Not for Everybody

[tim]

I hate to say one more thing about Steve Jobs. But last night, after I lost cell phone signal while driving through wildest Marin and could no longer listen to Pandora, I turned on the radio to an archived Fresh Air interview with Jobs from 1996.

And he had all these inspiring things to say about how at Apple, they believed that everybody should be able to use technology, and that what's more, math and science should be for everybody.

But he didn't really mean it, because the people who work in factories in China assembling Apple products don't get to learn about technology or science, because they're paid such low wages that they can't possibly have time to. This is not an accident; without exploiting people this way, Apple wouldn't be able to sell you the products that entertain you so (including the one I'm using to type this post) at such low prices.

Nor do the people who suffer ill health or early death because of environmental degradation caused by Apple's manufacturing processes (they have one of the worst environmental records in the tech industry) get the chance to enjoy the delights of math, science and technology.

So when Steve Jobs said that technology was for everybody, he didn't really mean everybody, and he knew it, and everyone he was speaking to knew it. "Everybody" means white people, upper-middle-class people, Westerners, people who have privilege. Everybody else just doesn't quite make the grade of being considered "people".

And that's one of the fundamental problems I have with working in the field that I hypothetically still work in: you have to listen to people saying all these grand things about access to technology, and you have to know that those grand things fall somewhere in between meaningless and mendacious because they're deeply predicated on the maintenance of social inequality. You have to know it without talking about it, because the price of talking about it falls somewhere in between hostility and banishment. You have to embrace hypocrisy.

Comments

[luinied]

To be fair, it isn't just our field that has these problems. Do you know anyone with a Biology degree, by any chance?

But yeah, I'm awfully sick of hearing about how Steve Jobs was some sort of saintly hero who single-handedly delivered all this fantastic new technology - like nothing anyone had thought of or built before - to everyone on earth with no downsides ever.

[juli]

the people who work in factories in China assembling Apple products don't get to learn about technology or science, because they're paid such low wages that they can't possibly have time to

It's not just that low wages mean they don't have time to, it's also that the people running those factories have historically forced them to work such long shifts that they cannot.

Apple claims that they're making their factories pay for hired-underage workers to go back to school, and that they're sponsoring a distance learning program for thousands of workers. Whether that's enough to have any positive impact, whether the factory operators actually can allow workers (paid, ideally) time for that and whether the programs are actually useful, I have no idea.

In any event, Steve Jobs was interested in consumers and making consumer products, and consumers are economic tools; even if you're targeting the ones who have privilege, money and power, they're still not people.

[tim]

Agreed, on all counts.

[autumnus]

this reminds me of an argument I had with a professor. They were designing software for 3rd world countries using Iphone as basis.

I am not sure they KNOW. Sometimes it really doesn't register.