Mike Daisey's Apple factory-themed This American Life episode and related performance in disgrace
Mike Daisey’s Apple factory-themed This American Life episode and related performance in disgrace
I remember listening to Mike Daisey describe tearing down his MacBook into individual components and then putting it together again, ostensibly for fun, and thinking: this is a description of what this guy imagines nerds do in their spare time, told by someone who is not himself a nerd.
It bothered me. It’s not that nerds don’t like to take things apart to see how they work. It was something about the way he said it: he was fetishising it. It didn’t sound as though he was treating the subject matter with respect. I can imagine myself or people I know describing how we take computers apart for fun, and I can even imagine telling the story in a self-depreciating way; but it would sound different, for an important reason: we do this because we enjoy it, and we have very specific reasons that we enjoy it, none of which outsiders are likely to understand. There is a method to our madness. None of that came across in his story. Activities like this are not random or arbitrary as they must seem to Daisey.
It was a tiny thing to pick apart from his story, but it just happened to be the one part of the entire episode that I happen to be somewhat knowledgeable about. I, like most of his listeners, have never been to China and know nothing first-hand about the factories there. So all I had to grasp with which to evaluate his trustworthiness was this one small, seemingly insignificant anecdote that rang false to me.
It was fortunate, I suppose, that this happened in the very beginning of the episode, as it made me sceptical throughout the rest of it. I assumed the encounters he described, and the specific quotes he gave from the people he talked to, were exaggerated or embellished. But it didn’t occur to me that he might be fabricating entire conversations–entire people who never existed.
I also remember thinking that it was surprising, after hearing all of the disclaimers and caveats that the crew of This American Life felt they needed to add after playing the guy’s monologue, that they had decided to air the episode at all, when–even before these new facts came out–they were aware of so many things that did not add up about the story.
Daisey’s response:
It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity.
In other words, he is one of those people who thinks it’s okay to tell a lie as long as you don’t get caught–that the ends justify the means.
As others have already pointed out, the truly disappointing part about this whole thing is that it also serves to discredit all of the very real and legitimate issues about present-day manufacturing in China.