By: Thomas Ponsive

Wired Magazine recently came out with an article called ‘1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?’ The article’s title right from the get go makes you wonder, what’s the correlation? The company that makes iPhones over in Shenzhen, China, Foxconn, has made headlines in the past for its bustling industrialization, known for being the largest private employer in China, providing above average living conditions for its employees, and being a relatively great company to work for. But since the inception of the iPhone and the company’s contract with Apple, the company has seen 17 suicides in relation to the production of the smart phone. But, like Joel Johnson, author of the Wired article, I’m curious as to the correlation between suicide and iPhones and whether or not it was just fabricated as a catchy, though tragic, title to sell a story.

Clearly if the article is merely based on pretense and deception to pander to the morbid fascination of its consumer base, then it’s an indictment of Wired and Johnson. But if there’s any semblance of truth in some of his claims, then it’s an indictment of Foxconn, Apple, iPhone, and the consumers of iPhones (i.e. a large basis of the Western population). While exploitation of the East by the West predates the twentieth century, suicide, or pushing worker’s to the brink until they reach suicide, hasn’t necessarily always been a trend of Western civilization. Hell, as the article points out, America’s penchant for suicide is much larger than it is in China; and 17 out of a million kind of sounds pathetic. But there has to be a reason, doesn’t there?

What Johnson didn’t care to cover, and neither did some of the commentators at the bottom of the article, was Emile Durkheim’s book ‘Suicide: A Study in Sociology’—considered to be the leading literature on suicide, even after 100 plus years of it being written (which, for you history buffs, was in 1897). Durkheim, being one of the grandfather’s of social science concluded that suicide, while resonating within the individual, is not entirely an individual experience. Suicide, like many other phenomena, is a reflection of the society. We as a society have been so engendered to therapeutic, pseudo-psychological definitions we have forgotten that suicide is not necessarily a symptom of a mental illness like depression and bipolar disorder, but is a part of something larger. There are many splintering reasons as to why an individual might turn to suicide not all of which correlate with one another.

To expand further, Durkheim listed out four types of suicide: Egoistic, Altruistic, Anomic, and Fatalistic. If you truly want to know more about the definitions of these types, then I suggest reading his book yourself (or going to Wikipedia, though I recommend the former). To be quite honest, Durkheim would probably find these 17 suicides merely an anomaly and would thus pass over them just as easily as society did.

But to humor Wired, I’ll try to categorize the suicides happening in Foxconn. In all probability (and of course I’m open to dialogue if you disagree with me), these iPhone suicides are the result of Anomic suicide—which is defined by a society’s moral deregulation. In essence, people in such a society where Anomic suicide is prevalent generally have no clear definition of aspirations; and thus, desires go undefined, with disappointment rampant. Durkheim even went so far as to say that poverty acted as a buffer to Anomic suicide, and that this particular type was the result of economic expansion too fast and out of control. It’s fair to say that Foxconn, and China as well, fits such a definition.

So, should you feel guilty for owning an iPhone? Probably, but not for the reasons that Wired points out. I do not doubt that the constant consumer-demand for the smart phone has created a heavy pressure on Foxconn, and its workers (more importantly), to make more and more. But to say that 17 suicides is enough proof of incidence—and then to not really investigate too much into why each individual committed suicide—is a weak correlation. The debate does, though, raise the question as to whether or not this progression in industry has any lasting effects that we as a society sometimes forget because the iPhone and other technologies like it have so many apps to play around with.

Though I do have one theory as to why the article made some of its claims: Technology and Death are the new sexy.