Apple fait partie de ces entreprises dont on aime les produit, un peu comme Nike, mais dont le système productif installé en Chine s'appuie sur un système hyper-fordiste et quasi néo-esclavagiste pas forcément très reluisant - voir Apple's New Forbiden City.
Mais si demain ce système changeait ?
Et si demain les usines ne se retrouvaient plus en Chine, mais installées au-dessus des Apple Store, est-ce que cela changerait grand chose pour les travailleurs chinois produisant des iPhone ?
Pas sur ...
On retrouverait les mêmes conditions de travail (la chaine), les mêmes conditions de vie (les dortoirs), les mêmes suicides.
C'est en tout cas l'hypothèse imaginée et illustrée par Zigeng Wang et Tany Liu dans leur fiction politico-architecturale "Invisible Apple" présentée dans le cadre du concours "Fairy Tales 2015".
Leur vision est glaçante et très très sombre - voir le texte ci-dessous - mais a le grand mérite donner à réfléchir sur la réalité sociale et industrielle qui se cache derrière le succès des grandes marques de la nouvelle économie - voir "Amazon, Facebook : back to the fordism ?"
« I am a security guard in the Apple Store on the ground floor of the Empire State Building. The store usually closes at 10:00 p.m. When the customers are cleared and the store is about to close, I always hear loud noises as if the place is still crowded with people. All the screaming, crying, and quarreling caused me to question my own hearing. I thought I had intermittent auditory hallucinations, but after a thorough checkup at a hospital, my hearing was just as normal as anyone else’s. Since the first day I came here, I have been suffering from these noises, which only occur at closing time, and I fear this moment very much.
One day I was locked in the store by accident, and those noises came again. I noticed that they came from below the escalator. This is the emergency escalator and is usually locked. Curiosity drove me to push the button, and surprisingly, it opened. I stepped in without realizing it, and felt myself being led to another world.
The escalator went slowly upward and stopped sometime later. When the door opened, I was shocked by what I saw: there was a tower hidden in the Empire State Building !
I witnessed workers alongside the endless assembly line of iPhones; supervisors running around; those who jumped off the tower to commit suicide being caught by a huge net and sent right back to work; and those exhausted to death dragged to the end of the workshop and thrown out of the cave. Dead bodies slipped into the already packed morgue, and butchers chopped and cooked them before serving the meat to the living workers as food.
The black market for electric products was selling E-trash that came from unknown sources. Above the market was a school with graduates standing in line to pass through the gate of “Unpredictability” in order to work in the factory. A prison stood above the school. Someone in the tower told me the most dangerous criminal was imprisoned there: an architect who tried to open the windows of the building. A monster named “Relief” was rowing a boat in the river, holding a lantern to collect spirits deserted in various cheap hotels and abortion clinics.
I would have never seen the night clubs and sex shops hidden in the police station if not led by a policeman to the tower. There was a grocery store at the entrance of the police station, and the secret code to enter was “the invisible apple”."
Sur le plan du graphisme, cela renvoie à :