Apple – like virtually every other electronics manufacturer – subcontracts much of the work that goes into building its devices to companies in Asia. One of them, Foxconn Technology, is the largest private employer in China. Its factories there and in other parts of the world put together approximately 40 percent of all the consumer electronics devices on the planet. Their largest facility, Foxconn City, is in Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong, and employs nearly a quarter of a million workers.

As the New York Times reported late last month:

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors. More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu [the capital of Sichuan province in southwest China], killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.

The explosions were due to accumulations of aluminum dust from the polishing of thousands upon thousands of iPad cases. There have been more than a dozen suicides as well – part of Foxconn’s solution was to install nets around buildings to catch jumpers – and accounts of workers fired after their hands were made useless by repetitive stress injuries.

Many have reported on the working conditions at Foxconn, but it’s Mike Daisey’s one-man play, media coverage of his work and the broadcast of a one-hour version on the public radio series This American Life that seem to have galvanized public opinion.

Physically large and in charge, Mike Daisey’s performance style suggests a peculiar combination of the late Spalding Gray and Lewis Black of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He sits at a table on a bare stage with some notes and a glass of water and simply tells his story; at times hysterically funny, at others, poignant, withering and accusatory. Some might find his manner a bit loud and overbearing: the night we were there last fall, media moguls Barry Diller and David Geffen were sitting a couple of rows in front of us and walked out after the first fifteen minutes or so. (Don’t try to deny it: we have your ticket stubs.)

But maybe it wasn’t Daisey’s profanity and mild bellicosity that got under their skin and instead, some simple truths. Daisey begins by detailing his own passion for all things Apple (“I am an Apple fanboy, I am a worshiper in the cult of Mac.”) and slowly segues into stories from the company’s history and its increasing dependence on Chinese labor. Daisey traveled to China to see it all firsthand.

“You know,” he says, “when we dream of a future when the regulations are washed away and the corporations are finally free to sail above us, you don’t have to dream about some sci-fi-dystopian-Blade Runner-1984 bull____. You can go to Shenzhen tomorrow – they’re making your s___ that way today.”

All the bad publicity and petitions that sprang up, especially after Daisey’s public radio appearance apparently have gotten to super secretive Apple, which at an estimated worth of more than $465 billion has now surpassed ExxonMobil as the largest publicly traded company in the world. They’ve launched a PR counteroffensive that included this week’s “exclusive” visit to Foxconn City by Bill Weir of ABC’s Nightline, who reported on the suicides and other health issues but said, “China has very different values when it comes to gainful employment” and compared some of the complaints to what “you’d hear at any factory or college campus.”

Weir breathlessly referred to Apple products as “precious objects” and “works of art” and said that although Bob Iger, the CEO of the Walt Disney Company, ABC’s owner sits on Apple’s board and the Steve Jobs Trust is Disney’s largest stockholder, “I only agreed to report exactly what I saw.”

In its latest, annual Supplier Responsibility Progress Report, Apple for the first time released a list of its subcontractors and announced that it has joined the Fair Labor Association, which makes unannounced factory inspections to check on working conditions and report violations. And last Saturday, Foxconn announced it’s raising salaries by as much as 25 percent (to $400 a month) and reducing excessive overtime.

But not so fast. According to the activist Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehavior, “The new basic wage… only applies to the workers in Shenzhen. In inland provinces, where two-thirds of production workers are based, basic salary remains meager. Given that inflation in China is high. Foxconn is just following the trend of wage increases in the electronics industry in China.”

As for the Fair Labor Association, it’s not all that independent. Writing for CNN.com, Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, notes:

…Most of its money — millions of dollars per year — comes from the very companies whose labor practices it is supposed to scrutinize. Although Apple has not disclosed its financial relationship with the Fair Labor Association, it is likely now the organization’s largest funder. Moreover, on the association’s board of directors sit executives of major corporations such as Nike, Adidas and agribusiness giant Syngenta. The job of these executives is to represent the interests of other member companies, such as Apple. Under the Fair Labor Association’s rules, the company representatives on the board exercise veto power over major decisions.

Jeff Ballinger, director of Press for Change, a labor rights group, told The New York Times, “[It] is largely a fig leaf. There’s all this rhetoric from corporate social responsibility people and the big companies that they want to improve labor standards, but all the pressure seems to be going the other direction — they’re trying to force prices down.”

Yes, Foxconn workers make well above the average salary of Chinese garment workers and yes, there are cultural issues and the overwhelming tide of globalization. But Apple is sitting on cash reserves of nearly $100 billion. As others have noted, just one tenth of 1 percent of that could go a long way toward improving conditions for its workers in China. They could even set up a health care plan. And as an anonymous former Apple executive said, “Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

Meanwhile, Mike Daisey keeps performing “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” around the country. He finishes another New York run at the Public Theater on March 18, but you can listen to the This American Life radio version, and at his website, MikeDaisey.com, you now can download the entire script.

Daisey says, “If Apple would spend less energy finessing its public image, and instead apply its efforts to real transparency and accountability, it could be a true leader for the electronics industry. Apple today is still saying what it said yesterday: trust us, we know best, there’s nothing to worry about. They have not earned the trust they are asking for.”

There’s much protesters can do: petitions, letters, phone calls, boycotts. And Daisey has written that “talking about it, thinking about it when making purchasing decisions, and understanding it is not just symbolic. In a world of silence, speaking itself is action. It can be the first seeds of actual change. Do not be afraid to plant them.”

In other words, Mike Daisey proclaims, “Spread the virus.”

UPDATE: Public radio’s “This American Life” has issued a press release retracting their original Mike Daisey program because they’ve learned it contains “significant fabrications” and are devoting this weekend’s entire show to a report on the alleged errors in the story. This article was inspired by Daisey’s stage performance but the details about Apple’s contractors in China come from a number of reputable sources, including The New York Times and CNN and we believe it is accurate.

A new, self-published book (available online) shows off some of Kare’s most recognizable work (including more recent projects, like Facebook’s popular digital “gifts”) — and resurrects other designs that have been phased out of Apple computers’ virtual image lexicon. Over email, Kare answered some of our questions; the following slide show offers highlights from her portfolio (with captions adapted from her book).

How did you first get involved with Apple?

My friend from high school, Andy Hertzfeld, encouraged me to interview at Apple for a part-time job to design fonts (mainly) and other images for the Macintosh. I didn’t have any experience with computers, and couldn’t find research material about digital fonts per se, but figured I could work from traditional fonts displayed in books.

How unusual was it, at the time, for a computer company to hire a professional artist? Do you think this is something computer companies do a lot more often now?

I can’t really generalize, but I was the only graphic artist in the Mac software group (the title on my business card was “Macintosh Artist”).  Of course, it seems more common for development teams to include artists now since so many user interfaces are graphical (and I’m always impressed with the art made by the Google Doodle team).

In the beginning, how long did the design process for a single icon take?

This varies, because for some of the icons (e.g., a pencil for “write”) there is one obvious solution where alternatives were probably mocked up within a day. Others (e.g., “fill”) took longer because multiple candidates were created and circulated, and leading contenders were shown in the software in progress.

What do you think the most effective and lasting computer icons accomplish? Has this changed over time, as design technology has improved?

A great icon clearly conveys a concept at a glance, is not ambiguous, and is memorable. I think that the basic design challenge remains unchanged, though certainly technology advances provide more potential avenues of expression (more color, more resolution, sound, animation, etc.).

Your early, heavily pixelated Mac icons are markedly different from some of your more recent, smoother designs (e.g., the Facebook gifts). Is this because of the way technology has progressed over the years, or simply because you’re trying for a different look?

In any job we do, we first consider the design or marketing goals along with any technical limitations or requirements.

For the Macintosh, most symbols were monochrome, needed to fit within a 16 x 16 or 32 x 32 square pixel grid, and were shorthand for computer functions.

For each Facebook gift, there was a 64 x 64 pixel canvas with virtually unlimited color. The challenge was to create images desirable enough or affecting enough or amusing enough to encourage potential gift givers to spend a dollar to enhance a message. The gifts functioned as small greeting cards, rather than digital road signs. Some gifts were more iconic and some more illustrative, but detail in this case did not impede understanding.

How closely did you get to work with Steve Jobs? What did you understand his aesthetic philosophy to be?

I was fortunate to work with Steve at Apple and at NeXT on a variety of projects. He checked in almost daily on the Macintosh graphics-in-progress. Later, at NeXT, we worked together on the identity and branding, and on a variety of publications and slide shows. He would constantly iterate on the content of his presentations, slide by slide. At that pre-PowerPoint era, there was a lot of handwork in making slides, and builds could require many exposures. He might revise a single slide 14 or 15 times. I learned a lot about the cumulative value of attention to detail from Steve, and about pushing the limits of a medium. I still think of his philosophy of not showing too much information all at once, and the value of simplicity in visual messaging.

View the slide show

How would you like to be remembered, in the hands of a skillful wordsmith? “Rich and famous,” as Jobs already was by the time Simpson met her long-lost sibling in 1985?  Those are certainly words most of us grow up dreaming will someday be applied to our names. And “handsome” — what man wouldn’t love that? But rather than reeling off a list of Jobs’ already well-documented successes, Simpson instead turns her eulogy into a celebration of not just a life well lived, but a death well done.

“He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures,” she writes. “If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe I didn’t have to be.” In a culture that equates wealth with success and presumes success is a prize to be won on a reality show, Simpson extolls Jobs’ commitment to a different kind of satisfaction – hard work. The kind that comes with a lot of setbacks and disasters. “He always, always tried,” she writes, “and always with love at the core of that effort.” To be known as someone who tried, and loved to try — now that’s an accomplishment.

Would you want to be recalled by those you leave behind as having an abiding love of beauty and devotion to your family? Sure, and Simpson gives the man credit for those things, as well. But she also remembers his fearless willingness “to be misunderstood,” for being the millionaire who “cultivated whimsy” and “treasured happiness.” And, finally, she remembers him as someone who brought the grace of simple determination even into his final breaths. He didn’t merely reach death, she writes, “he achieved it.” He achieved it with a sense of wonder and amazement, marveling, “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW,” with his final words.

You don’t have to have a famous novelist in the family to get a great eulogy. You don’t have to have your own Wikipedia entry to have an extraordinary life. Simpson writes that “We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.” As this brother and sister, in their own unique and compelling ways, prove in one final message to the world, all you need to do  is make sure each day brims with your own exuberantly lived best stories.

How appropriate! One of the great mysteries of Steve Jobs is the question of how a man so sincere in his commitment to Zen Buddhism and Eastern spirituality could at the same time be such a flaming asshole. If there’s one thing that comes shining through in Isaacson’s warts-and-all biography, it’s Jobs’ consistent tendency to act like a jerk; to make his friends, employees and family miserable with his insults and put-downs. His tantrums, manipulations and lies (or “reality distortions”) are the stuff of legend. But by golly, he also dedicated himself obsessively to cultivating the perfection and purity of his inner spirit. Uh, how exactly does that compute?

Steve Jobs embodied a unique duality. As Isaacson documents, Jobs fully embraced the hippie-dippie mores of his native Northern California: he dropped acid, smoked dope, lived in a commune, became a vegan, grooved to Bob Dylan, sought transcendence and enlightenment and neither regretted nor disowned any of it … and yet he also became the most successful businessman of modern times, in part by employing management tactics featuring the kind of cutthroat machinations not usually rewarded by upwardly mobile karmic transmigration.

As I finished Isaacson’s rushed-into-stores tome, I realized that I was still confused as to how these contradictions could be reconciled. After almost 600 action-packed pages, I was dismayed: no enlightenment for me! In a sudden burst of yogic whimsy, I reached for my brand-new iPhone 4S and tapped the iBooks app. I stumbled for a second — the first suggested purchase was none other than Isaacson’s book. That seemed a little incestuous. But then I typed the letters “auto” in the search query box, was instantaneously prompted with the suggestion “The Autobiography of a Yogi,” and tapped the screen two more times to download my own free copy.

Which is how I found myself reading the life story of Paramahansa Yogananda, a man considered instrumental in introducing millions of Westerners to meditation and yoga — on my phone. And then how I found myself watching a YouTube video featuring 1936 footage of Yogananda lecturing on the topic of “How to Sleep Correctly” — on my phone. And then, caught up in the inexorable flow, how I found myself asking Siri — my phone’s voice-recognizing personal assistant — to locate the nearest yoga studio: (“I found 10 yoga studios, nine of them are fairly close to you,” answered Siri.)

To all of which a younger version of myself might say, wow, man, that’s trippy. “Yoga is not magic,” saith Yogananda, but to anyone who is part of the generation that came of age along with Steve Jobs, the iPhone 4S sure as hell is. To borrow the argot of the mighty Jobs: Who gives a shit whether he was a jerk or not? The products he brought to market are fucking amazing! Steve Jobs didn’t invent the integrated circuit or the Internet or the personal computer or the cellphone — but he saw, ahead of almost all the rest of us, how to put the pieces together in ways that unlocked creativity and inspired passion and delight.

And there’s your connection, there’s your paradox resolved. The good karma derived from midwifing all those incredible devices into the world surely outweighs the personal unpleasantness. Maybe the universe forgives Steve for being an asshole because the combined force of everyone loving their iPhone has lifted the entire planet into a more exalted state (with the likely exception of exploited Chinese workers — though who is to say they don’t want their iPhones too?).

The most serious flaws in Isaacson’s ultimately unsatisfying “Steve Jobs” are that the author doesn’t step back and grapple with how the world has changed as a consequence of Steve Jobs’ passage through it, and also fails to resolve the contradictions in Jobs’ character into a coherent narrative. This is disappointing, especially when one considers that the level of access Isaacson enjoyed to Jobs and his family during the last days of his life is, of course, impossible for anyone else to duplicate.

It doesn’t make the book a bad read. Steve Jobs’ life is inherently interesting — his rise and fall and rise again, his LSD-dropping entrepreneurial genius, his epochal impact on not just the computing industry but also the movie, phone and music businesses are all riveting stories. But most of us already know most of the details. Few recent figures have had their daily adventures more chronicled than has Steve Jobs. Some key parts of the legend — such as the creation of the Macintosh — have been told far more entertainingly and with much more insight than they are here by Isaacson.

The real challenge any would-be biographer of Jobs faces is to explain what it all means. In the past 40 years, the personal computer and the Internet have vastly transformed how billions of people live and Steve Jobs was right there in the middle of it, as big, or bigger, a player than anyone else. It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate vehicle than Jobs for telling this grand story. No one, for example, better embodies the synthesis of countercultural values and start-up entrepreneurialism –the dual impulses for self-actualization and capitalist accumulation, the frenzied pace of change — that define the San Francisco Bay Area than Jobs. One of Jobs’ favorite songs was Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changing.” Exactly!

But instead of fully immersing himself in this fertile Ganges of cultural and technological cross-pollination, Isaacson skates across the surface. He jumps from product launch to product launch, recounting all the standing ovations Jobs received from his adoring fans, and toting up the stunning sales numbers of each new release, but never really getting to the bottom of the question of why something like the Macintosh or the iPhone engendered such strong emotions, or what is really signified by the fact that I can now carry all the teachings of all the yogis that ever lived in my pocket.

There are other failures, other mysteries left unsolved. Isaacson’s depiction of the chaos that an undisciplined and out-of-control Jobs was unleashing on Apple just before he was pushed out by John Sculley in 1997 makes a pretty convincing case that he deserved exile from his own creation. He was a terrible manager. But 10 years later he comes back and this time around he can do almost no wrong. From whence came this catharsis? What changed? Did the umpteenth reading of the yogi’s autobiography finally deliver an epiphany that catalyzed his transformation into one of the greatest CEOs to ever stride the earth? Job’s reinvention of himself is one of the most fascinating stories in the history of modern business, but Isaacson portrays it simply as something that just happened.

Steve Jobs didn’t just happen. His was a force of will the likes of which most of us will never see again. And in that respect, Isaacson’s biography does make perfectly clear one point that should trouble all of Apple’s employees and customers. No one can step into Steve Jobs’ shoes. None of his successors will be able to combine the vision and the assholery and the moral authority into a package seamless enough to ensure Apple continues its permanent consumer electronic revolution. At a moving memorial service held for all of Apple’s employees on Oct. 19, the new CEO, Tim Cook, recounted how one of the last things Steve Jobs had told him was that he didn’t want Apple’s executives to be asking themselves, “What would Steve do?” –he wanted them to do “what they thought was right.” Well, what happens when people disagree on what’s right? One of the obvious lessons of Steve Jobs’ life is that true greatness doesn’t necessarily emerge from a collective decision-making process — in Apple’s case, it emerged from one man’s stubborn conviction that he was right 99.9 percent of the time and heaven help those who got in his way. Steve Jobs was the one asshole to rule them all. And there’s no business school you can go to that will tell you where to imbibe that defining elixir.

After the news broke that Steve Jobs was resigning as CEO, I was chatting with my daughter about his accomplishments, and as we discussed his legacy, I realized that she didn’t even know he had been the CEO of Pixar. We are all huge Pixar fans in my household — every new movie release is a major cinematic event in south Berkeley. My son, a 13-year-old with pretty strong geek credentials in the making, emerged from his lair and asked what we were talking about. I said Steve Jobs had resigned — a fact that my son registered as pretty big news. “Did you know he was responsible for Pixar too?” I asked.

His eyes widened. “WHO IS this guy?!” he exclaimed.

Who indeed! I still don’t know — even after devouring the endless encomiums and memorials and biographies that have proliferated since his death. But I keep coming back to that quest for transcendence and to Steve Jobs’ off-repeated testimony to the almost spiritual mandate he felt to incorporate purity and simplicity into everything he touched. As a human being, Jobs was anything but pure, anything but simple, all too easily swayed by raw emotion. But one cannot hold an iPhone without marveling at its grace and sublime design. In a consumer society, it is the ultimate consumer object, a key to infinite libraries and a doorway to infinite malls, an instrument of connection and pleasure, an object insanely simple to use, but encompassing within it the full complexity of technological progress and the accumulation of human knowledge.

It is, of course, not the final statement of consumer electronic apotheosis. There will be better gadgets to come. There will be a cooler phone in six months, or earlier, and it might not even be from Apple. That’s part of the fun. The journey toward those gadgets, as Jobs liked to say, will be its own reward. But it’s all still pretty mind-blowing, especially for those of us who recall playing games of “Pong” as teenagers. And when you get right down to it, maybe the world doesn’t just owe Steve Jobs thanks for all of the goodies produced by Apple and copied by everyone else. Maybe the world also ought to consider sending the countercultural craziness of 1960s California a big smooch.

Because one common thread to all the drug experimentation and dalliances with Eastern spirituality so rampant in the region Steve Job grew up in was the active desire to get your mind blown — to get knocked out of the mundane world you occupied straight into some new realm where everything made sense, where everything was connected, where transcendence and enlightenment were finally within one’s grasp. Make no mistake — that restless seeking is an integral part of Apple’s DNA.

Isaacson recounts a meeting between Steve Jobs and the New York Times technology reporter John Markoff, author of “What the Dormouse Said” — an investigation of the psychedelic roots of the computer revolution. “Taking LSD,” writes Isaacson, “was one of the two or three most important things he’d done in his life, Jobs told Markoff. People who had never taken acid would never fully understand him.”

If everything is connected, and the iPhone is the ultimate instrument of connection, then maybe the key to what made Steve Jobs go was his desire to translate that quest for transcendence into products that blow our minds.

I’m not going to say the iPhone can deliver enlightenment — but I just asked Siri: “Is there a god?”

Her answer: “There are 14 churches near you.” The closest, I was amused to see, just happened to be a Zen Buddhist Center less than half a mile away.

I hope Steve Jobs is grinning, too.

Yet the rush to Monday-morning quarterback his healthcare choices has been on ever since the Apple founder died earlier this month. In a lengthy – and much circulated — post on Quora, Harvard research fellow Ramzi Amri flat-out declared that, “Given the circumstances, it seems sound to assume that Mr. Jobs’ choice for alternative medicine has eventually led to an unnecessarily early death.” And now, in a new biography, author Walter Isaacson says that Jobs’ odyssey of “fruit juices, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments — some of which he found on the Internet” – exasperated his loved ones and left Jobs himself rueful. “He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it,” Isaacson tells “60 Minutes” this weekend. “I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner.”

Jobs had a rare and relatively slow-growing form of pancreatic cancer, one for which early intervention could have made a radical difference. And if he later came to regret dragging his heels regarding conventional treatment, it’s unfortunate, especially because when he embraced a conventional treatment approach, he went at it with gusto. He later said his goal was to be the first “to outrun a cancer like this” or among the last “to die from it.”

Let me be clear – I’m a big fan of life-saving surgery. I have the scars on my head, my neck, my chest, my lungs and my thigh to prove it. One of my best friends practically whistles now when she walks, she’s had so much of her insides removed from her cancer operations. But I have a big problem with the all-too-common temptation to give a moral value to a person’s choices regarding his or her body, to assume that if someone takes a different path that he, as one headline about Jobs declared, “killed himself.”

This useless, unhelpful crap starts from the moment of diagnosis – did you smoke? Sunbathe? Put off those mammograms? It continues throughout illness, even long after the writing is on the wall. A week before my father-in-law’s death from stomach cancer last spring, a friend visited him in the hospice to tell him he could beat his disease and rally — a pep talk that left him heartbroken that maybe he hadn’t “tried hard enough.” And it lasts, if the Steve Jobs speculation is any indication, even after you’re six feet under, with finger-wagging stories that imply that if you die, it’s your own fault because of your dumb choices. But here are the facts we do know: a) Jobs had cancer and b) everyone, at some point, dies, even the many, many people who try both conventional Western medicine and complementary and alternative treatments.

Jobs lived eight years after his initial diagnosis. Anyone with experience of cancer will tell you that five is considered a relative triumph. And the notion that if we are not doing absolutely everything our doctors and our friends and our shamans tell us, we will commit the great error of not wringing the maximum amount of time out of life, well, that’s really a hell of a lot of pressure.

The survival instinct burns brightly, and most of us would probably say that we’re fortunate enough to want a long, healthy life. But how we go about making that happen varies considerably. The pressure to make the right choices, the wrenching doubts and fears of disappointing everybody: Aren’t these too much to weigh upon any of us? How much “if only” are we expected to bear? Mortality is grueling enough. But guilt-tripping is an entirely curable condition.