Read This: Investigating the Foxconn Suicides

In the part of our minds where Americans hold an image of what an Asian factory may be, there are two competing visions: fluorescent fields of chittering machines attended by clean-suited technicians, or barefoot laborers bent over long wooden tables in sweltering rooms hazed by a fog of soldering fumes. When we buy a new electronic device, we imagine the former factory. Our little glass, metal, and plastic marvel is the height of modern technological progress; it must have been made by worker-robots (with hands like surgeon-robots)-or failing that, extremely competent human beings. But when we think "Chinese factory," we often imagine the latter. Some in the US-and here I should probably stop speaking in generalities and simply refer to myself-harbor a guilty suspicion that the products we buy from China, even those made for American companies, come to us at the expense of underpaid and oppressed laborers. From what I can tell, though, the reality is more banal than either of those scenarios.

In this month's Wired, Gizmodo's Joel Johnson documents his tour of the notorious Foxconn factory in Shenzhen that was home to nine workers who lept to their deaths between March and May of 2010. While he can't quite shake the guilt that his consumer thirst contributed at least in some small way to these suicides, the truth about the sprawling mile-square industrial complex is far more nuanced and interesting that you might imagine.

Read This: Investigating the Foxconn Suicides originally appeared on Switched on Tue, 01 Mar 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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