited Foxconn worker dormitories and saw bunk beds stacked nearly to the ceiling and security cameras inside dormitory rooms. His interpreter says that Daisey never visited dormitory rooms. Daisey claims that he did visit the dorms without his interpreter, but that the security cameras were in the halls, not in the dormitory rooms. Given that Daisey doesn't speak Chinese and, as discussed above, it's extremely unlikely that the workers Daisey encountered spoke English, how could Daisey have visited the dormitories without his interpreter?
• Daisey claimed that he was told by a group of workers protesting working conditions at Foxconn that they met at Starbucks to discuss their strategy; Schmitz said that was as likely as a group of United Auto Workers organizers in Detroit meeting at a Chinese tea room.
• Daisey also said that he was shown a government "blacklist" of people who would not be hired by Shenzhen manufacturers because they had protested working conditions; his interpreter said that the document didn't have any government stamps or seals, and was most likely a fake.

No one denies the work conditions at Foxconn and other manufacturers--they've been widely reported and have been documented by Apple's own audits. However, the most interesting parts of Daisey's allegations--that he actually spoke to underage workers, to workers injured by exposure to n-hexane, and with a man so injured by repetitive work building iPads that his hand had become claw-like--were all acknowledged or likely fabrications.

Ira Glass, the host of "This American Life", has repeately said that when Daisey told him and his producer that his interpreter could not be found, he should have killed the story. However, so much of the story checked out that they believed Daisey. When the story aired, Glass went out of his way to say that the story had been extensively fact-checked by "This American Life" before it was aired, which raises the question: Why did Glass stand behind the story when the interpreter, the only independent witness to everything that Daisey claimed happened, had "disappeared"?

Rob Schmitz of "Marketplace" said that it was very easy to find Daisey's interpreter--he simply entered the name that Daisey used for the interpreter during the radio show (Cathy Lee), and the words "interpreter" and "Shenzhen", into Google, and she came up as the first link. Couldn't the "This American Life" team have done the same thing? Finally, the authenticity of some of Daisey's monologues has been questioned in the past, including by the New York Times. Shouldn't that have raised "red flags" with the "This American Life" team?

Even though the theater where he's performing his one-man show says that the show will continue, Mike Daisey's credibility has been destroyed. The question now is, given how many errors got into this "This American Life" story, how many other bogus stories have gotten on the air?

An agrarian mind in an industrial world

You're probably seen the recent articles about the spate of suicides (nine this year so far) and working conditions at Foxconn's factories in China. One two-part article, written by a reporter who got a job in a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, shows the sadness of the lives of the company's manufacturing workers, almost all of whom are no more than 30 years old. Yet, the Foxconn situation is only an extreme case of what hundreds of millions of people go through worldwide. So few of us are satisfied with our working lives. We see our workday as a burden to be endured, rather than a life to be enjoyed. Why are we so unhappy so often?

At least a part of it comes from the fact that factories, offices, hierarchical management and mass production aren't natural to humans. Our natural organizations are families, with hierarchies based on age. When we worked in the fields to raise food for our families, the goals and objectives were very clear, and not arbitrarily imposed by some power figure. Over time, the rise of feudal societies began to decouple us from control over our working lives--we did things because we were told to do them, not because it necessarily made sense.

The industrial revolution and mass production widened the gap between doing work that we had to do in order to earn a paycheck and work that we were fully engaged and interested in. The professional management movement brought hierarchical structure and mass production into the office, and education brought the same practices into the classroom. Is there any wonder why we now have several generations of disengaged students and workers? Decades of being ordered to do things that made no sense, that we knew were counterproductive, but that we did anyway because they determined our rewards and compensation, have taken their toll. We have schools that don't educate and companies that don't work. Students and employees put up with class or work during the week in order to get two days to themselves.

We are missing an enormous opportunity to engage in what we do more fully and with more satisfaction, and I believe the key is to take control of our school or work lives. Whether that means more small businesses, more startups, more cooperatives, more home schooling, or more whatever, I don't know. I do know that the Foxconn situation is only a more extreme case of what the vast majority of people in industrialized nations deal with every day. We've lost control over our lives. It grates at our nature. We want to be free to do what we believe are the right things.

Please note that this has nothing whatsoever to do with capitalism. Capitalism doesn't presuppose or require factories, mass production, hierarchical management or bureaucracies.  You can be capitalistic and believe strongly in free enterprise, but still recognize that we are wasting years of our children's educations and decades of our own work lives doing things that are counterproductive to the personal goals that we have for growth, happiness and satisfaction.

Confronting the Great Firewall of China

I returned yesterday from China, where I was in Shenzhen, attending ZTE's Global Analyst Conference. (More on ZTE in a future post.) Using the Internet there was an adventure in finding out what I could, and more usually couldn't, get to. Many of the sites that I regularly visit (most of which could hardly be called political or provocative) were blocked.

Pretty much any blog, no matter its contents, was out of reach. I tried accessing blogs through both a feed reader and Firefox to see if the problem was that RSS feeds were blocked, but I got the same result. Even blogs that are completely politically innocuous, such as Engadget and Gizmodo, were unavailable.

Interestingly, I could post to my own blog, but I couldn't read it. Similarly, my mail client could send mail, but not receive it; the only way that I could receive mail was through a web client. I was in Shanghai and Hangzhou last year, and I didn't notice the same level of interference.

On my way back to the States, I had a wait for my return flight at Hong Kong International Airport. Using PCCW's free WiFi service, I fired up my browser, feed reader and mail client, and everything worked just fine. I could access all of the sites that were blocked just a half-hour away on the Chinese mainland, as well as get my mail.

It may have been the combination of the Great Firewall with the fact that my hotel was right next to the local police station, but I felt more than a little paranoid and uncomfortable while I was in Shenzhen. The city is very modern (it's the place where China's experiment with Capitalism inside of Communism began,) and the people were very friendly, but I frankly don't look forward to going back.