Luke Robert Mason: You’re listening to the Futures Podcast with me, Luke Robert Mason.
On this episode, I speak to Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Jack Qiu.
iSlavery is more about workers and consumers losing their autonomy, losing their freedom. They become enslaved in different ways. One looks more pleasant than the other, but in the end it’s about reducing our options; reducing our freedom.
Jack Qiu, excerpt from interview.
Jack shared his insights into iSlavery—exploring ways factory workers are repressed, how notorious corporations build systems of exploitation, and sharing what activists are doing to fight back. This episode was recorded on location in London, England, where Jack was promoting his new book, Goodbye iSlave.
Luke Robert Mason: Jack, your work is on iSlavery. Could you explain what iSlavery is?
Jack Qiu: iSlavery: from the word, iPhone, iPad. So the ‘i’ came from all kinds of ways to call today’s smartphone or digital media. But at the same time ‘i’ also stands for individualism, because of individual consumerism—that’s how I imagine it. And slavery of course. It is about enslavement, about extreme ways of exploitation. This is an attempt to have a comparison, but also to bring together historical lessons from slavery and anti-slavery movements to today’s digital media, and efforts to improve the world of digital media today.
But there’s a more analytical concept. There’s the ‘manufacturing iSlave’—people who are enslaved because they do production. I sometimes call it ‘iSlavery along the assembly line’. Especially Chinese workers who make not only our iPhones, but also Samsungs—any kind of digital gadgets today. These are called ‘manufacturing iSlaves’. A second mode is called ‘manufactured iSlave’. These are people who spend lots of time…this is the consumption mode. Scholars like Tiziana Terranova call them ‘free labour’. People who are addicted to digital media usage. In cities like London or Hong Kong, we have lots of people who have lost their personal freedom because of too much addiction to digital devices. Essentially, this is also an important part. Slavery works in consumption mode in the data mine, as much as in the assembly line.
Mason: So you’re both an academic and an activist. How do those two things work together?
Qiu: Well I was trained as more of a traditional type of social science which should not have too much of an overlap with activism. Although when I think back, when I was a PhD student—I feel very grateful that I had the opportunity to work with Manuel Castells, a very established social theorist, and he used to tell me “no matter how good your social science research, it will not help with your activism because it’s political decision: political will”—the two things are separate. But then when I was a PhD student I spent 6 years in Los Angeles. I was with a group called Metamorphosis. We went into ethnic minority communities to observe and to study, but also to help ethnic minorities from African American to Armenian, from Korean to Chinese, Mexican, and Central American communities also to improve. Back then it was mostly radio, print media, church based communication. So I think I also had some influence from there. But the real change where I started calling myself a scholar/activist was 2009. That was the year when I did lots of hospital visits in Shenzhen, the industrial area near Hong Kong—which is probably the centre of electronic hardware today. Now people refer to Shenzhen as the Silicon Valley of Hardware, but back in 2009 it was not called the Silicon Valley of Hardware yet, but there were lots of work injuries. Every year 40,000 fingers are cut, or crushed, or smashed when they produce goods for the world. Every other Saturday I would be in the hospital. I would visit these injured workers—most of them would have lost their fingers. So that was the time I realised the world of digital media is too problematic. It’s such a problem that we only look at these things and try to understand them—not to change them. iSlavery is one of the terms I picked up from activist campaigns, and then further developed it from the luxury of a university environment—referring back to history, to global development, but then contributing back to the activist community as a scholarly input that hopefully will be helpful in unforeseen ways.
Mason: It’s not just your scholarly input. You’ve had direct run-ins with Foxconn, the company that makes these digital devices. Could you explain some of those run-ins that you’ve had?
Qiu: Yes. In 2009 when I went to the hospital—these are typically four or five storey buildings. Half of that building would be called ‘Hand Injury’ or ‘Bone Injury’ section. These hand surgery or bone surgery areas were almost exclusively filled with workers who lost their fingers. If you talk to those workers, Foxconn was the number one place where they got injured. Maybe one third—because there are many other factories. Foxconn was by far the largest. They produce more injuries because of the sheer numbers of their workforce.
2009: I was doing this along with one NGO, one labour NGO—their name was Tiny Grass. Tiny Grass people took me into this hospital, and there I was helping them out. I was really just shocked. One challenge if you study social problems: where can you find working class people who have the time to talk to you? If you’re working class then you’re very busy making ends meet, and then you don’t have the luxury to sit down and talk to someone. But then the hospital is actually a place where you have lots of time to kill, and you’re very lonely. Many of these people are young kids who are afraid to tell their family that they’ve lost their fingers, because their family would be heartbroken—so most of them are very lonely. So that’s how I started.
But then, in 2010 the Daily Mail invented the term Foxconn “suicide express”. Within five months there were 15 or 16 Foxconn workers who committed suicide. I was in Taiwan as a visiting professor at the time. My colleague Pun Ngai started 20 university activists. All of them are scholar activists: 20 universities from Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan. I joined that network when I was in Taiwan, and so I went to the annual press conference—the most important news event for Foxconn. Foxconn’s main headquarters were in Taipei, and I happened to be in Taipei during that period. So I joined Taiwanese activists and many of them are like me—activist scholars—so we demonstrated in front of Foxconn headquarters.
I even collected poetry, because when the suicides happened, many worker poets in mainland China would write poetry. We gathered 20 poems from mainland China and we had a public reading of the poetry whilst there was a stockholder event inside the main headquarter. Those were the things we were doing.
Indeed, this book, iSlavery has a lot to do with Foxconn because the term iSlave was the campaign name. It was called “The iSlave Campaign”, after the “suicide express” in 2010, and it built on this 20-university network.
SACOM was the Hong Kong based labour NGO. SACOM stands for “Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour”. SACOM was a central node for this 20-university network. SACOM basically published things into English, but most of the research for Foxconn was around that time. I’ve continued working on Foxconn since then. Every year I would take students to the Foxconn neighbourhood and monitor Foxconn through the news, through other means. Now, after I’ve published this book, SACOM actually invited me to be on their board.
Mason: From a methodological perspective, how do you work with your students to study the work of Foxconn? Do they see you as a threat, or do they allow you to do your academic research, and they don’t see it as a threat to the bottom line of their business?
Qiu: They definitely see me and our network as a threat. Before 2010, before Foxconn, SACOM had already worked on Disney. They already worked on other major multinational corporations, and they were allowed to go into factories to investigate; to do work from inside that factory, as well. So in 2010 we actually met a representative of Foxconn, and we said we want to go inside your factory. They were actually kind enough to meet us, but they never allowed us or any other independents to go inside. So still now, Foxconn is guarded by high secrecy. Not just researchers, but even the official union cannot go in their factory as they like. Foxconn is still treated as a very secret organisation. We tried to go in overtly, but without success. We did not have permission from the company to go inside. So what we did for several years was to send student volunteers—of course we had to train them before—so we had students go inside Foxconn covertly; undercover.
Mason: As workers?
Qiu: Yes, as workers.
Mason: How do you as a university sign off the fact you’re going to send undergraduate or postgraduate students to go and work there?
Qiu: Not undergrads—most of them are postgrads.
Mason: Right, ok.
Qiu: Actually in East Asia, if you know the history of the labour movement in South Korea and in Hong Kong as well—South Korea was on a much larger scale—there was a whole generation of student activists who go embedded on the shop floor. Some of them even died in that process. So the university of course cannot sign as a formal IRB—in the US, it’s impossible. But even in the US, I know for example, Harvard Business School, they would send their Harvard Business School students to the assembly line to experience assembly line work—so that’s possible in the business school. To train better business managers for the supply chain, they have to understand how things work. So that was possible.
Mason: So for the students who want to go and work at Foxconn, what does that training look like, before they make the decision to become an embedded researcher?
Qiu: So this is something we did between 2010 and 2014, actually. We did five consecutive labour study summer schools. It’s one month long, and we admit students who have to persuade us that they are interested in labour studies. They have already done something within the Students Association, or they’re already reading and maybe practicing by themselves in different parts of China—and then we will have them together for one month. We’ll start from reading Marx, but also talking about what are the things to do or not to do, and how to blend in as workers.
Mason: So what are some of the things you train them to do and not to do, and how do they blend in? How do they learn to blend in?
Qiu: Well one thing, for example: I’ll tell them basic things such as how to dress. What do you wear? A worker would usually wear darker clothes and no high heels—as basic as that. More importantly, it’s about how to take notes. When students start they like to have their notepads—these are completely off-limits. Going in there, the best way is to make full use of your mobile phone—you’re undercover. Of course, we’ll teach them about ethics. This is very essential. We go undercover not just to find the scoop so that we can become famous reporters. The only single reason we go there is because there is something of major public interest. We need to know what’s going on, and what’s going wrong along the assembly line, and the world should know the reality. We’re there to find out what the reality is.
Without going undercover, there’s no other alternative. We already tried other options. Actually, Foxconn was open for one single day in June 2010, if I remember correctly—to the media. Even now, Foxconn is still guarded by high secrecy, so we’re there to find out what is going on, to talk to workers—and usually this won’t be too long. Also, we do not send students into the factory as individuals—we send them into the factory in small groups. I sometimes went undercover but I’m too old, because the workers are all in their late teens or early 20s—so I would be hanging out in the neighbourhood.
Another very important thing to understand is this monstorous factory. Foxconn: the highest point according to Wall Street Journal is 1.4 million people; all of the employees it has. The largest campus is the way they call their factory facility. They call it Longhua, and that area has 400,000 people—just one factory facility. So half of the workers would live inside the dormitories, but the other 200,000 people live outside, so there’s no problem for me to sit in the Dai Pai Dong—it’s like street food—in the Hawker Centre. I just sit there and then the workers can talk to me. Some of my interviews are done here, because guards came to me and talked to me, so we can sit outside and do surveys outside. Sometimes they think I look older, so they think I’ve come from a special monitor service at a very high level—maybe I came from Taipei to monitor what’s going on. So not only do the workers fill in our questionnaire, they also write on the back of the questionnaire a little essay about how things should be improved in this factory, because very seldom do Foxconn collect worker’s voices. So we use multiple methods when it suits the context. I have personally interviewed low level managers as well, but then for the high level management we collect all their press releases: how Foxcom had a major argument with the official union in Beijing. We collect all of those statements and then we piece things together.
Mason: So once you’ve identified the issue and you realise there’s a systemic issue, what are some of the solutions? How do you enable workers to also be activists? What sorts of solutions do you suggest?
Qiu: I think there are several answers, OK. First thing is that ordinary workers do not want to be activists.
Mason: Is there a reason why?
Qiu: One thing is that they are workers trying to make ends meet. Or they’re very young. They go to Foxconn—they came from rural China to see the world. Maybe to use slightly jargon language, this is a typical neo-liberal subject. When they came to Foxconn, they already had the mindset to strive for individual success. To try to get more material wealth, and then try to become another successful consumer. You are what you buy, like what they have been seeing on TV. Most of these workers when they grew up, they never saw labour movement activists on TV. They don’t have activists around them, many of them. So that’s the “normal” worker. But like any normally functioning capitalist society in Hong Kong or in London, most people are not activists—they are part of the system. But it’s not uncommon when they have a breakdown—like work injury could be one case; a vocational disease; or in other cases people cannot have wages paid. Basically they’re subject to the most blatant form of wage theft. So they become activists, because they have no other choice.
Around 2009 was also the time of the global financial crisis, about 30 million people—migrant workers—lost their jobs. Now they have the luxury of additional time to think about changing the system. Why have they worked so hard, but they still can’t climb up the ladder of social mobility promised to them? So that’s when the neo-liberal subjectivity starts to break down.
My attempt to write this book is one of many other attempts to provide workers with these tools. But then it’s really up to the worker—herself or himself—to decide whether they want to use these tools. You know, this is a lesson we learn from Leninism—is that we impose on other people what they should think about; all their belief in the past is forced consciousness; believe in me. But then in that sense, you’ve lost the sense of popular democracy. I’m a socialist in that sense. Being a socialist, without being authoritarian. So there is lots of creativity. Once workers realise the problem, that the system is going wrong, then they can be creative in their own way. Just as I mentioned they wrote poetry. Who in the world still writes poetry today? But when Foxconn workers were committing suicide, all the poets came from factory zones in different parts of China, or they were a domestic helper, or they were a construction worker, or dock workers. So they wrote poetry and then these became new resources—cultural resources for labour activism. Often, they wrote better poems than me, even though I teach in Chinese universities. So my role is not just there to enable workers, but also to enable myself as a better listener, as a better observer, so we can learn from existing worker activism—as limited as they are—and then magnify what successful worker bloggers have been doing. For example, I have organised physical meetings for worker bloggers so that they can exchange their best practices.
Mason: So the onus shouldn’t just be on the workers, should it? It should be on the consumers. And I know you quite openly say you were one of those consumers at one point, waiting for the next iDevice, whether it was the iPad or the new iPhone. And I just wonder—what is it that makes us so complacent as a consumer about this form of modern slavery?
Qiu: I think this goes back to the same neo-liberal subject. This is part of neoliberalism. It’s liberalism but on the surface. Liberalism should be about giving people more choice, more freedom. But then neoliberalism is actually—you only have more choices in the department store, in the iStore, iShop. You only have more choices in a pre-defined way, and those pre-defined ways are by the resourceful and the powerful, and usually these two come together as the elite decision makers. Consumerism is a quintessential part—probably even closer to the audience of this programme. We are programmed to think about the next device as being ‘cool’. At the same time, most people would think of the previous iDevice as ‘uncool’, but when you think about the new: ‘cool’. This is the theme of built in obsolescence, where we’ve lost our freedom, because our mindset is being led, being programmed at the political economy level. The consumerist neo-liberal subject also gets into the mind of Chinese workers as well. Now I go to factories and compared to seven years ago, very few people would be able to afford authentic iPhones, but now increasingly they are using authentic iPhones. They are in the same kind of system. Sometimes when you talk to workers they even glorify the myth of the next iPhone—even more than average urban consumers.
Mason: You tell a story in the book of someone selling their organs for the next iDevice.
Qiu: Yes. That’s a very pathetic and saddening story. It was actually a 13 year old—or maybe 15 year old—so he was a teenager. He was still in secondary school and his parents—both of them—are textile workers in a second tier City in China. Then he sold his kidney to buy an iPhone and iPad. I think it was 2011. In the process, he used social media. He used Tencent QQ—this is the Chinese equivalent of Facebook. He used that to find the person who wanted to buy his kidney, and then he was promised that it would just be like taking one of your hairs—you’ll have no problem or medical complication afterwards. But actually, he lost his ability because of the condition of the transplantation. So that’s a very sad story.
I think in China and probably other societies of the Global South: India, Latin America, the Philippines; I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the working class—especially young people—would be even more captured, more addicted to this digital media, to the latest gadgets. Even more fanatic than what we would see around us—the iPhone fans in London or in Hong Kong. There’s even more scarcity. The neo-liberal subject works by creating false markets, and then people will perceive—even though it could be produced in very large quantities—perceived as being very scarce. That’s where the social status of consumption—especially when it’s not needs based consumption; this is to show off—OK, so that came out even stronger in places like working class societies, working class China. Maybe it still works in working class UK—I’m not sure.
Mason: So you’ve tried to capture all of these different forms of iSlavery under this catch-all term “Appcon”. Could you explain Appcon?
Qiu: I developed this word bilingually. It started as a Chinese term to put Apple and Foxconn together. When it started, the Chinese term was called Píngguǒconn—so it’s more like Appleconn, OK—A‑P-P-L-E-C-O-N‑N, so it’s Apple and Foxconn together. But later on when I was writing this in English, if we look inside Samsung or Xiaomi—Xiaomi is the Chinese brand mobile phone, smartphone, much cheaper, but the business model, the way they produce this is also in Foxconn. Samsung has its own assembly line, not in Foxconn. But if you look at Samsung’s problems of worker suicide, of vocational diseases – it’s almost exactly the same. So in English I simplified Appleconn into Appconn—A‑P-P-C-O-N‑N as a way to talk about all these app economies, OK, smartphones. It’s to do with the high end design, the research and development in Silicon Valley in the case of Apple, or even Google I would say—or Samsung, or Xiaomi. They work actually hand in hand. Without Foxconn or similar assembly lines, there wouldn’t be so many devices. There wouldn’t be so many crazy fans. Appconn is basically my way to call the structural forces that create iSlavery. iSlavery is more about workers and consumers losing their autonomy, losing their freedom. They become enslaved in different ways. One looks more pleasant than the other but in the end it’s about reducing our options, reducing our freedom. Appconn is the structural forces—it works at the global level—from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen. From South Korea to different parts of the Samsung empire. There’s actually a South Korean documentary called Empire of Shame talking about vocational disease, so this is global; multi-national. Appconn is also closely tied to financial capitalism. That’s the root of neo-liberal capitalism, so financialisation—and no one is asking “Why do we have to have a new generation of smart phone every year?” It’s because of the annual cycle, the short term cycle of the financial market. Basically Appconn is the wealth system of gadgets, but gadgets not only as hardware, but also as software, as PR industry, as ways of cultivating this -
Mason: Desire for these devices.
Qiu: Exactly. So not need-based, but want-based desire.
Mason: To a degree, some of these devices are then being used—and social media is then being used as a form of resistance – a kind of weird irony. I know that you’ve looked at people who are using social media as a form of activism to reveal what’s going on to the rest of the world. I wonder if you could speak to some of those examples.
Qiu: Oh, there are lots of examples. First is because…Actually we had debates among our activists, or scholars, or students you know—whether we want to boycott all this and just stay with our old Nokias, but then that’s a dead end—at least among my colleagues and friends and comrades. So we need to use this digital media to talk to the consumers, to the workers. The workers are smartphone users themselves. So there are many global campaigns, including iSlave. That campaign actually used the same colour of the book—the original Apple iPod colours. The famous advertisement with music lover, freedom—so they used the same colours, and this what we called memes. It’s actually a collaboration between Stockholm NGOs including Greenpeace and those at Public Eye in Switzerland, so it’s a global campaign.
And you know among workers—so we have poetry, I already mentioned that. There’s still a thriving poetry tradition which we did not see in other upper class/middle class populations in China. They write poetry about their work and then the poetry would become multi-modal. So if it’s really good poetry, chances are there’s another worker band. I work with worker musicians. They would make melodies—they would transform the poem into a song. And then there would be live performances. They would use the songs in their People’s Theatre—Worker’s Theatre performances. They stream them together to an hour long or 90-minute theatrical performance. So there are all kinds of creative practices and often at times, these are by the more artistic individuals and groups.
Another important instance is when there are major confrontations. Like I said, ordinarily, workers would be too busy—but sometimes we see that when there’s a recession—like the global financial crisis—we see that usually when right before factories go public, before their IPO; their initial public offering—their company would be downsizing. They’d be doing all kinds of cost cutting, and that’s the moment when workers start to realise they have to have a protest strike, and sometimes they’d use the most creative forms of insurgency.
My favourite example is from 2009—this was a shoe factory called 360 Degree. It’s a Chinese brand making athletic footwear and apparel. So when 360 Degree was preparing for its IPO in New York, it was the financial crisis and then the company tried to become even more lean and mean. So there were thousands of workers. This was in the province called Fujian, in a small town called Jinjiang—but then half of the town was working for this factory. So the workers started a strike, and what the factory did was that they bought off local officials and then used riot police and thugs to crack down on workers—a very bloody crackdown outside of media attention. There was also local media censorship, so most people did not know about it until things went dramatic. Probably my most favourite example about using digital media to have an insurgency by workers is that the shoe factory workers formed solidarity with hackers. We know China also has a sizable number of working class software programmers. They’re not all in India, you know. In China we have a small army of software programmers—I call them grey-colour workers. These are people who do tedious coding and programming, but make a very low salary, and then they were probably…my suspicion, OK…I haven’t really been able, because the place is rather far away from Hong Kong so I’m never down into it, but my suspicion is that the shoe factory workers maybe have cousins or brothers who are software programmers. So what they did is they came together, what they did is they used a skill called ‘search engine optimisation’. What they did is basically they hacked Google. So when anyone searched 360 Degree using Google, they could not find the financial PR release from the company. What they found is thousands of pictures about the bloody crackdown. This was by my account the first factory worker and hacker alliance, and then they had an ambush. This is probably the first cyber ambush against capitalism in the history of the global labour movement. It happened in a special time of 2009 and it shows the creativity of 21st century labour activism in China and in the world. There are probably similar things in India and Latin America that I haven’t heard about, but this is one thing that came to our attention. As scholars, as activists, there are so many new things because neo-liberal capitalism—including digital media incarnation of capitalism—are endlessly novel in the way they exploit people. But at the same time—this is my lesson that I learnt from history from my own activist work—the ways workers resist capitalism are also infinitely creative. Using this form of hacking for example as one of many ways to use digital media against digital capitalism, against slavery.
Mason: Now you said 1.4 million workers are employed in these factories. What happens if automation solves the iSlavery problem, but also makes the need for these workers obsolete? What’s going to happen in that scenario?
Qiu: Well I know in the West, for example: my best friend—or one of my best friends—Adam Greenfield wrote about automation, and he’s very genuinely worried about that. I actually have a slight disagreement. I’ve talked to him about this already but at least in the case of Chinese capitalism, labour intensive and also highly flexible capitalism—automation works more like a threat that never really materialises. For example in 2010, when I was protesting outside Foxconn headquarters, we could not go inside. We were outside demonstrating. The meeting of the stockholders—the annual conference—was on the third floor of that building. On the first floor of that building there was already a fully automated lab. There were robots making electronics, and Terry Gou, the owner of Foxconn actually bragged about it—we all read it. Deal without workers. So Foxconn already has the most advanced robotics.
I trained in Social Science in the old way. I only try to look at the past and present and make sense of them. I don’t want to predict the future. But at least, so far, if you look at the actual number of workers that Foxconn employ in China and their robotic technology, Foxconn robotics have been becoming more and more advanced, but at the same time they have been hiring more and more Chinese workers. Like I mentioned, at the high point—this was 3.3 years ago—Foxconn had 1.4 million. That’s the last time Wall Street Journal reported on the total number of workers Foxconn have in China. But then in 2010 when the suicide express happened, Foxconn had less than 1 million people, so why have Foxconn been making more advanced robotics—industrial robotics? It has not hired less workers. It has increased the number of workers. The answer, if we know how Foxconn’s exploitation works is actually rather easy to explain—because workers can be laid off. Workers can be subject to wage theft. But robotics cannot. You cannot lay off industrial robots because to maintain a robot, you have to have electricity. You have to have technicians, and if you don’t have those, that robot will stop working. So you cannot reduce the costs. Robots are actually fixed assets in terms of the mode of production. But human workers are flexible and you can have them earning small amounts of money, and then they buy the things you sell them, and then the money comes back to you.
So far—I would be probably sounding too dismissive to people who worry a lot about automation—but so far robotics and the threat of robots works more in another way: to discipline workers. To say if you don’t work hard enough, if you don’t accept the horrible conditions, then we’ll have robots do your job. So far, that’s what I’ve been observing in the Chinese context.
Mason: To some degree it’s the fact that the capital outlay to actually replace the workers with robotics is so high that they’d see a short term return on that investment and that wouldn’t make the shareholders happy in the short term. It might preserve their business for the long term but it won’t mean that they’re making the same sorts of dividends that they did last year.
Qiu: You’re spot on. It’s the logic of financial capitalism to make short-term, because robots are a long term investment. Actually even before Foxconn…I have another book called Working Class Society (2009, MIT Press) where I talk about the case of BYD. Today BYD in China is a company known for its electric cars—almost like the Chinese version of TESLA. But 10 years ago, BYD was the world’s largest mobile phone battery producer, and if you look at how BYD succeeded, before BYD started to enter the market for mobile phone batteries, it was 2002/2003. Before that point, 90% of the world’s batteries were made by two highly automated Japanese companies. One was Sanyo, the other was Sharp. Sanyo and Sharp were already using industrial robots, and then they would make all of the batteries for Motorola and Nokia. They’d been occupying 90% of the global market. Within two or three years, BYD got half of the world’s market share. What they did is they used human labour—and in a very flexible way.
What also happened was because of the cycle—so this goes back to the building obsolescence. The cycle of mobile phones is becoming shorter and shorter. Motorola and Nokia actually designed their devices to be durable. Adam Greenfield told me at Nokia, they used to put mobile phones into washing machines to try to make them work longer. The battery is also actually a crucial part of our mobile phones that needs to be updated—once you update your screen; your software. So the battery design used to be… because the cycle for pre-smartphone mobile phones were longer in duration. So actually it makes more sense for batteries. Once you have your robots, the robots can work for 18 months or two years—and then you don’t have to re-tune your robot. It can make the same battery for 2 years, and then your investment comes back. But then with the shift into smartphones: not only is there a new model of smartphone, usually not just for Samsung, iPhone, or all the Chinese brands as well. Not only do you have a new smartphone with a larger screen, higher demand on battery. For example for your iPhone 7; the iPhone 7 in the first three months. The production process for making the iPhone 7 may be different from the next three months, because they already have big data to calculate how it has been working and what has to be changed. Sometimes it was changed in the wrong way—that’s how Samsung got bust a few months ago.
So the manufacturing procedure becomes much more flexible, and when they design it—they never think about the workers. So if you have to re-tune your robots every 3 months, that doesn’t make economic sense, but with human beings, it’s actually -
Mason: Easier to re-program.
Qiu: Exactly. I call them programmable labour in that sense. That works much better for financial capitalism.
Mason: So general purpose machines—we’ve already got them. They’re called humans, and they’re easier to retrain every 3 months than build a brand new robot for a very specific, specialised task. I very quickly want to talk about this. You mention, at the beginning, this second form of iSlavery—the iSlavery that every single person who uses a social media platform is under. The ability of these social media platforms to generate wealth from our free labour; from our likes, and from our engagement, and from our clicks, and from our shares. To what degree can something be done to make people aware that they are the product of those platforms?
Qiu: One thing—in Western Society as much as Hong Kong—is the notion of privacy. This is an easy way to start to raise awareness about how the platform owners are exploiting us. But like I said, that’s the easy and common way to start, but that should not be the end. The solution…because the discussion as much as I understand about privacy is still very much an individualistic notion, so there will be other alternatives. One thing I’ve been spending more time on these days is called “platform cooperativism”. As collectives, people come together and own their apps together, and develop their governance structure amongst themselves; negotiate. So in Hong Kong we have many interesting examples. Giving free rides to other people. So basically it’s UBER without being owned by a private corporation, but then these are people who help each other. Usually they live in the same community. The community is called Tai Po, next to my university campus, and they have developed their own app. In addition to giving each other rides they also have their weekend yoga classes together—free yoga sessions.
Mason: So exchange a ride for a yoga session. So it’s truly the sharing economy without the exchange of capital.
Qiu: Exactly. So truly a sharing economy, yeah. Another of my favourite examples is in senior care. In Hong Kong—even Hong Kong is an advanced capitalist society in many ways—but in terms of maximum work hours, Hong Kong is very backward. Probably the only post-industrial society without legal limits. So in Hong Kong, McDonalds can ask their workers to work 20 hours a day—if the worker is willing. Of course they’re very poorly paid. People want to do more overtime work. So it ends up—if the parents work for McDonalds, they won’t be able to take their grandparents to hospital. So this was a group started as single mothers, and they initially just had a hotline with Excel so they could help each other. Some of them are laid off so they can help their neighbours to take the senior citizen to hospital. But now they have their own app—it’s called Around Neighbourhood. It’s these kinds of grassroots practices giving us a full awareness. Not just awareness, but workable solutions beyond the platforms. Often they’re starting on Facebook, but they end up having their own apps. They still use Facebook, but they’re not constrained by Facebook.
Mason: So ultimately, this could potentially be at least one of the solutions to engineer sustainable change.
Qiu: Definitely, yes.
Mason: Thank you.
Qiu: Thank you.
Mason: Thank you to Jack for sharing his thoughts on some of the ways we can overcome the injustice and oppression that exists within our global economic system. You can find out more by purchasing Jack’s book, Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition. Proceeds from this book go towards a Congolese NGO set up to help improve the working conditions for miners extracting coltan—the mineral used in many of our digital devices.
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Further Reference
Episode page, with introductory and production notes. Transcript originally by Beth Colquhoun, republished with permission (modified).