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“This is why Foxconn workers are free to jump from buildings but not to ‘make trouble.'”

—Foxconn worker

“Specialization is for insects.”

—Bart Kosko, professor, USC; author of
Noise

Soviet farm collectivization in the 1930s and the agricultural development of the American colonies were attempts to impose structure onto groups of humans from the top down for the benefit of those in power. A small cadre of powerful people in each society desired either symbolic or economic power, and so they implemented a system of authoritarian order on the society in order to achieve their goals.

People did not willingly participate in these projects—they had to be threatened with severe punishments and constantly monitored to make sure they kept working.

Nature frequently resists being managed. “Scientific forestry,” for instance, was invented in the 18th century in Germany as an attempt to gain control over the unruly natural forests. State bureaucrats desired more yields from certain trees, which they could not reliably get from old growth forests. And they needed to precisely measure and quantify the output of the forest.

Anthropologist James C. Scott describes the rise of scientific forestry in his influential book
Seeing Like a State
. The scientific foresters replaced the complex ecosystems in the natural forests with simplified “scientific” forests for maximizing yields of certain types of timber. They planted the forests to resemble an Excel spreadsheet: row upon row of neatly-ordered trees all of the same type. A monoculture. In the first generation, this all worked marvelously well: yields were up, the timber was easy to harvest, and the bureaucrats could efficiently count the trees in order to make predictions about the future.

Inevitably, the forests revolted. Within one generation, yields for some trees were down thirty percent. The perplexed Germans invented a word for what happened:
Waldsterben
(forest death). This was when the nutrient cycle of the soil was altered beyond the point of repair by the monoculture trees. In the worst cases, the entire forest died. The reason “scientific forestry” failed was due to total scientific ignorance of how forests work.

Forests, too, are self-organizing systems. Their health is maintained by an extremely complex interaction between diverse types of soil, animals, insects (such as ants), plants, fungus, trees, and weather. By disrupting this exquisitely balanced and harmonious system through uniformity and attempting to make the forest “productive,” scientific forestry caused the forest ecosystem to collapse. Surely the principles of “scientific forestry” were consigned to history's ash heap? Consider Apple. Surely Apple, the most valuable company in the world, the maker of the coolest digital devices known to humanity, eschews the antiquated principles of German scientific forestry?

You have likely heard of the abysmal working conditions at the Chinese factories that produce nearly all our electronics. Your passing concern might have been assuaged by the recent announcements that the factories are attempting to make work at these places more worker-friendly. Apple's products are manufactured by a Taiwanese company in China called Foxconn. Foxconn proudly
employs what are called “scientific management” techniques for its millions of workers.

The rationale for doing this is always the same: a small group of powerful people wish to control systems that are intrinsically uncontrollable so that these systems can be made to do things they would not otherwise do. These short-term solutions are always greeted as a revelation. They certainly produce stellar short term results.

But whether we are talking about forests or human beings, the scientific fact about these systems is that they are self-organized, and therefore an external agent cannot control them. Forcing them to suppress their natural fluctuations and complexities in the name of productivity will always lead to revolution, crisis, or collapse. In the case of forests, you get
Waldsterben
. For human beings, you may get suicide. You may get the collapse of a corporation or an entire manufacturing sector.

Foxconn's approach to management is quite simple: make each human do a very specialized repetitive task so that no actual thought or skill is required. This type of specialized labor works in ant colonies because individual ants are relatively simple creatures and are by genetic design already specialized to do certain tasks without thinking.

Human beings are actually terrible at specialization. This is why every attempt to turn human beings into worker insects for the benefit of rich people results in massive human misery. Terry Gou, the CEO of Foxconn, admits as much in one of his sayings that people who wish to get promoted must memorize: “Suffering is the identical twin of growth.”

In a remarkable study by Pun Ngai and Jenny Chan about the rash of recent suicides at the Apple supplier, they describe the fate of seventeen-year-old worker Tian Wu who on March 17, 2010 jumped from the fourth floor of her worker dormitory.
⁵
Tian had just moved to Longchua to work at the Foxconn factory from rural Hubai. Prior to what she called “her accident” she was described as a carefree girl who loved flowers.

After working at the Foxconn Longhua campus for thirty-seven days she attempted suicide. Unlike fourteen of her co-workers who also attempted suicide during a two-month span in 2010 and 2011, Tian survived. She will likely be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

Foxconn maintains a round-the-clock production schedule and often imposes overtime on the workers. They live in dormitories that have armed security guards at the doors. They live in such close quarters that personal privacy is next to nonexistent. Workers are randomly assigned to dorm rooms, a process which breaks up existing social networks and keeps worker organization to a minimum. They are not allowed visitors overnight. The entire life of a Foxconn worker is devoted to the production of cheap electronics, mostly for Western consumption.

Recently, pressure has been mounting on Apple and other technology companies to examine their relationships to their Chinese suppliers like Foxconn. However, I would argue that it is the fundamental nature of the work that drives people to suicide. Working at Foxconn is the logical extreme of time management. Management schedules washing, eating, and sleeping to coincide with production timelines and in order to maximize the efficiency of shift rotation.

In the West, we are proud of our new economy based on mobility and of our information revolution. We seem to regard industrial production as a quaint relic of the mid-20th century, as if we're somehow now free of the ugliness and unhipness of manufacturing. We all live in the cloud now. In fact, Foxconn is the largest private employer in all China. It employs upwards of 1.4 million people, and one of the factory compounds employs four hundred thousand people. That's four hundred thousand people—roughly the population of Minneapolis—working at one factory.

The Fair Labor Association recently investigated Foxconn and concluded, “The factories were working beyond legal and code limits on hours of work, not recording and paying unscheduled overtime correctly, allowing interns to work overtime against Chinese regulations and during peak periods workers worked more than seven days in a row without a rest day. In addition the investigation recorded many health and safety issues and found that although there is a trade union with a collective bargaining agreement it does not measure up to international or national standards.”

One Foxconn worker comments, “We get yelled at all the time. It's very tough around here. We're trapped in a ‘concentration camp' of labor discipline—Foxconn manages us through the principle of ‘obedience, obedience, and absolute obedience!' Must we sacrifice our dignity as people for production efficiency?” In this inhumane environment, Ngai's study found small acts of resistance among the workers such as stealing products, slow-downs, stoppages, small-scale strikes, and sometimes even sabotage, which really delays production.

Then there are of course the suicides, the final option for workers to exert control over their lives. The system—in this case, the worker's brain—tries to inject variation into its life—the stealing and sabotage—to find a more stable space in which the intrinsic dynamics of the system are in balance with the environment.

Complex systems exist very close to the edge between order and disorder—this is called “self-organized criticality,” and it allows these systems to adapt to new environments. At this edge of chaos, systems rapidly change their internal structures until they find a stable state. There are limits to this adaptability however, and they are nonlinear. They can reach a threshold beyond which the system completely and catastrophically falls apart. A striking example of this is how glaciers melt. They can withstand a certain amount of warming, but when the melting has reached a certain threshold (the popular term for this is “tipping point”) the glacier will start to disappear even if the temperature drops again.

Sand piles are often used to illustrate how self-organized systems stay on the edge of order and disorder, and to illustrate the concept of a nonlinear threshold. Imagine a completely flat surface on which you pour grains of sand at some constant rate. The grains of sand fall randomly to either side of the pile as it builds up. At first, the pile is small and so the angle of its slope is very shallow. You can keep adding sand and the pile will just get taller.

At a certain point, the angle of the pile will become steep enough so that adding more sand causes small avalanches. Eventually, the angle of the pile and the frequency of the avalanches will converge to form a balance so that the overall shape of the pile is maintained. However, the key to this is that there is an open dissipation of sand running off the pile to compensate for the new sand being poured on to the pile. If you keep adding sand, the pile angle will become so steep that when you add just one more grain of sand, it will cause a catastrophic avalanche that flattens the whole pile.

Working nonstop has become a new badge of honor among the professional digital class. We walk around with our gadgets trying to define our value propositions. The compulsion that businesses have to organize our lives with apps and calendars comes from deep ignorance of how the brain actually functions. We refuse to recognize that our brains are already a miracle of complex organization.

Albert Einstein, in a much-overlooked 1949 essay called “Why Socialism?”, wrote, “If we ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible, we should constantly be conscious of the fact that there are certain conditions which we are unable to modify. As mentioned before, the biological nature of man is, for all practical purposes, not subject to change.”

While our understanding of “the biological nature of man” is constantly being updated, Einstein was correct in realizing that our brains have limits. Though our lives are easier, we exist on the same spectrum as a Chinese laborer. The price of achievement is the same price. Increasingly, information companies are trying to have “flat” organizations. However, the less explicit the hierarchy is at a job, the more responsibility each worker is typically expected to take. The line between life and work is blurred as the endless list of tasks becomes distributed to everyone.

Your mobile devices ensure you are available 24/7 to handle work-related requests. There is no longer any physical place in which you are not able to work. Your mind can never truly rest. A modern information worker may actually never feel she is not working. From the point of view of capitalist investors, inducing this fear of losing an endless competition is more effective than employing bosses to intimidate workers. This compulsion to work is a form of externally imposed order and it can be a schedule, a to-do list, a business process, inane projects, and time management activities, or directives from a customer who wanted results six months ago.

At the other end of the spectrum, we find workers like Tian Wu at the Foxconn factories in China. They pay the price of our digital mobility, sometimes with their lives. Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin wrote, “The freedom of all is essential to my freedom.” What he meant was that if some of us are enslaved, none of us are truly free.

In
Wealth of Nations
, Adam Smith writes, “Great labour, either of mind or body, continued for several days together, is in most men naturally followed by a great desire of relaxation, which, if not restrained by force or by some strong necessity, is almost irresistible
.
It is the call of nature, which requires to be relieved by some indulgence, sometimes of ease only, but sometimes too of dissipation and diversion. If it is not complied with, the consequences are often dangerous, and sometimes fatal, and such as almost always, sooner or later, bring on the peculiar infirmity of the trade. If masters would listen to the dictates of reason and humanity, they have frequently occasion rather to moderate, than to animate the application of many of their workmen.”

We must ask why, and for whom, are we doing all this work? Recall that your brain has
hundred
billion neurons, each connected by
two hundred
trillion synapses. Its activity is regulated by a spectacular orchestra of electrical activity that synchronizes and desynchronizes neurons and brain regions to produce the complex harmony that allows us to be human beings.

An underlying assumption of productivity and time management is that the natural way human beings work must be suppressed for the sake of organization and productivity. For instance, time management expert David Allen's productivity strategy is to remove non-essential thoughts from your brain. He admonishes us to get whatever we're stressing about out of our brains and into some type of preferably automated to-do list manager: such as one of the countless productivity apps on your iPhone. Errands, emails to write, bills to pay, accounts to manage, inventories to check, strategic marketing plans to syntheoptimergize, whatever occurs to you during the course of your hectic day. When you have a physical record of these tasks, they don't have to occupy memory space in your brain, you are less likely to forget them, and you don't have to worry about them.