Daisey's two-hour monologue is in turns funny, insightful and serious. He is a storyteller, and he relates the early creative marketing efforts of the two Steves -- covering the infamous blue boxes that enabled free phone calls, the Scully years, and Apple's ups and downs until its recent resounding iSuccesses. He mixes in the story of his trip to the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, where he talked with hundreds of employees about working conditions that would not be tolerated in the U.S. Daisey met employees as young as 12 and 13, whose small hands assemble iPhones and iPads. He charges that Foxconn forces workers to routinely log 12- and 14-hour and even longer shifts to meet demand. Daisey notes that Foxconn's answer to worker suicides was to install nets near the top of its buildings (although PCWorld and others have also reported that the company cites some as well.

Daisey also posed as an American businessman, enduring several sessions of Death by PowerPoint described with levity that contrasted with his somber description of factory tours revealing cramped working quarters and even more crowded worker dorms (described as 10-by-10-foot rooms containing 10 or 15 or more stacked cots).

I can't fact-check all his allegations, but he correctly describes Foxconn as "the biggest company you've never heard of," which makes 50 percent of all the electronics in the world. The Shenzhen facilities alone house nearly 500,000 workers -- a volume better grasped by learning it has 25 around-the-clock cafeterias that each seat 10,000. Did you know your iPhone came from there? And Apple is not Foxconn's only customer; count Hewlett-Packard, Dell and other U.S. electronics giants.

Daisey fingers Jobs as an indisputed "visionary" on one hand and an "asshole" on the other, whose legendary volatility and intensity has been described before -- although Daisey's reference to Jobs as "not a micro-manager, he's a nano-manager" is a particularly poetic turn of phrase. He credits Apple's success with Jobs's willingness to "knife the baby" -- kill the project that won't fly, or change the product line in order to push a new one to even greater success. And he charges that buyers -- including himself, a self-described Apple fanboy -- know simply that the gadgets are "made in China" but don't have a clue what's behind that.

Daisey urges his audience to take action -- encouraging Apple and Jobs specifically to seek more socially responsible practices and encourage the same in its manufacturing partners. He cites work by Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), which released earlier this month.