Inventing facts about abuses by Apple was a rotten idea, theatre artist says
Last October, I went to the Public Theater in New York City to see a one-man show called The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. It was a monologue by theatre artist Mike Daisey, a spellbinding talker who sat at a desk with only a glass of water and a cloth to mop his brow, and began to educate us about the ugly truth behind our beautiful possessions.
Daisey had recently been to China, where Apple products such as the iphone and ipad were assembled in giant factories surrounded by armed guards.
There, he said, he posed as a businessman to gain entry, and interviewed many workers who told him stories of long hours and relentless work. He said he had met workers as young as 13. He met a man whose hands had been crippled by the repetitive tasks of assembling ipads, although he himself had never seen an assembled one. When Daisey showed him his, the man described it as “a kind of magic.”
The Agony and the Ecstasy had a long successful run, and Daisey himself became a kind of spokesperson for the cause, urging his audience to keep in mind the human cost of their beloved electronic devices.
Things started to fall apart this year when he appeared on the radio program This American Life, describing his China trip and the things he learned. The show broadcast the segment, then decided to do its own investigation because some of Daisey’s details – like when he said the workers met at a local coffee shop – sounded unlikely. It’s true that the workers at China’s Foxconn plant work long hours, and that there had been several worker suicides, but some of Daisey’s details appeared to have been invented. The 13-year-old girl probably didn’t exist. The worker with the crippled hand didn’t work at Foxconn at all. The guards weren’t armed.
Daisey’s story, in short, turned out to be another case of a journalist – or, in this case, a theatre artist doing journalistic work – exaggerating his story for effect. This American Life ran an hour-long retraction of the story that included the program’s host, Ira Glass, doing a painful interview with Daisey, who returned to the program to try to explain what he had done. His defence was that it suited the art of his story better; he apologized, but only for bringing the theatre piece onto a journalistic radio program, where it didn’t belong.
Later, on his blog, Daisey wrote, “In the last 48 hours, I have been equated with Stephen Glass, James Frey and Greg Mortenson. Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iphone components, or that I never went to China, never stood outside the gates of Foxconn, never pretended to be a businessman to get inside of factories, never spoke to any workers.
“Especially galling is how many are gleefully eager to dance on my grave, expressly so they can return to ignoring everything about the circumstances under which their devices are made. Given the tone, you would think I had fabulated an elaborate hoax, filled with astonishing horrors that no one had ever seen before. Except that we all know that isn’t true.
“There is nothing in this controversy that contests the facts in my work about the nature of Chinese manufacturing. Nothing. I think we (would) all know if there was, Ira would have brought it up. If you think this story is bigger than that story, something is wrong with your priorities.”
And that has become the tragedy of the Daisey story: how his own scandal has served to overwhelm the larger story of what’s going on at the Chinese factories. (Three New York Times journalists, Charles Duhigg, David Barboza and Keith Bradsher, last year reported on the same story, and Apple hired the Fair Labor Association to audit the working conditions at Foxconn.)
The question of art vs. fact isn’t a new one. When The Wall Street Journal asked theatre artists about what Daisey had done, Paul Lazar, the co-artistic director of Big Dance Theatre, responded, “One need not convey only literal facts in order to tell the truth. In Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, he describes meat packers falling into rendering tanks and being ground, along with animal parts. I do not believe that this occurrence was ever corroborated as fact, and yet this novel moved Teddy Roosevelt to sign the Meat Inspection Act into law.”
He added, “There are many forms of fiction whose purpose is to make reality vivid. I believe that one reason why Mike Daisey made the regrettable mistake of lying to Ira Glass was to ensure that he protected a potent form of fiction that he was employing in order to make vivid the working conditions in Chinese factories.”
Yet Daisey’s monologue wasn’t wrapped in the artistic cocoon of fiction: It was presented as fact, and those in the audience had no reason not to believe that he was reporting exactly what had he had seen.
A new book called The Lifespan of a Fact, by John D’agata and Jim Fingal, looks at a similar case. D’agata is a writer who did a story for The Believer magazine about a boy named Levi Presley, who jumped off the observation deck of the Stratosphere Hotel in Las Vegas and killed himself in 2002. Fingal is the magazine’s fact-checker, who noted many errors in D’agata’s story; the book is a record of their correspondence.
So we learn, for instance, that D’agata wrote that there were 34 licensed strip clubs in Las Vegas, when in fact there were 31. D’agata’s explanation is that “the rhythm of ‘34’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘31.’ ” He wrote that a fleet of pink vans was purple because “I needed the two beats in purple.”
And so on: art trumping reality to make it more “vivid,” a deeper truth uncovered under the annoyingly prosaic reality.
At the end of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, Daisey told his audience he hoped they would never look at their cellphones in the same way again. He called it a “mind virus.” If the show becomes that, it may be for the wrong reasons: not because of how the phones were put together, but because the messenger couldn’t let the facts speak for themselves.