Mike Daisey on The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs: under the skin of Apple

Mike Daisey's bold monologues have created impassioned debate about exploitation in The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

By Dominic Cavendish 04 May 2012 • 10:09am

‘It was about waking people up’: Mike Daisey performing ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’

‘I think the world is still trying to decide whether I’m famous or infamous,” says Mike Daisey, displaying remarkable good humour considering the cloud of opprobrium that’s been hanging over him in America for the past month. Next weekend, he’ll be bringing to Suffolk the latest and by far the most controversial of the monologues with which he has been steadily making his name in the US for the past 15 years: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

When it was booked by the HighTide Festival last year, it represented a major coup – a European premiere. Daisey’s outspoken reflections on the way Apple Inc goes about the manufacture of its shiny, state-of-the-art products had helped stir impassioned, widespread debate about his claims of exploitative working conditions in China.

Tens of thousands had flocked to the show. Drawing on research and a visit he made to the industrial city of Shenzhen, where Foxconn – the world’s largest maker of electronic components, for Apple among others – has some of its vast factories, this erstwhile “worshipper in the cult of Mac” declared himself an appalled apostate. “When you sit down in front of your laptops, when you open them up, you will see the blood welling up between the keys,” he advised his audience, urging them to open their eyes to the grisly truth.

The truth, though, so far as Daisey expressed it, turned out to be somewhat mediated. After excerpts from the show were broadcast in January on the popular public radio programme This American Life, certain key details were challenged – including Daisey’s suggestion that he had seen armed guards, had interviewed under-age workers and encountered those suffering from the toxic effects of hexane, used as an iPhone screen cleaner. The result: This American Life took the shaming step of retracting the broadcast in March.

Back then he defended his – publicly admitted – grafting of other sources into his eyewitness account thus: “The tools of theatre are not the same as the tools of journalism.” Today he says: “I’m not making any justifications for why I did what I did. I’ve apologised really clearly on my site and I take responsibility for it. I wish I’d done a better job but we all have regrets.

“What may not be clear to people in this entire kerfuffle,” he continues, “is that it really concerns about five minutes of material.” That five minutes has now been excised from the show, he avers. “For the sake of expediency, and because the issues in the play are much bigger than the debate about what I did or didn’t see, I’ve simply chosen to take everything out that’s contested in any way.”

The show is largely the same, then, as it has been since it first started touring in 2010. “It would be very different if it turned out I had never gone to China,” he admits, “and was in my New York apartment the entire time, never stood outside a factory. If all these things weren’t true it would be a lot harder to do.”

Inevitably he’s braced for an atmosphere of scepticism in the theatre here. But he believes that can swiftly be dispelled. “Of course, the fear is that people will judge me. The audience has in many cases heard all sorts of things about the show. But what happens is it begins, the lights come up and then you’ve got the story – stories are enormously effective at connecting with people if you’re good at telling them.” What he was always after, he insists, is that connection.

“All this information about China is openly available, it’s just that nobody cared,” he says, “and until there’s some sort of empathic connection, we’re not going to care, it’s only data. I wanted this work to bridge the gap between having the information and caring about what it meant. I never saw it as an investigation in a reportorial sense. As a monologist you’re just trying to connect with people.”

On balance, he believes the attention the show has received – good and ill – helped promote awareness of the issues, even if his own standing has suffered.

“If I had done everything by the book, I wonder if we would be having this conversation. I wonder instead if I would have had a reasonably successful monologue that didn’t effect any change whatsoever.”

That change is now afoot – both in terms of public awareness and Apple’s own review of its practices – he is convinced. “I feel the show has accomplished so many of its goals that it has nearly obsoleted itself. It was about waking people up. They’re now awake.”

Steve Jobs, of course, is no longer with us. Has Daisey (36) ever been afraid of the prospect of litigation in holding Apple in general, and Jobs in particular, to account?

“Not at all,” he retorts bluffly, revealing that so far the company hasn’t made any moves. “The fear of those lawsuits is more damaging than the actuality but I’m working on the assumption that I will keep going forward until I’m killed or sued out of existence for something. If that happens,” he laughs, “then it was a good life. I’ve already made more headway than I expected to.”