Step 1: Product

Bang!  Our container hits another bump.  Crash! It’s cargo crashing and swaying all the way.  I can’t tell where we’re going, I see nothing, just blackness.  All I hear is a constant pattern. Bang, crash, bump, bang, crash, bump.  I hear a loud and consistent whir, like some kind of motor, it was constant, never stopping, on a seemingly endless journey.  Just then I hear a loud screech, I can feel us stopping.

Just then the light reflects over all of my shiny surface as I am brought inside the giant metal and concrete city.  I realize that have been brought to another factory. Just like the few before. The blinking and dim lights, the constant roar of machinery looking like giant metal monsters, the dull voices in the background, and heavy, musty and dim air.

The constant adding and tinkering with weird and shiny metals, endless amounts of wires, glossy plastics, and strange computer circuit boards.  I don’t know why it is all being added to me, and I certainly don’t know where it came from. But just then I overhear some chatter about raw materials coming from all over the world and being mined by China. That must've been where I came from before I got to the factories, some of my questions have finally been answered. Just then, as more shiny stickers and strange gleaming metals are added, I notice the strange people who are working on me.  I look at them, and they look back at me with tired and sad eyes. They work quickly, they each have a job. Down the line I keep going, each person doing one single job. Placing a sticker on, or tightening one screw, it seems that no one is trusted with the variety and privilege of each working on their own product, but it doesn’t seem to bother them.  The continue, doing a single thing so quickly it is almost scary.

I continue to move down the assembly line and I see large silver letters on the wall they look to spell-SONY INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT in bold, shiny capital letters.  The letters then pass, but I can’t help wonder what SONY even is. I then hear more dull chatter about someone named Mark Cerny and how he designed the product that is made at this factory which means he designed me. My mind starts to race, I desperately wonder what's going to happen to me, and why I´'m even somehow magically alive.

Step 2: Worker

Beep, Beep, Beep.  My broken alarm clock wakes me up.  My name is Asahi Hinata. I have been working at the Sony factory for over eight years, working ten hours a day.  I get about nine dollars an hour and a dorm to sleep in. My job is to tighten one screw on the motherboard for each product with my bare hands.  One screw is all I am worth for to Sony and our factory boss. One job, for ten hours, every day. Not a single day goes by where I don’t wish I could quit, but my family needs the money, and I am the only one who can work.