Apple of California or Taipei iPod Contractors? "Birth of iPhone" is "Game of Thrones" Saga

In the Game of Thrones (which am watching for the first time, binging Seasons 1, 2, and 3 during an Xfinity free-access trial).  It's about the rightful sons and daughters, or "bastard" sons of Kings, and their rights and claims to Kingdoms and Thrones.

In our world, the Patent or Copyright or Claim of invention is the coveted throne of the modern "Rightful Heir".  And the stakes - for Titans like Apple, Samsung, Sony, or Foxconn - represent a far more wealth than the "Iron Throne" at King's Landing.

Game of Thrones keeps our interest, in part, by slowly revealing more dimension in characters introduced in a previous season (before killing them off and replacing them, perhaps with a new actor less willing to negotiate better salary.. another contract manufacturing angle).  For those of us who study planned obsolescence and contract manufacturing, the history of Android (especially Samsung) vs. Apple smartphones is just as fascinating.  (There's even a 'bit player' I know personally, a kind of Hong Kong Tyrion, that I know pesonally.  Proview's Rowell Yang of the four fingers received a check from Apple for $60M five years ago. He had trademarked the name "iPhone" while I was a consulting with Proview).

In last weekend's WSJ.com, there's a fascinating chapter to the claims that Steve Jobs is the rightful King. father of the smartphone.

Back to Africa / We Live in the Future

Ken 'Bundy' Brown 2003 Band "Gray market goods"

Got my ticket, my seat assignments, and going through the visa process.   And I'm working on a cluttered pile of photos and journals, hoping to turn some of my writing into something a little more mainstream.

From time to time though, I'll return here.  My goal is to make the blog shorter and sharper.   A lot of the posts have emphasized the same point, rewording the collective outrage of the geeks of color in different ways.   It can be done humorously, like the April Fools "African Matrix Blog" (scarily foreshadowing the methodology of the E-Waste Tragedy "scrapumentary"), or with college thesis flair, or angrily.    But the goal now is to provide insight in modest bites.

Here's the key difference between exports of used electronics to African and Indonesian geeks and the exports to the ports controlled by (mostly Taiwanese) businesspeople in China.   The Chinese market, in the 1990s, was more like Africa today, importing for direct reuse and consumption in Chinese cities which could not otherwise afford brand new product.   That's like used German cars being sold in Poland in the late 1980s, or used brand name appliances to Russians in the 90s.   That's what Hurricane Hamdy, Hurricane Benson, and other African traders have been engaged in.   It's pretty simple, a secondary market taking gently used and electively upgraded material from wealthy neighborhoods and reselling them in emerging neighborhoods.   Salvation Army, Goodwill Industries, St. Vincent de Paul, eBay.

• In a direct resale market, you are selling a used car with the odometer reading is correct.
• In a direct resale market, you could be selling a used car with the odometer rolled back.
• In a brand new market, you could be selling a brand new car.
• In a brand new market, you could be selling what looks like a brand new car, but is basically "spray and pray" (new coats of paint on an old or recalled motor).

(Here's some background music by Ken "Bundy" Brown via Youtube.   I'm a huge fan of Leo Kottke and Ry Cooder, and would place Gray Market Goods in that style or vein.  His older stuff is a more Little Feat-ish.)

Just When I was Starting to Hate Apple

 'Photographer Credit: Nichollas Harrison' - thanks

I am not a Troll

Steve Wozinak Speaks to Bloomberg about Smart Phone Patent Wars.

“I hate it,” Wozniak said when asked about the patent fights between Apple and Samsung. “I don’t think the decision of California will hold. And I don’t agree with it -- very small things I don’t really call that innovative.

“I wish everybody would just agree to exchange all the patents and everybody can build the best forms they want to use everybody’s technologies.”

Steve Wozniak, the engineer-geek who co-created Apple Computer with Steve Jobs, was ever the good cop.   Yes, Jobs was a visionary, yes he was an orphan, yes he climbed up from the bottom, and yes he got blindsided by IBM when richie rich kid Bill Gates' Parents (who were on IBM's Board of Directors) got Gates a personal meeting to pitch Windows... Perhaps those tender moments influenced Jobs, perhaps he grew up tough.

But Steve Jobs also sued 14 year old bloggers, parked in handicapped spots, and (my beef) took credit infamously and greedily for other peoples ideas.  See Wired News articles... (but beware of flame-baiting your blog)...

My position in this industry was built by reading Digitimes, a Taipei-based tech journal which I started subscribing to about 10 years ago.  It was mainly about displays, displays, displays then.  I was able to predict and ride the sales of CRTs when the demand curve was outpacing the LCD supply curve, due to increasing demand projected in emerging markets, I was able to find Taiwanese-owned contract manufacturers, and I became who I am by riding Taiwanese coat-tails.  And here's the truth - Windows and IBM released their hardware, the PC clones, rather than open-source their software (as Google has now done) and the deal worked.  The Asian Tigers engineered and tinkered and produced PC Clones into a massive industry.  And the biggest thing you wanted to clone, 50% of the cost of a computer, was the CRT monitor.

Apple had to outsource their displays, they had nowhere near the market share to produce their own, not even close, in the 1990s.  And they outsourced them to Japan (Sony Trinitron), and did not develop the ties with Proview, BenQ, Wistron and Foxconn which others in the industry developed.  Apple tried to keep control, when Windows and IBM were PC-cloning, and tries to keep control as Google is Androiding.  But eventually, they had to come work to discover the IPhone prototype.

The Taiwanese became to display devices what Japan had become to automobiles.  In fact, it drove Beijing nuts that Taiwan was becoming outsource-in-chief to Japanese manufacturing, drove the Communist Party so nuts that they tried to corner the entire CRT manufacturing market, buying out all the furnaces and dumping subsidies into the manufacture... in 1999.   (Newbies).

Debate, Dialectic, Diablog: IPhone #ewaste Graphic Misleads

Diablogs and Wiki-Greeks

A couple of weeks ago, I was sent a new set of graphics, in the spirit of "Story of Stuff", by umm... students? activists? artists?... seeking to raise awareness about the IPhone.   A woman named J.Rhee sent me an advance copy and asked for my comments.   I sent her some, in the spirit of cooperation, but did not hear back.  

Elizabeth Chamberlin of IFIXIT (soon to take away the crown for the "Best Scrap Blogger in the World"*) has written about the Apple-criticism piece, and does a good job of examining the case against Apple without taking it hook, line and sinker.

The Anti-IPhone-graphic-activists display a lot of talent, sincere passion, and make some very valid points.  They asked my opinion rather nicely, and I'm always looking for mature, grown-up conversations with environmentalists.  But I'm disappointed not to have heard back from the authors of the piece.  Below is a snippet of the dialogue, followed by my response and comments.

Hi Robin,Thanks for getting back to me. The graphic I was referring to lives here: http://www.mbaonline.com/cost-of-iphone/  Let me know what you think. I’d love to get your thoughts, and feel free to use it as you’d like!Thanks again, Jen

Hi Jen,

I really like the lifecycle focus on mining, coltan, etc.   I lived in Africa and was in Rwanda, Burundi and DR Congo for awhile.   The natural resources harvesting business has been a curse. The Worlds Most Polluted Places (TIME) are metal mines, not recycling yards.

With that said, I think your graphic is pretty unfair to Terry Gou and Foxconn (Han Hoi Precision)...  The Taiwanese "Geeks of Color" like Gou and Simon Lin (Wistron) and Rowell Yang (Proview) have been "racially profiled" by the left in the USA, I think.  All three of those guys began as a "tinkerer" importing and repairing used electronics, then became a contract manufacturer (like Foxconn is for ... um... everyone not just Apple).  They have done a pretty good job of learning 100 years of industrial revolution lessons in a decade.

Foxconn is owned by the Taiwanese, managed by Hong Kong, employs labor from Cantonese Guangdong, and is regulated by Mandarin Beijing.   It's pretty remarkable.  The suicide rate is below that of similar scale operations (yes including the USA), when you have 1.1 million employees living in campuses the size of cities, you see rapes, robberies, and suicides at the same rate as you'd see in Detroit. 

Finally, the piece about Guiyu is completely inaccurate.   There are no Iphones in Guiyu.  Guiyu is almost all scrap generated in China.  Shenzhen, Guanzhou and Hong Kong have basically grown into one metropolis which has the population of JAPAN, and Guiyu is the scrapyard.

If you want to know what happens to Iphones which wind up in China, check out this blog.  http://techtravels.wordpress.com/shenzhen-phone-recycling-1/  Visit all 4 pages on the cell phone recycling in China.

I'm a socially conscious environmentalist.  In my opinion, we don't do ourselves any favors with racist depictions of the Geeks of Color.  It is a major embarrassment to the environmental community to have launched this "green scare" campaign against geeks and techs overseas.  I urge you to imagine how you would feel if you were Mowgli... when sex worker, coltan mining, child soldiering is 30% of your job market, and you learn to fix a cell phone, creating affordable connections for people in your emerging market,  or putting CRTs into internet cafes that become the center of Revolution 2.0, when you are recycling rather than mining, and green Americans portray you as some kind of a primitive, polluting, sorry, toxic victim.

Again, bravo on the first half of your piece.  But if I post it on the blog as is, I'm going to make some of the points I made above.  If you are interested in really conveying the truth, I'll spend as much time with you as you want.

If you want to see the piece we are both commenting on, find it via Elizabeth's blog... I don't really want to raise its pagerank if they are sending it out "looking for comments" but don't respond to the comments.  An MBA is supposed to be a masters degree program, and work is supposed to be subject to peer review, response and debate...

Daisey Chain, Foxconn, and Export Policy

I want to strongly recommend listening to the podcast (or at least reading the PDF) from the retractions in This American Life.

Ira Glass of This American Life has done a good job of trying to undo the ficticious Mike Daisey reporting about Foxconn.  In this episode, they try to correct the mistakes without excusing past abuses, or defusing legitimate concerns over fair trade with the workers who make Apple and other products.

The moral, to me, is that if an accident happens at a different factory in China (not Foxconn), 1000 miles to the west, two years ago, that it's not ok to say that you eyewitnessed the same accident happened at Foxconn's factory in Shenzhen.  This undermines the good factory, by making them the same as the bad factory.  The fact that both factories have brown people in them does not really excuse the shortcut.  The lesson is that if you are a journalist, and you give someone a soap box, you have to act swiftly to prevent a daisy-chain of bad journalism from taking route.

This is what CBS 60 Minutes allowed to happen, relying on Basel Action Network's Jim Puckett, in reporting that CRT monitors were scrapped in Guiyu, China, and not at the refurbishing factories I showed them pictures of.  They set into motion a chain of daisey-claims, infecting PBS Frontline, and Terry Gross' Fresh Air program, with fake statistics about e-waste exports.

Confessions: Foxconn Hoax by APM Mike Daisey

Fake Foxconn story on This American Life

While I don't want to exaggerate Foxconn as a wonderful place to work, I said from the beginning that it was nowhere nearly as bad as places like mines and textile factories in China, and the story by Mike Daisey didn't strike me as unbiased reporting.  I wrote two posts about how Foxconn is foremost a cooperative effort between Cantonese, Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Mandarin Chinese, which is kind of a coup by itself, and I provided film from Financial Times.

But it's worse than I thought.  Not Foxconn - Mike Daisey is worse than I thought.

This afternoon's press release from American Public Media:


During fact checking before the broadcast of Daisey's story, This American Life staffers asked Daisey for this interpreter's contact information. Daisey told them her real name was Anna, not Cathy as he says in his monologue, and he said that the cell phone number he had for her didn't work any more. He said he had no way to reach her.


"At that point, we should've killed the story," says Ira Glass, Executive Producer and Host of This 
American Life. "But other things Daisey told us about Apple's operations in China checked out, and we saw no reason to doubt him. We didn't think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his story. That was a mistake."


So when Mike Daisey says this,

...and all these people have been exposed [to N-hexane]...Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them...can't even pick up a glass.

What he meant was... well Marketplace asks Daisey in this interview which sheds new "dark" on his tale... [marketplace.org] :

Rob Schmitz: Cathy says you did not talk to workers who were poisoned with hexane.

Mike Daisey: That’s correct.

RS: So you lied about that? That wasn’t what you saw?

MD: I wouldn’t express it that way.

RS: How would you express it?

MD: I would say that I wanted to tell a story that captured the totality of my trip.

Ira Glass: Did you meet workers like that? Or did you just read about the issue?

MD: I met workers in, um, Hong Kong, going to Apple protests who had not been poisoned by hexane but had known people who had been, and it was a constant conversation among those workers.

IG: So you didn’t meet an actual worker who’d been poisoned by hexane.

MD: That’s correct.

Now maybe people will remember the great "E-Waste Hoax" of Africa, and ask themselves, when does passion do more harm than good?

Related articles

• This American Life retracts Apple Mike Daisey China show - BBC News (bbc.co.uk)

General Custer Reincarnate in Africa

You know who I'm talking about.  Enforcer of International Laws, in the form of unpassed amendments, the bringer of change in his vision.

The bringer of western ways.   Until the savages learn not to repair and recycle, because it just isn't safe.

The e-waste IT recycling should be done by whitie.

By the way, this internet thing is really cool.  Blackie should take some IMF or World Bank loans and leapfrog into the 21st century, and pay the interest in sweaty coltan mining jobs, to buy more new Stuff.

It's a whole package, it's all planned.  Obsolescence brings jobs to our factories, which we outsource to the people who are too primitive to fix or disassemble our stuff.

What he's destroying are the Geeks of Color, who are the best hope for places that otherwise offer kids employment in the sex trade, or who become thugs like KONY.

The image of the thugs like Kony is what gets the press, which further ingrains the image of an Africa too backward and too poor to fix a cell phone or CRT monitor.   Pounding and pounding the image of primitives into the press in Boston, just as period writers wrote of Custers heroic battles against the savage Apache.

The truth is now out there.   Ghana has 30,000 repair technicians, earning 10 times the average wage, creating places like MIST and intenet cafes like the ones in Cairo.

The threat to Custer yesterday would have been images of women and children laying on the "battlefield" outside their teepees and tents.  The threat today is an image of Chicas Bravas, an image of Geeks fixing, repairing, tinkering, debrouillards patching a new laptop out of two throwaways.

The threat to the ENGOs is that they will be caught having telephoned the EPA in the country of this (Indonesia) refurbishing factory, having told the competent environmental authority that it's a hazardous waste facility.  They are cutting down geeks at a rate that would make Custer proud.

Little Big Horn, Nairobi, Kenya...

ODM - Opportunity is in the Wind

First, here is a May 2010 film from Financial Times, which was done during the wave of 10 suicides at Foxconn (Han Hoi) in Shenzhen (click "MORE")

Foxconn Hires PR Firm

Psst.. spider, this is a pro-Foxconn post

I promised another post ranking the top ten "bad recycling" practices in Africa, but want to edit it more.  Meanwhile, I just ran across this story about "Foxconn", the western tradename of Han Hoi Precision Group.

Foxconn was one of the companies I discovered in 2002, on my first trip to Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou.  As a student of international development, and a rabid crusader against "resource curse" mining, I was fascinated by the contract manufacturers like Foxconn, Wistron, BenQ, Proview, etc.

Today's news, Foxconn hires Burson-Marsteller to hit out at underage worker claims is already being buzzed about in the blogosphere.   Foxconn's tremendous growth has turned into a case study for "gotcha" journalism.  Companies like Apple, Sony, Panasonic, and other contractors are worried about collatoral damage from the scrutiny on the "big secret factory" that makes their Iphones, IPads, laptops, etc. (using USA, Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean and European engineering and designs... and imported raw materials.... and little else from outside China).

According to commentary on Slashdot, to hire a big "spin" firm is something akin to a "cover up".   Burson-Marstellar was hired to manage PR disasters like Tylenol cynanide poisonings, Three Mile Island over meltdowns, and Bohpal chemical spill disaster... and I guess we are supposed to draw some kind of correlation between embarrassing press, regardless whether the company is victim (Tylenol) or conspirator.

I'm quoting myself again, but "it's like recoiling from poverty is being equated with compassion".  I've speculated about some kind of Stephen Pinker evolutionary psychology which causes us to recoil from some things and rush to help others, and how children seem to be a key to pushing our buttons.  Sure enough, the headline is about "underage employees".

EWaste Entrepreneur Mad Man Meets Primitive Wire-Burning Robots

i for one welcome primitive robot recycling overlords

Here is an excellent article on OpenForum.com on the Five Essential Characteristics of the Entrepreneural Mind.

1.  Creativity
2.  Suspicion of Predictors
3.  Comfort with Uncertainty
4.  Openness to Experimentation
5.  Functional Humility

Some of these come more naturally to me than others.   But the article helps explain our success with Fair Trade Recycling [FTR].

Making connections is how I bind my Creativity to the rudder of reality.   Seeing people (Geeks of Color) for what they can do rather than for what they cannot do is the Key to numbers #2,- 3, -4.   Number 5 is the most challenging.  For humility... how long will this FTR opportunity last before there's more "new escrap" coming out of China than we can supply from here... and how long will personal computers even be "a thing??

The "Essential Characteristics" is a good paradigm.  This is about creatively solving an "e-waste" problem through more and better trade, seeing a market opportunity, connecting solutions (quality, accountability) with the "ewaste" events in developing world, and having fun.   The other suggested viewing for this post is the Mad Men Series episode "The Fog".  The opportunities, predictors, uncertainty, and experimentation were all around fifty years ago... except the "emerging market" wasn't overseas.  It was women and minorities, markets ignored and impugned right here in our own country, back in 1962.

Suspicion of Predictors:  Look at how self-assigned Watchdogs have characterized the six billion people in converging markets.   They have successfully gotten the Mainstream Press to buy into their Predictor - sell a device to an African or Chinese and beware the "toxic consequences".

Look at how the non-OECD "Geeks" are depicted.  Now remember past marketing campaigns, which tried to marginalize other groups, like women (50% of the world).  Imagine running a "femine trade" marketing campaign in the 1950s.   As an entrepreneur, you might get beat up. But when previously excluded women become accepted decision makers in the market - as Africans and Chinese are bound to be - money which competitors spent on denigrating campaigns will become a liability.  By being open to partnerships with "excluded class" members, you may get an inside track.

Ratio of OECD to non-OECD

Comfort with Uncertainty, Openness to Experimentation:   You must experiment with these markets - sell to them - in order to get admitted into their factories where you can know them, and then you reduce Uncertainty load by load, trade by trade.  How can an entrepreneur stay comfortable going against the "E-Steward" current, ignoring dire predictors of primitive, wire burning, incapable buyers?



The "excluded market" of non-OECD is huge.  Big, like "women" in the 1960s.  The better-off half of non-OECD, about 3 billion people, is getting online at 10 times the rate of growth of OECD nations... but they earn $3,500 per year, one tenth of OECD per capita income.  Like women who were getting increasing purchasing influence in the 1950s, but were yet to be treated as equals, its a market opportunity in the rough.   It seems crazy and rebellious (to your clients, lenders and sponors) to treat Geeks of Color as equals.  But FTR won't have these sneering Madison Avenue Mad Men Ads to be ashamed of  as this market opens up with blistering, lightning speed.  Douala Cameroun became high speed bandwidth this month.   Open the bottle, the genie is knocking...