iSuicide

I first read this in private eye, but google led me to The Independent:

Yesterday, Li Hai, a 19-year-old employee of the [Foxconn factory in the southern Chinese boom town of Shenzhen], jumped from the top of the building in Shenzhen to his death. It brought the number of suspected suicides at the factory this year to 10. There have been another two attempted suicides.

This factory has (and the number seems to change) hundreds of thousands of employees on its vast estate.

This vast enterprise makes our consumer electronics - apparently the iPad is made there, among many other gadgets. This is the pinnacle of alienation, the workers complain of feeling like machines, their entire lives are subsumed into the factory.

Yet, another way of looking at it is that out of the 6 billion of us on Earth, a tiny fraction are producing immense quantities of shiny goods, the productive power of the technology of this plant, if it was conquered, de-alienated, could be used to liberate us and stop us feeling like machines.