The problem is that n-hexane is a potent neurotoxin, and all these people have been exposed. Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them can't even pick up a glass. I talk to people whose joints in their hands have disintegrated from working on the line, doing the same motion hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times. It's like carpal tunnel on a scale we can scarcely imagine.

Everyone I talked to worked 12-hour shifts standard, and often much longer than that. 14 hours a day, 15 hours a day.

And I say to her, "You seem kind of young. How old are you?" And she says, "I'm 13." And I say, "13? That's young. Is it hard to get work at Foxconn when you're--" She says, "Oh, no."

Week after week, worker after worker has been climbing all the way up to the tops of these enormous buildings, and then throwing themselves off, killing themselves in a brutal and public manner, not thinking very much about just how bad this makes Foxconn look. Foxconn's response to month after month of suicides has been to put up these nets.

And Foxconn security went out, scooped him up, and beat him before releasing him.

cafeterias can hold up to 10,000 people.

Surprisingly, slavery is at the root of much of the natural world’s destruction.

We pull food from the earth, of course, but we also pull our cellphones from the earth, our clothing, our computers, our flat-screen televisions, our cars—it all comes from the earth, ultimately.

It makes sense that slavery and environmental destruction would go hand in hand.

If slavery were an American state it would have the population of California and the economic output of the District of Columbia, but it would be the world’s third-largest producer of CO2

Slaves are producing many of the things we buy, and in the process they are forced to destroy our shared environment, increase global warming, and wipe out protected species.

Cellphones have become electronic umbilical cords connecting us with our children, our partners, and our parents with an immediacy and reliability hardly known before

We know that, even though it comes all the way from India, slave-produced granite is cheap.

Slavery is a great way to keep your costs down

Slavery in granite quarries is a family affair enforced by a tricky scheme based on debt. When a poor family comes looking for work, the quarry bosses are ready to help with an “advance” on wages to help the family settle in. The rice and beans they eat, the scrap stones they use to build a hut on the side of the quarry, the hammers and crowbars they need to do their work, all of it is provided by the boss and added to the family’s debt. Just when the family feels they may have finally found some security, they are being locked into hereditary slavery.

We think of Steve Jobs in his black turtleneck as the origin of our iPhones.