Call me a miserable old piece of shit but I reckon it’s pretty weird that on the same day that some of Australia’s most committed virgins are queuing up in the cold outside the Apple Store for the launch of the iPad, in China, they’re queuing up on the roof to kill themselves at the factory that manufactures them.
If you want to know the story of globalisation, this one surely will do. On George St, Sydney, extra staff have been called in at the Apple Store to cope with the demand as hundreds of cashed-up geeks gather in a display of commodity fetishism which will hopefully be the subject of formal study by some sardonic anthropologist from the developing world.
Meanwhile, not that far north at the Foxconn factory in China’s Hunan province, nets have been installed on the roof after an 11th employee hurled himself to his death as the workers struggle to meet a deadline which has been created by our demand.
Apple is Apple so it has largely escaped the kind of Naomi Klein/No Logo vitriol which has damaged companies such as Nike and Puma.
It’s because Apples are, like, soooo cool, and nobody else makes their stuff anyway, so it’s not like you have a choice or anything, you really just need an iPod and an iPhone and a Powerbook and now an iPad, right?
It’s such a hysterical double-standard and proof that when it comes to consumer boycotts people are only actually prepared to impose an arbitrary ban on something they think they can live without.
And that’s the flipside of the issue - why do people think they can’t live without this stuff?
I got an iPod last year. For those of you who don’t know it’s like a small computer version of a Walkman which contains music and if you plug it into things like the car radio, or the stereo, songs come out of it.
But it’s just an appliance.
And at what point did our society start queuing for appliances? We’ve turned into the affluent version of the former Soviet Union.
When the first toasters were released did people sleep out overnight in George St in their jaunty denim caps and waxed moustaches to be the first proud owner of a magic bread-warming machine? Did the ladies camp out in anticipation of being the first to own a curling wand? Was there a crush when the first Breville Kitchen Wizz hit the market?
We’ve all got too much time on our hands, too much damned money and too screwed up a sense of what is actually important or even interesting.
Personally I just love the fact that even the most hyper-groovy among our number can assuage their instinctive and loudly-voiced concern over dodgy, life-ending work practices in the developing world, just because it’s just such a totally cool must-have item.
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