“A Call to Arms”, or “What Happens When You Play Too Much WordsWithFriends”
“Qat”, or “qi”, is an allowed word in Scrabble. Play that game, WordsWithFriends, or WordFeud enough, and there’s a lot of shady words that you swear you’ve never heard from your friends in regular conversation, be used casually during play, and no amount of frustration over the fact that you’re playing with someone with an extraordinary amount of “S“‘s will alleviate the fact that you are in competition. In competition, you do what it takes to win, and a win, is a win. Especially if you drop a “Qi”, and then add an “S” on your next turn for the triple word qualification (bastards).
Lately, there has been a lot of outrage over the working conditions at Foxconn in China, an important strategic manufacturing partner with Apple Inc. The New York Times posted a fascinating report on the dynamics of this relationship, which has caused Apple no end of grief. Realizing that the image of company fishnets to catch suicidal Foxconn workers was not really going to help with their next marketing campaign, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave out a strong, fangless response, saying that what resulted at Foxconn ran contrary to Apple’s “values”:
“What we will not do — and never have done — is stand still or turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain. On this you have my word.”
This is the company that is studied the world over for its enviable level to detail, and yet the details of a manufacturing partners working conditions were somehow outside the scope of Apple’s eye? Please.
But what else do you expect a modern multinational to do? I find the reaction to their practices more offensive than the practices themselves. Not because I would like people to stand until their legs get sore from repetitive tasks, nor because I consider workers cramped in dorms to be cost-effective, but what else did you expect in today’s economy? The world economy sucks, and company’s have to squeeze as much as they possibly can in order to compete not only against another competitor, but against the changing economic and political landscape. Sometimes, there are companies that squeeze a dollar out of a dime for pure profit, but that’s another story. Of course, Apple would prefer to hire Americans, manufacture in America, etc, but their actions are a perfectly rational response to high labor costs, unskilled workers, as well as political and infrastructural realities in the US (it’s shocking at how China’s infrastructure can scale as fast as it does).
However, you won’t find me calling for draconian cuts in minimum wage and regulatory laws in order to simply compete on another country’s terms: those Chinese workers are not jumping out of their windows because they can’t contain their happiness. Those workers are miserable, and that practice is not sustainable in the long-run. China is getting rich off of FDI, and that rising middle class is going to give way to popular labor reforms not unlike those in the US. China is a country that is paranoid to the bone about disorder, and it has a history of not wanting to lose the social narrative, as they remember the fall of the Qing dynasty to popular uprisings. Couple this rising middle class with an encroaching loss of privacy within this dynamic information age, and you are looking at a social class that is ripe for hard times when the chips fall. The reliance upon the state is going to be its undoing in the long-run, in my opinion.
Getting back to my point, recently Google updated its privacy practices, with the effective result being that they are allowed to do whatever it is they want to do with the fact that you like googling “Kitchen Nightmares” episodes. This is the company that famously told itself to not “be evil” during it’s luxury times, but now with competition from Facebook, they are throwing that luxury to the wind, in order to survi-uh, I mean, compete. A for-profit company is doing exactly what it should be doing, and it seems that the true values come out when pressure is at it’s most fierce. Everything else is just good PR.
In the American political scene, candidates give out responses that would test the sanity of the most legalese of lawyers, and give faux outrage over the fact that someone would accuse them of lying to voters. Pretty much that same politician is then lying when they accuse the other politician of lying to the voters. In the end, the question that is most important is not which politician speaks with core conviction, has integrity, and can handle the challenges of the office, but which politician would you like to have a beer with…while lying to you, too? Sites like Politifact may call out a lie, but there is so much marketing and bs in the process that it becomes apparent to the seasoned voter that the entire process is a con-job, and that partisans on both sides stick with their political parties like if they were a football team (Niners!).
In 2010, the GOP brought this country to its first credit downgrade in its history. Not because of political divides that could not have been bridged, but because of pure politics on a level that I have never seen before. With a party that prides itself on being more patriotic than Democrats, this behavior was very much in sync with a political strategy that is no-holds-barred intent on winning. It all makes sense if you think about it that way, and give yourself a few election cycles for the shocks to subside. Democrats, as a compliment, made concessions during the talks which would have caused them heartburn in the next election cycle, but the entire talks were scrapped because Republicans did not get 100% of what they wanted. Then again, my opinion was that negotiation was never an option in the first place. What mattered, above all, was winning, no matter the cost. Just as with companies, you see the true values of something, or someone, when they have to compete in order to survive, and I wonder if now we are just coming to terms with that bald-faced reality, and ourselves as participants.
There is going to be a Foxconn worker who will jump out of their building because they are not happy with their life, while at the same time there will also be an obnoxious rich-kid who gets promoted to the top of their father’s company at the expense of others. There is going to be a nice guy who will end up getting the girl, while there is going to be a brute who will spend their life alone. There is no karmic fairness to balance things out, it just is, and that realization, borne from a reflection of the realities that you see everyday, can give a sense of empowerment as to not only what priorities you really want in life, but how suffering over life’s misgivings is less painful when you simply stop caring, and soldier on.
Take SpaceX’s Elon Musk. He was born with an aptitude for technology, and made nine figures from the dot-com boom when he sold his company to EBay, seemingly having it all. Yet, his latest vision of privatized space flight not only received harsh publicity when launches weren’t working out, not only had former employees taking his ideas when he had trusted them to work on the company, high cash burn-out, but also dealt with the once-in-a-lifetime event of a 2008 recession. Squeezed from every corner, in the unfair circumstances of an economic downturn not of his making, within a company requiring high capital burn rates, this individual felt a level of stress that seemed to escape his earlier life, and reality tended to strike away at the narratives we often build of ourselves. However, he soldiered on, and his company eventually received a huge grant from the US government upon completion of a successful test launch, and introduced SpaceX’s 4x cost-effectiveness in space flight to the rest of the world.
He could have failed too, it could have all been for nothing, and he could have lost his company. Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple, and thought about leaving tech altogether. But you soldier on in life, and stack the deck in your favor as much as you can, in order to achieve the life you ultimately want, empowered with shaping a reality reflective of the values you want to make. If you ever get too complacent, just take a look at this picture of a Foxconn hiring booth:
