Thursday, October 18, 2012

Nailed It: No Sweatshops in Steve Jobs Biography:

Back here, I castigated Walter Isaacson for writing an entire book about Steve Jobs without even mentioning the giant gulag of brutal Asian sweatshops that make Apple’s products.

That was in December 2011. What happened next?

KABOOM!

That’s what.

A month later, performance artist Mike Daisey’s “embellished” account of Foxconn caused a huge wave of sweatshop stories in the reluctant corporate media.

At a stroke, a decade of carefully crafted multinational propaganda was swept away. Today, everybody knows about the sweatshops. In fact, it is so mainstream now that even Saturday Night Live did a bit on it.