Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how workers, activists, and academics in Hong Kong and China exposed the toxic conditions in Apple's outsourced factories. It critiques the promise of “green futures” as a strategy for extracting value, disciplining behavior, and framing national and planetary futures.

Presentation long abstract

When the “suicide express” began at Foxconn factories in China in 2010, there was widespread media criticism of Apple’s indifference to the harsh labor practices in its outsourced factories. These suicides were soon forgotten until Foxconn worker and migrant poet Xu Lizhi jumped from a building in 2014 and appeared on the cover of Time Magazine under the title, “The Poet Who Died for your Phone.” However, these moments of liberal journalistic outrage over worker suicides obscured, or outright ignored, a history of activism and protest in Hong Kong and across China about other deadly issues: the toxic materials used on production lines, the dangerous dust in polishing rooms, neurological deformities, and factory explosions. Building on Nicholas Shapiro's concept of the "chemical sublime,” this paper explores how workers, activists, and academics used various media, political theater, and chemo-ethnographic reports to reveal the slow and sometimes fast violence of an industry long based on lethal chemicals. I argue that uncovering these histories of activism can teach us a lot about Apple’s discursive framings of “responsibility” in its yearly supplier reports, its current claims to be “greening” its supply chain and cloud storage facilities, and its efforts to establish a carbon-neutral future for the world's largest tech giant. Uncovering these histories assists the panel’s larger political project of exposing how Apple and other electronics companies are deploying the promise of “green futures” as a strategy to extract value, discipline behavior, and frame national, and planetary futures.