pulling a Johann, Foxconn edition

So US public radio put out a documentary in January featuring an imaginative fellow called John Daisey, who produced a hard hitting report on conditions at the Foxconn plants that make various Apple devices, among other things (for the record, the group of employees in Wuhan who threatened mass suicide recently were making Xbox 360s). Anyway, it turned out to be the most popular episode ever, went viral, inspired all sorts of activism, all that good stuff. But:

Daisey's interpreter Cathy also disputes two of the most dramatic moments in Daisey's story: that he met underage workers at Foxconn, and that a man with a mangled hand was injured at Foxconn making iPads (and that Daisey's iPad was the first one he ever saw in operation). Daisey says in his monologue:

He's never actually seen one on, this thing that took his hand. I turn it on, unlock the screen, and pass it to him. He takes it. The icons flare into view, and he strokes the screen with his ruined hand, and the icons slide back and forth. And he says something to Cathy, and Cathy says, "he says it's a kind of magic."

Cathy Lee tells Schmitz that nothing of the sort occurred.

This chap never appeared on film. Maybe it was because he thought the camera would steal his soul. I don’t think you need any more than an absolutely rudimentary awareness of China to find that incredible. By rudimentary, I mean knowing that it makes a huge proportion of the world’s gadgets or that it has massive levels of internet and mobile device penetration and is generally device crazy. Or that a culture in the throes of mass industrialization might in fact be quite materially aware. Above all, would you assume it was a credible assertion that someone on a production line would think their finished product was ‘a kind of magic’ if that production line was in Europe or the US?

The sad thing is that it’s probably this kind of mysticism that helped drive the appeal of the programme: people pretty much like us in most material particulars wanting to earn a decent living’ doesn’t seem to excite much in the way of solidarity. ‘Hands off the munchkins': that’s the way to go.

In fairness, the show has put out a detailed, almost grovelling retraction, which identifies failures in fact checking as the main cause of the problem. I'd say it was more a matter of assumption checking.

Comments

[BenSix]

Mike Daisey. Perhaps it serves 'em right for hiring a man who's written a show entitled All Stories Are Fiction.

[hellblazer]

Pulling a Johann being something neo-Nazis have supposedly gone for, eh, fnarr, fnarr,

(Sorry, it's Friday afternoon here and I'm ever so slightly bored and delirious.)

Oh, and "amen" to the penultimate paragraph. Very neatly put.

[CMcM]

Sorry: though I'm sure you're right in the general argument I do believe 'its a kind of magic' is an entirely believable thing for someone in the position of Daisey to say.

I said more or less the same thing to my kids this evening when trying to illustrate the difference between how I (b.1958) see the interweb and how they (b.1996 & 1999) do.

'Believable' doesn't make it true of course.

[Barry Freed]

how I (b.1958) see the interweb and how they (b.1996 & 1999) do.

It's a series of tubes, right?

[Phil]

an entirely believable thing for someone in the position of Daisey to say

Maybe, but it's not attributed to Daisey.

[Barry Freed]

Some of the personal narratives in Truth include his own tempations with manipulating truth in art

[JamesP]

Weirdly enough, Mike Daisey is an friend-of-a-friend. He's a very good, imaginative monologist, which is, well, clearly the problem here.

[JamesP]

A friend-of-a-friend from ages back, too - via the Pagan Publishing gaming collective in Seattle back in the day.

What I think happened here is that Mike put together a theater piece in his usual fashion - cobbling together other people's stories and his own experiences, then dashing it up a bit as a storyteller. And then he got carried away by getting to go on TAL, and didn't go "Hey, guys, by the way ..." - and probably figured, hey, China's a long way away, nobody will find out ...

[CMcM]

Phil, quite right. My bad. I should have written 'Daisey's interviewee'. But I stick by the thought that the quote is far from totally unbelievable. It's a moderately plausible turn of phrase.

[ejh]

I agree. All this stuff seems magical to me, too. But it might be a question of the age of the person speaking. I never saw the internet until I was in my thirties. If you've grown up with it, different story. I don't think of the TV as magical, though it's as great a miracle as the internet is.