Big Tech is no stranger to Big Hypocrisy. Finally, has Apple (Tim Cook) replaced Facebook/Meta (Zuckerberg/Sandberg) as the leader of Big Tech hypocrites? The WSJ has a very good article about Tim Cook and Apple's hypocrisy on freedom of expression.
It was a telling moment when Tim Cook responded with a long stony eyes-down silence to a volley of searching questions by a Fox News reporter on Apple's response to China's brutal crackdown on Covid lockdown protestors at its largest iPhone factory in Zhengzhou and its collusion with Chinese authorities in suppressing free speech through tweaks to software on Apple devices.
This is what Apple has been upto in recent days in China,
In April... the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, wrote a letter questioning Apple’s decision to drop the Voice of America mobile app in China...But the issue attracting the most attention now has to do with AirDrop, an Apple file-sharing tool that many Chinese had been using to coordinate demonstrations beyond the reach of Beijing’s internet censors. AirDrop works by letting iPhone users who are within 30 feet of each other exchange photos and documents without going online. On Nov. 9, Apple released a software update only in China that limits to 10 minutes the amount of time files can be shared among iPhone users who are not in each others’ list of contacts. This robs Chinese iPhone users of a tool they had been using to organize protests.
In stark contrast, this is Apple's moralistic posturing at home,
In 2015 a couple inspired by Islamic State opened fire at a San Bernardino, Calif., office, killing 14 people. Though gunman Syed Rizwan Farook was killed in a shootout with police, authorities recovered his iPhone 5c at the scene. Trouble was, it was locked, and the iPhone was programmed to delete all its data after 10 failed attempts to log in. The Federal Bureau of Investigation asked Apple to help the government get into the phone, but Mr. Cook refused, saying the company couldn’t possibly participate in something that “threatens the security of our customers.”That isn’t the only public stand Apple has taken to underscore that it’s a moral lodestar, not just another grubby business seeking profits. When Georgia last year passed new reforms to ensure the integrity of its voting system, Mr. Cook happily joined a chorus of corporate leaders who condemned the state for supposedly engaging in an effort to suppress the vote of African-Americans and other racial minorities. In 2015, when Indiana passed protections for religious freedom, he called it an effort to “rationalize injustice.” After George Floyd’s killing in 2020, he decried “deeply rooted discrimination” and noted how iPhones, with their built-in cameras suitable for filming police malfeasance, were a force for advancing social progress.
The WSJ article nails the dilemma
CEOs can always justify their operations by pointing to the economic benefits their companies bring to the communities in which they operate. Or CEOs can go the progressive route, presenting their companies as moral paragons. But they can’t have it both ways: holding themselves up as courageous in places where the risk from speaking out is low while keeping quiet about real oppression in places where speaking out can really hurt the bottom line.
If one were to go by standard theories on marketing and media management, the interview episode should have been enough to seriously dent the brand and its business. And Tim Cook's future as CEO.
What does it tell about our assessment of business leaders when we elevate as the lodestar of visionary business leadership someone who has single-handedly and single-mindedly in pursuit of efficiency and profit maximisation irretrievably yoked Apple to China thereby ignoring every principle of risk management and diversification, and continues to consistently brush aside all the numerous unmissable signatures of bellicosity by Xi Jinping's regime and deteriorating relations between China and the West?
The very socially conscious consumers of iPhones (the overwhelming majority of whom are well-off, and most likely subscribing to the liberal ideology) should have been boycotting Apple products and Tim Cook should have become the butt of jokes and criticisms in social media. But none of these have happened because, contrary to theories, there's an even bigger hypocrisy at play.
There has been no viral #BoycottApple campaigns on social media, like the loud campaigns against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine or Qatar for its abusive labour practices and views on LGBT issues. If one were to take a poll of the most passionate human rights advocates and those strongly sympathetic to such causes in the US, I'm confident that the vast majority of them would be staunch Apple users. Very few of them appears to have dumped their iPhones, Air Pods, and MacBooks, and dislodged Tim Cook from his pedestal as a visionary leader. There is a psychic cost associated with dumping your favourite products and icons.
This is in contrast with the psychic cost-free protests and boycotts that liberals regularly stage on countless issues where they have little or no stakes or which are distant secondary concerns for their personal selves. On a related note, I blogged sometime back about the reductive seduction of solving other people's problems.
Like with corporates such as Apple chasing efficiency and profits, when forced to make a choice between their primary material tastes and their moral values, consumers prefer to overlook the latter. It's personal conveniences and comforts first and only then moral values. Or better still, morality for all others and personal comforts for us!
Update 1 (11.02.2023)
Another example of Apple hypocrisy is the working conditions in its iPhone factories even as it makes a song and dance about its design and woke appeal. This from an iPhone 14 Pro assembly line at a Foxconn factory,
His task was to pick up an iPhone’s rear cover and a tiny cable that charges the battery, scan their QR codes, peel off adhesive tape backing, and join the two parts by tightening two screws. He’d then put the unfinished phone onto a conveyor belt that carried it to the next station. Hunter had to complete this task once every minute. During a normal 10-hour shift, his target was to attach 600 cables to 600 cases, using 1,200 screws. Every day, 600 more unassembled iPhones awaited him. Apart from a strictly timed hour-long lunch break, he spent his days inside a windowless workshop that smelled of chlorine, wearing an antistatic gown and a face mask. If he needed to take a toilet break, he had to make up for lost time. Behind the assembly line, supervisors — known as xianzhang, or “line leaders” — monitored workers’ progress on a computer and frequently admonished those who fell behind.
The long read is a very good one, covering several aspects of Apple's China-centred manufacturing strategy. This about the perils with efficiency maximisation at the cost of all else,
Foxconn’s compound in Zhengzhou makes about half of the world’s iPhones. Nicknamed “iPhone City,” it covers an area of 5.6 square kilometers — about one-tenth the size of Manhattan — and at full capacity employs some 200,000 workers. Apple relies on just-in-time manufacturing, meaning it doesn’t build up a large inventory of products but has iPhones made as consumers order them... As global demand for new phones surges, Foxconn offers pay and bonuses that are much higher than those of other blue-collar jobs to make sure its assembly lines can run at full speed. Workers, including rural migrants and college students, take on heavy workloads, skip holidays, and follow a tight schedule in order to qualify for their bonus at the end of the month... Covid-19 outbreaks that disrupted production lines and a labor protest that pitted workers against riot police caused the factory to fall behind on its iPhone 14 Pro orders. Dan Ives, a tech analyst at U.S.-based financial services company Wedbush Securities, estimated that, during the crisis, Apple was losing out on $1 billion per week in iPhone sales.
The role of seasonal manufacturing contracts,
The seasonal nature of iPhone sales means most workers are only needed during certain times of the year. The company now keeps its basic monthly salary at about 2,200 yuan ($324), which workers told Rest of World is barely enough to cover rent and food costs. To attract recruits during production peaks, it lures them with overtime hours that pay up to double the minimum hourly wages and lucrative end-of-month bonuses. When iPhone orders decline, the company cuts overtime and terminates bonuses as a way to shrink its workforce, according to labor researchers. Yige Dong, a sociology professor with the State University of New York at Buffalo, calls such short, seasonal factory work “gig manufacturing.” Manufacturers retain a core group of skilled employees, while the rest of the workforce is brought in for a few weeks at a time.
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