The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone
Brian Merchant
[Little Brown and Company]
The One Device is a biography for the cyborg era, recording the life not of a person, but of a machine. Examining the iPhone one component at a time, writer and Motherboard editor Brian Merchant leads us deep into Bolivian mountains where children are paid to extract tin, across the saffron-colour Atacama Desert where lithium is mined along the ‘Ruta del Muerte’, through the ritualistic cleanliness of the Apple Store, back to, finally, that clammy room where the device was first conceived, the ‘Purple Dorm’ where unsleeping, sunlight-starved engineers worked for years in secret to create a phone which would ultimately be credited to Steve Jobs alone.
The man in the mock-turtleneck hardly features in this book, a welcome break from the rash of silicon fanboy lit published shortly after his death. There’s something very cyberpunk about Merchant’s readiness to break apart the iPhone, dismantling its mythology, scratch-proof Gorilla Glass and all, even as he pays it homage.
Apple are notoriously secretive, but this doesn’t prevent Merchant from speaking to former employees off the record, or sneaking into Foxconn City, where a workforce larger than the population of Estonia eat, sleep and work (in infamously gruelling conditions), speeding the iPhone on its way from assembly line to consumer in the space of a single workweek. The One Device reads as at once a love letter and an indictment. Merchant’s travelogue examines the phone’s moral cost, the sweat and blood, the rare earth metals, conflict minerals, hopes, dreams and cybernetic viscera collected within its gleaming shell.
Words – Roisin Kiberd
