Stigmabase | North America

Your new iPhone's features include oppression, inequality and tax avoidance - Whatever marvels have been shoved into the new iPhones, the devices serve to increase the gulf between the super-rich and the rest of us, deny countries of rightful tax revenues, and oppress Chinese workers even while depriving Americans of high-paying jobs. Arrogant towards critics and governments, glutted with cash and yet plainly out of ideas, Apple is elegant shorthand for a redundant economic system. One of those attempted suicides, a 17 year old called Tian Yu, flung herself from the fourth floor of a factory dormitory and ended up paralysed from the waist down. Speaking later to academic researchers, she described her working conditions in remarkable testimony that I then covered for the Guardian. She was essentially a human battery hen, working over 12 hours a day, six days a week, swapped between day and night shifts and kept in an eight-person dorm room. When the historians of globalisati...