the agony and the ecstacy of Mike Daisey’s iPhone as told by me, as Mike Daisey’s iPhone
my anthropomorphic editorial from the 5/5/12 installment of The Paper Machete:
It is a very strange position
to be an iPhone.
Mike Daisey’s iPhone.
it is
VERY personal.
I feel like it’s safe to say that
I know more about a person than his or her family, friends, and employers…
all of ‘em combined.
no doubt.
which is just…CRAZY to me.
like, why trust me with that?
you don’t know. I mean,
you could drop me
into a toilet, or, you know, a sink,
or something,
leave me in a cab?
I mean, a MILLION things could happen.
they wouldn’t be my fault—
or your fault.
I’m just like…
there’s like billions of me now.
and we all come of out this box,
we all come out of the exact same BOX.
and some of us belong to people like Ira Glass and some of us belong to people like Mike Daisey.
but,
we’re from the same fucking place.
you know.
and we’re a dime a dozen.
Mike Daisey, you know
he was working on this piece basically,
about my family.
my dad, who,
I never really knew?
that well?
I know that he was really proud of me—well, like,
all the me’s.
I think he felt a lot of pride in having made us.
And maybe that was pride in himself, like,
I like to think that he was proud of our influence
but maybe it was literally just pride that he put us here.
Those are the kinds of thing that…
I will never know the answers.
I am amazingly intuitive about
so many things,
but emotional…
I don’t have anything to figure that out.
I try to keep everything in these…boxes.
Like, if I just keep a person’s life in order, if I keep,
Mike Daisey’s life
in order…
simplified…
I mean, I’m working really hard,
to stay on top.
And AppleCare went UP in cost! Which is fucking stupid. Because I have never even used my AppleCare.
because i’m conscientious.
I’m a hard worker, and I’m conscientious.
I don’t run more than one application at a time.
I turn off GPS satellites when I don’t need them.
My screen is on a 15 second sleep timer.
I run the battery to empty before recharge. Most of the time. When I can.
I’m voluntarily wrapped in some sort of high-resistance cellophane developed by Japanese POWs for the US Military at the end of World War II to deflect radiation from potential retaliatory atom bombs.
I always keep at least 3 reserve gigs available in case of emergency.
I’m meticulous.
It’s important for me,
to do things,
well.
People ask me why in the hell I still work for Mike Daisey. Don’t I know that there are better people out there, that anyone in the working world would be lucky to have me, didn’t I see The Help?
No.
I didn’t.
I didn’t see The Help.
Because I was fucking busy.
You know, Mike Daisey is a theater artist, okay?
He is a dramatic,
take it from me;
I’ve seen the guy spend the day in bed when he couldn’t get the top off of a jar of pickles.
I’m not saying what he did wasn’t flawed.
Misrepresenting the truth is wrong whether you’re an actor or a journalist.
It reflects either a lack of integrity or a lack of talent—liars?
take your pick.
Why is Ira Glass’ manipulated side of the story the one that people rally behind? This 1/87th of the world’s population who have even ever heard of Mike Daisey?
Is it to absolve themselves of first-world guilt?
Because there’s no denying that the root of the facts are true.
Apple Employees By Proxy WERE and ARE exposed to poor working conditions, BY AMERICAN STANDARDS. They DO work longer hours than labor laws permit. There WERE factory explosions.
Daisey’s art is his hubris.
The fact that no matter what comes out of his mouth for the rest of his career will be tainted by this public lashing—
THAT is the punishment.
HE is the failed party in this debate. Not Ira Glass. Not This American Life. Not NPR. Not Apple, Incorporated. Not the workers at Foxconn, Not me, the iPhone.
Mike Daisey.
A fat man,
A successful-ish writer by spoken word standards,
From Maine,
Who still wears Teva sandals,
Who performs at a table for three hours at a time in polite theater spaces across the country,
behind a lukewarm pint glass of tap water,
and, I guarandamntee you, Mike Daisey’s not toweling his genitals with hundred dollar bills.
There are Grand Wizards running for public office every day.
That’s your whipping boy?
Really?
You’re supposed to be the smart ones.
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all material written and compiled by megan mercier
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