On 10/10/11 00:03, [email protected] wrote: > > Anyway, now we know that: > > � Acer Inc. (Taiwan) � Amazon.com (United States) � Apple Inc. > (United States) � Asus (Taiwan) � ASRock (Taiwan) � Intel (United > States) � Cisco (United States) � Hewlett-Packard (United States) � > Dell (United States) � Nintendo (Japan) � Nokia (Finland) � Microsoft > (United States) � MSI (Taiwan) � Motorola (United States) � Sony > Ericsson (Japan/Sweden) � Vizio (United States) > > among others, use Foxconn's factories and thus have the same higher > than usual suicide rate as Apple, will anybody tell us how Apple's > business practices are fundamentally different from Nintendo's or > HP's or Dell's, or MS' or any other company from the above list ?
Yes, I will suspect that the working conditions of the wage slaves differ depending on who and what they are producing for - - on the basis of having worked in a high-tech factory producing goods for the gadget-consuming-neoliberal subjects. We had different production lines and very differing orders. Some were to be produced very fast - sometimes masters/originals had to be flown in directly from source to begin production immediately - and some were to be delivered "all at once" (i.e. a big load) for spectacular releases - and sometimes a hundred items had to be delivered as soon as they exited the production line and be driven - and sometimes this was my job - straight to some gallery in the big city or to some pundits who would drink bubbly, snort coke and behold the new thing exclusively for a little moment: trendsetters. Needless to say?, whether we were producing things that just kept coming (such as HP printers) we were "leisurely" doing so *in comparison* to when we had to produce special things (brands, names etc.) surrounded by hype and with the need to carpet comb the identity based gadget market in one go, in order to push the hype potential to its limits (such as iShit). Moreover, the secrecy - and the function of that secrecy in the hype - is extraordinary when it comes to Fruit Machines - hence security and other work pressures increase. It might well be that workers' conditions are invisible to most theoreticians (some bloke called Michael Perelman has a new book out about that) but if you'd worked in the industry, on the factory floor that is, then you'd have seen that not all moments are alike and that different customers demand different things, leading to different consequences and atmospheres and feelings of well-being and its opposite -- none of which, of course, reaches the class-rooms of academics or the offices of gadgets lovers. In addition, Apple's grip on popular culture - to the point where their business is protected against injust attacks on a progressive economics list - warrants extra care and criticism, as Steve Jobs and his merits/products stand as milestones/icons in the neoliberal era of me, me, me, or : i, i, i. "jmp" Not a troll, just a drunken ranter tired of convenience-contrarian theoretical "politics", who is not in love with his hardware vendors. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
