Your iPod glistens on your waistband, a totem of modern engineering brilliance, perhaps the most ubiquitous cultural icon of the 21st century so far. This shiny box of wires and lights has become a byword for a whole western youth demographic, the 'iPod generation'.


But what does it say about a culture when its defining product, a product outwardly symbolising style and modernity, is accessible to that culture only through the exploitation of foreign labour?


Foreign labour exploitation? Yawn. Who wants a hippy tugging on the seam of your faux-distressed Diesel jeans, mumbling inanities about the guy in China who got paid £1.36 a day to solder your iPod together? No one. These are facts that we're not used to confronting when making a purchase decision in the glossy white foyer of Nike Town, or the glass and marble cathedral that is the Regent Street Apple Store. Frankly it's easier to ignore it. In fact, Apple assumes you won't be thinking about the workers in Foxconn's Longhua plant -- Apple's notorious iPod City. After all, you don't see the worker's faces in the iPod advertisements.

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