Latest Tweets:

January 12 2012

iFault

You don’t have to dream about some sci-fi dystopian Blade Runner 1984 bullshit; you can go to Shenzhen tomorrow. They’re making your crap that way today.
That’s from the first half of this week’s episode of This American Life, where humorist Mike Daisey recounts his implausible, revealing infiltration of the Chinese factory where many electronic devices — Apple products, most notably — are assembled. 

But the really killer part of this episode is what comes next, when the producers set about fact-checking Daisey’s story, and record it. It’s exactly the kind of thing that makes TAL so good. It gets inside our thoughts. It is our thoughts. 

It’s as though the producers knew we would hear that first half and demand verification — or maybe validation; some discrepancy in Daisey’s claims that would somehow make it okay for us to continue buying all of these devices. Something to reassure us that in spite of what we’ve just learned, it’s not that bad. 

But it is that bad. 

Sent from my iPhone

Update (1.26.12): It gets worse.

  1. scifitwin said: I hated this episode. Not because it was bad but because it hit that spot that knows about this but has chosen to pretend it doesn’t exist. Everything I’m using the post this was probably built there.
  2. jdeadly posted this