Autopilot by Andrew Smart

of powerful people wish to control systems that are intrinsically uncontrollable so that these systems can be made to do things they would not otherwise do. These short-term solutions are always greeted as a revelation. They certainly produce stellar short term results.
    But whether we are talking about forests or human beings, the scientific fact about these systems is that they are self-organized, and therefore an external agent cannot control them. Forcing them to suppress their natural fluctuations and complexities in the name of productivity will always lead to revolution, crisis, or collapse. In the case of forests, you get Waldsterben . For human beings, you may get suicide. You may get the collapse of a corporation or an entire manufacturing sector.
    Foxconn’s approach to management is quite simple: make each human do a very specialized repetitive task so that no actual thought or skill is required. This type of specialized labor works in ant colonies because individual ants are relatively simple creatures and are by genetic design already specialized to do certain tasks without thinking.
    Human beings are actually terrible at specialization. This is why every attempt to turn human beings into worker insects for the benefit of rich people results in massive human misery. Terry Gou, the CEO of Foxconn, admits as much in one of his sayings that people who wish to get promoted must memorize: “Suffering is the identical twin of growth.”
    In a remarkable study by Pun Ngai and Jenny Chan about the rash of recent suicides at the Apple supplier, they describe the fate of seventeen-year-old worker Tian Wu who on March 17, 2010 jumped from the fourth floor of her worker dormitory. 5 Tian had just moved to Longchua to work at the Foxconn factory from rural Hubai. Prior to what she called “her accident” she was described as a carefree girl who loved flowers.
    After working at the Foxconn Longhua campus for thirty-seven days she attempted suicide. Unlike fourteen of her co-workers who also attempted suicide during a two-month span in 2010 and 2011, Tian survived. She will likely be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
    Foxconn maintains a round-the-clock production schedule and often imposes overtime on the workers. They live in dormitories that have armed security guards at the doors. They live in such close quarters that personal privacy is next to nonexistent. Workers are randomly assigned to dorm rooms, a process which breaks up existing social networks and keeps worker organization to a minimum. They are not allowed visitors overnight. The entire life of a Foxconn worker is devoted to the production of cheap electronics, mostly for Western consumption.
    Recently, pressure has been mounting on Apple and other technology companies to examine their relationships to their Chinese suppliers like Foxconn. However, I would argue that it is the fundamental nature of the work that drives people to suicide. Working at Foxconn is the logical extreme of time management. Management schedules washing, eating, and sleeping to coincide with production timelines and in order to maximize the efficiency of shift rotation.
    In the West, we are proud of our new economy based on mobility and of our information revolution. We seem to regard industrial production as a quaint relic of the mid-20th century, as if we’re somehow now free of the ugliness and unhipness of manufacturing. We all live in the cloud now. In fact, Foxconn is the largest private employer in all China. It employs upwards of 1.4 million people, and one of the factory compounds employs four hundred thousand people. That’s four hundred thousand people—roughly the population of Minneapolis—working at one factory.
    The Fair Labor Association recently investigated Foxconn and concluded, “The factories were working beyond legal and code limits on hours of work, not recording and paying unscheduled overtime correctly,