Worked to Death: Temu Comes to America

This is like twenty twenty one. China's lockdowns are actually incredible for PDD because, as we talked about last episode, pdd's strategy is group shopping, right. It's about getting a bunch of people to buy things together to make it cheaper, this thus pulling in more in our customers. Now, China had real lockdowns and in a real lockdown. This is

increasingly how people got food. You know, the strictness of the lockdowns very across, like depending on what province you're in, right, But so like my family was an inner Mongolia and an inner Mongolia in like the first lockdowns, you could send you could only send one member of your family outside per week to like, you know, to go get groceries. Otherwise everyone else fed all times has to stay indoors.

And this meant that people started pulling together to like all buy groceries and then sending one person out to like go pick up the delivery. And this this ingrained PDDs like fundamental strategy of like buying into the into the consciousness of the Chinese public because they've just been doing it for like a year, right, and as twenty twenty for a word on PDD like skyrockets, this this is this the period from like twenty twenty to like twenty twenty four has been the period where pdd's grown

them most. I mean it was already pretty big before then, but now you know, it's it's now like the main competitor of Alibaba. It was like the previously unassailable like online shopping giant the company grew so much that it forced the other like shopping companies to get into the fruit market because it was like clobbering them there so badly. So yeah, it was wild. But then a bunch of absolutely terrible stories broke about PDD in both the Chinese

and American press. So we're gonna start with the stuff that's I guess less bad, and then it's gonna get worse. So question number one is the PDD at malware. All right, we're just really jumping right in here. Oh, this is this is the mild it, this is the Are we allout to say this legally? Yeah? It's well, here's the thing. So Google play removed the app from its playstore. Oh okay, so all right, so so okay, we we need to be very specific about we're talking it's too bad for Google,

that it's probably too bad for you. Yeah, so very specifically, this is we're the thing we're talking about right now is not Temu. We're talking specifically about the Chinese version of the app PDD. And this was released on the Google Play Store in like the mid twenty the mid early like like I think it's like twenty twenty one or something and okay, so this again and to be clear again this is not Temu. This is specifically the

Android version of PDD. And this is interesting too because so most people in China like don't use Android for you or sorry, they don't. They don't. They don't use Google Play, right, like they don't that that's not like the App store where they get their apps from. So when PDD released, like their app on the app store, this is this is them specifically going to the Western market.

So unfortunately, before we start this, we have to sort out kind of well, like you have to make a judgment about what level of app surveillance is, like the level of apps surveillance you get in the US, because all of your apps are spying on you, and then what is like above and beyond the like quote unquote normal level spying and like TikTok is TikTok is unbelievably invasive, right, Like it is true, it's a privacy nightmare, but like so are most apps, Like TikTok's worse than normal, but

it's not.

and go buy it. Google is trying to do that now. Yeahah, but China had that, like like Douyan's had that for like ages. Right, It's like so like the versions of the apps that we get here are actually less bad than the Chinese ones, which makes the whole panic so funny to me. It's like no, no, no, like they're sending you like a better version of the app, Like, well.

of this app. So originally there was a Chinese company that a Chinese security company was looked at this app and was like they're using a bunch of Android exploits, like they're like they're using like they're there, they're effectively hacking your phone, right, They're they're they're they're deploying a bunch of exploits of things that are like broken in in like in Android and allowing you like this, like lesson do stuff and I was supposed to be able to do And so CNN brought in a bunch of

different security like analysts and like they brought in security companies like look at it, and here's what they found.

two have exploited about fifty Android system vulnerabilities. Most of these exploits were tailor made for customized parts known as original Equipment manufacturer code, which tends to be audited less than ASoP, which is like another kind of code and therefore prone to more more vulnerabilities. He said PDD had also exploited a number of AOSP vulnerabilities, including one that was flagged by Totioniin to Google in February twenty twenty two. Google fixed this bug in March. He said, I've never

seen anything like it. It's like super expansive. Cergy Totionin, android security expert, he's the guy I said that. Sorry, I've never seen and Android Tracin said, I've never seen anything like this. It's like super expansive. According to Tosin, the exploits allowed PDD to access users location contacts, calendars, notification, and photo albums with ot their consents. They were also able to change system settings and access users social media

accounts and chats. He said, now that is pretty bad. Will I will mention that like a lot of your normal apps can also do shit like that. Yeah, like that's stuff that you can get out of, like Google, but some it's not good. The other thing that they were doing is they're doing these things called privileged escalation attacks where they're trying to get like a higher level of privileged on the system so they can run code

and not supposed to be able to. So you know how like sometimes when you're running something at a computer, you have to run it as admin so the thing actually works. Yeah, like Discord, Yeah, I actually Discord. I've been trying to stream Alan Wake two to my friends and oh my god, it has been such a nightmare. I'm gonna personally write the CEO of Discord a letter.

And yeah, but like so like so there they're they're like the way the system security works is there's certain levels of users that are allowed to do certain things and certain people who aren't, and this is supposed to stop people from running malicious code. And so they're doing these privileged escalation attacks where they're trying to be able

to like do stuff that only admins can do. And so I showed this to so I was trying to get a gauge on how much of this is real and how much of this is insane, And so I showed I showed it to my friend who's a software engineer, and he was like, what the fuck? So this is this is very tytyfically the privileged escalation attacks on the and the attack on the like the original Equipment manufacturer code like the OEM stuff. That's just not normal, Like

that is that is actual malware. That is like not that is not normal app bullshit that like this thing is trying to hack your phone. So in twenty twenty three, the like Google pulled the app from the store because everyone was like, what the fuck. Wait, this is just literally malware. I'm gonna so so what were they trying

to do? Here's CNN again. It was in twenty twenty, according to a current PDD employee, that the company set up a team of about one hundred engineers and product managers to dig for vulnerabilities and Android phones, develop ways to exploit them, and turn that into profit. According to the source, who requested anonymity for feear of for fear of reprisals, the company only targeted users in rural areas and smaller towns initially, while of winning users in megacities

such as Beijing and Shanghai. The goal was to reduce the risk of being exposed, they said, by collecting expansive data on user activities, the company was able to create a comprehensive portrait of the users habits, interests, and preferences. According to the source, this also allowed it to improve its machine learning model to offer more personalized push notifications and ads attracting users to open the app and place orders.

They said, so this all makes perfect sense with like, how we know that PDD operates right, Like, you know, they're trying to build detailed profiles or rural customers they can serve the more efficient ads, and they're doing it by apparently just straight up running an in house hacking team. I got pretty large one. Oh so they supposedly that team got like acted and they don't do it anymore. But who knows. So, Okay, this is not even close

to the most batshit thing that PDD gets up to. Okay, we're going to escalate up the how weird this stuff is.

So one of the things that that PDD has a six tonech reporting is that they have these really strict non compete clauses that prevent people from like, so if you take a job here and you get fired or eat like you leave, you can't take another job at a tech company for like years this is like fucking like any tech company, like fucking like I don't know, they're they're really expensive, like fucking like setting up your grandma's website like might get you trouble. It's like it's

it's a real disaster. We have these in the US too, and they absolutely suck. So I think there was a ruling about them FTC ruling to ban them recently. Maybe Oh no, they're proposed, it hasn't gone through yet, trying to get rid of them. But yeah, they're they're in the US two. But these ones are really strict and apparently they're like PDD is really aggresive about it to the point where like people people will take other jobs under fake identities and like pdd's HR will like track

them down. Oh wow, yeah, Like they're they're like headhunting these people, well like like inverse head hunt, Like they're they're like they're they're literally just hunting down people trying who are trying to get like jobs, right, And this apparently led people to adopt secret identities to like hide, right, And so this GIDS is something I I did not believe the first time I read it, which is that apparently and I regentally read this in n K, who

is usually reliable. But I read this and I was like, no way.

another work group is. And like I read this, I was like, I don't believe this right, And then I started running it into like other outlets like Financial Times, was like yeah, no, no, apparently they they talked to they talk to people who work for the company. They're like, yeah, everyone uses pseudonyms. I didn't fucking know anyone's real name or like there was like one person who's real name that I know wild. I don't know why they do. I've never seen I've literally never seen this before with

any company. It's it's fucking nuts. I got nothing. Yeah, I do you know who? No one had this company knows my real name. So that's true. I do actually operate by a pseudonym. Yeah, that's pretty funny.

that she lays down in her bed dies. Then a worker who posted a video of an ambulance outside of pdd's headquarters with the caption another brave warrior of PDD has fallen, which great caption, terrible situation, great caption. He gets fired for it, and then very quickly like after that, so they have like a the company has like a Q and a thing like if effectively, what happens is someone responds to like one of their social media accounts with and asks them what do you think of the

PDD worker who died after working overtime? Should PDD bear responsibility? Their corporate responded and I quote, look at those in the underclass who isn't exchanging life for money. I never thought that this is a problem of capital, but as a problem of this society. We live in an era where we spend our whole lives working hard. You can choose a comfortable life if you accept the consequences of comfortable living. People control how much effort they make. Everyone does.

too hard. This is actually labor's fault and not capital. Like this, this fucking blew up in the Chinese media and people got like people got really fucking pissed, and p d D at first was like, no, this is a fake post. We never did it. And the people were like, no, no, it's not this is we found

the post. Right, they take they take it down, people like had saved screenshots and eventually the company was forced to admit that it was actually their account, but then they said that it was a social media contractor who put it on the corporate account. Quote by mistake.

after he joined PDD in early twenty nineteen. He said employees were told they need to work at least three hundred hours per month, amounting to nearly twelve hours per day, six days a week. We're going to get more into that. That's a schedule called nine niney six, where you work from nine am to nine pm, six days a week. This is incredibly common and try This is actually a good schedule. In a lot of Chinese work environments, it can get way worse than that. Here's another quote from

that six Tone article. The company cares a lot about our work hours. It has become company culture. Even if staff is finished working, if they'll just stay in the office. I was one of the lucky ones. I only had to work from eleven am to ten pm, and my manager was nice to me. This person added that employees arriving after eleven am would have their daily wages docked

by three hours. It's fucking insane. It's it's nightmarish. That same worker talked about how she would like and this is this is the thing that's like you see you see this a lot of different accounts, is that people would just literally break down crying at their desks because they had so they were so overworked. Are these like office jobs? These are workers, These are tech workers. These are fucking tech workers. Like right, these are the fucking bougie tech jobs.

he had to deal with. And this was a big, like a huge thing in the Chinese media, but almost all of the reporting and the coverage and stuff like that was about the tech workers. But like, fucking so many people work schedules that are worse than nine ninety six, right, Like that is a that is a that is a tech workers schedule, right, there are a lot of places

where people were fucking way worse shit. The sort of countervailing force to it is people who, like you know, we talked about this kind of in the Lying Flat episodes. It's people working for like one day and then eating just like plain rice with some like whatever, fucking the cheapest thing they can finally they can fucking get out of it, and not working for two more days and

working another day. But like it's it's so bad, like the little labor conditions are just appalling, and you know, like a bunch of stories sort of started coming out about how bad PDDs like conditions are. There was one on we chat that broke that I saw via six tone about the toilet situation in pdd's largest office building. So this building has one thousand people per floor. It has eight total bathrooms per floor one thousand people. They don't even have one bathroom for every hundred people.

There are like there's a bunch of reports of guys just like shitting in urinals because there just literally wasn't time for them to fucking actually like use a stall. So they're just like they're they're just like they're they're

pooping in urinals. Maybe the worst picture I've ever seen in my entire life is this is going to be the episode our PDD started installing timers over the toilets to show how long how long people had been there, So there's just like a like a a fucking clock over you that starts when you when you fucking close the door to try to get people to go to the bathroom faster. It is just appalling the conditions. And again, these are the conditions of like the office workers. It's

apocalyptically bad. So I realized when I was researching this story that I actually ran into PDD earlier, because I I so like, way before I did this story, I hadn't looked into TAMU at all, and I realized that

I had. I had ran into PDD earlier when I was tracking the story about UH tech workers banding together to like basically like on GitHub, these these office workers, like tech workers, like made a giant spreadsheet where everyone would document their hours and like their pay scales and stuff. And it was like, you know, it was this sort of like you know, it was it was this thing

to like demand better labor conditions. Actually I'm pretty I'm pretty sure they were actually demanding like the workplace democracy too. It was pretty wild. But the thing that you get out of that is that PDD has the worst the worst hours of any tech company. They are. PDD is so bad. The other Chinese tech companies got worse in order to compete with them.

that people are just straight up fucking dying. And the Chinese government eventually gets involved, like they're there, they're their version of the Streame Court eventually rules that like working people twelve hours a day, six days a week, is illegal, but it doesn't really matter, like a lot of those people still have those same schedules. Yeah, and you know and like this this is not a this is not a problem that can be solved just by like court rulings. Right,

So yeah, it's it's really fucking bad. We're gonna we're gonna take an ad break. I don't I don't have a good transition out of that ship. And we're back. So all of this brings us to Temu And it's slogan shop like a billionaire.

out of the ad market. LIKETCCO has been talking about how they can't afford to run ads because ads are getting too expensive, because they're buying so many fucking ads. Here's Reuter's quote. US companies dependent on commercial spending or spending on commercials, not.

losing three billion a year. But they also project and to be fair, these projections, these projections are wrong so many of the time, of so much of the time, but they're projecting the ten will be making three point five billion a year in twenty twenty seven. And all of this raises the question why, and to answer that, we need to get into Chinese development economics. So the Chinese economy has a problem, and this is a problem that the CCP is known about for a long time.

It's the problem of turning a sort of like a low on the value chain like manufacturing economy, to a consumption driven economy. Now, the problem with transitioning into a consumption driven economy is that people don't have enough money to boost consumer demand. The Marxist way of saying this is that under capitalism, both output and consumption are double determined by your wage. Right, your wage determines both firm output and also how much you can consume. Right in

non Marxist terms. Oh no, no one has enough money to buy things. They did you consumer economy by brother in Christ. You set the wages. Okay, where are the fuck? Yes, where the fuck are these people supposed to be getting money from to buy your shit if you won't give them more money? Like wait, wait, wait, So you know you can't do this by just making them like work more hours. You know, you can work people for like twelve fifteen, like twenty hours a day, but there's only

twenty four hours a day. Like, there's an actual definite there's an actual definite limit to the amount of exploitation you can do via increasing labor hours. This is this has always been capitalism's problem, right, Like the sort of rapacity of capitalism has hit the secular limit of time itself. So the solution to this is to expand into new markets where consumers have more money, which is to say

the US. So PDD initially targeted like poor rural Chinese workers, right, and this is kind of the same group that Temu was targeting in the now. In the US, their initial base is people who like buy from dollar stores, but they've been spreading rapidly. Temu has outpaced she in to become the second largest shopping app in the US. But the important thing really, yeah, yeah there's second behind an Amazon. Yeah, they're they're destroying she in Like, wow, yeah, I did

not know they were that popular. Yeah, I mean like estimates are like, well, I've seen simens to say they have one hundred million years. I don't buy that. I've seen the estimates that I think I'm more reliable are like fifty four million years in the US, although.

But the important thing about specifically the American market for TEMU is that, like the kind the equivalent person who shops at a dollar store in the US still has unfathomably more money than that same person in China because partially this is because the strength of the American dollar. Partially this is because American wages are just like unfathomably higher than Chinese wages, and that's that's that's true, even if you're like even when you account for like the

relative strength and dollars to the yawn. So you know, the other kind of important thing about temis strategy is that they've been using this kind of like loophole that will set up a US customs law to allow people to like bring presents home from countries. So like, if you go to another country and you bring a present home, it's worth less than two hundred dollars, you go through like an expedited customs thing, you know, have to pay

tariffs on it. Yeah, so I Temu and like a whole bunch of these companies just ship every single one of their packages in quantities where it's like seven hundred and ninety nine dollars, not eight hundred dollars ye legal, yeah,

yeah yeah. And it's really funny. It's set off this like it's massive intra capitalist war because like a bunch of like like American right wingers, like American manufacturers, like the Republican Party are like, we need to close this gap, But then all of the fucking shipping companies are like, no, this is a vital part of the American consumer economy, and there's this like giant war going on like both in Congress and like the like in the press over

whether they should when they should close as loophole now, you know. On the other hand, like there are real challenges to Timu being the first like company to break into the they're like Chinese companies like really truly break into the American market, like she and has done well, but they haven't like they have they have, They're not like a rival front to Amazon, right, Like they're not big enough to like knock off one of the sort

of like American tech giants. And Temu's problem is that. Okay, so if you compare Temu to to PDD, right, the Chinese version, PDD is supposed to be about spreading through word of mouth, right, It's it spreads by like someone in your you know you as as of someone buying something from PDD taps your entire friend group and your family to get them to buy something for cheaper. Right. But the problem is that.

But they don't have a way to break into the American market because it just doesn't work like the Chinese market. So instead they're like buying three Super Bowl ads right now. There's another issue, which is that the goods that they sell suck ass and they break instantly. You know, that's

an issue, But I don't know it's the US. Lots of things suck and break instantly, but like it is only that's been driving sort of negative sentiment from people who've used it, is they're like, they buy something and it's just like sucks, and they're, you know, they're unhappy

about it. The thing I think is maybe the biggest problem is that their delivery times are really long by Americans den because they're shipping overseas, Temu had to build an actual logistics infrastructure where PDD like didn't, right because PDD is just using like Chinese versions of FedEx or whatever, right, and Temu is kind of doing that but in you know,

in order to make it convenient for Chinese sellers. The way that they the way that they've sort of like set this up is they have a warehouse in Guandong and every seller like ships it to this warehouse and then Temu deals with getting it shipped overseas. The problem is that this is really slow, right. It takes like two weeks for things to show up, and that's not that slow by like normal standards, but this is the.

week ship for can But why it is? I mean you have to do a bunch of b you have you have to have an actual logistics infratructure set up for it, right. You can't just ship it in like an Amazon boll.

from their ad spending, not from the actual sales. And this is this is where you get into again the really bleak part about this, where Okay, so are these why are these prices so low? And part of its tech money subsidy, but a lot of it is just labor, just pure, pure, unrivaled labor exploitation. You know, when with with the Chinese workers movement, like as like a a sort of like collective mass movement just completely broken by Tianamen.

And then again dream like the crackdowns through the twenty tens that wiped out whatever sort of like classical workers movement style thing was may have popped up from the strikes in twenty eleven, like there's there's no there's no mass countervailing force in Chinese politics to try to raise wages, like independent union organizing is illegal. You will get arrested. The actual unions that exist, like they all trying of union federation doesn't do shit. We don't really have that

kind of like fake union thing here. It's like it's like a different but you know, like they're they're I don't know, this is this is this is maybe not the time for me to try to explain China union system. Like the unions are fucking bullshit. They don't do anything. Like if you go to them and be like my wages are too low, they'll try to get you to like negotiate with the company directly, right like like as an individual, and like it's they're nonsense. They're completely useless.

And you know the results of this and the results of just like the incredible poverty of the Chinese working class and the fact that you know a lot of Chinese migrant workers who are people who are actually making these goods.

So a lot of some of it's real workers, some of its migrant workers, but a lot of these people's wages are lower than they otherwise would because they're drawing revenue off of like they're off of off of like the plots of land that their family has like back in the countryside when they like when they they like

migrate to another city to to find a job. Yeah, so, like all of these factors are just institutionally like smashing the price of like like smashing like wages, and there's no there's no fucking there's not there's nothing really there to resist them and and act like, you know, it's not like the Chinese working class like completely takes it lying down, right, but it's like the resistance strategies are trying to work as little as possible, but that doesn't

that's you know, and that's something that can be very effective in the sense of like you're working a lot less, but it's not something that drives up like wages. And so when when you're looking at Temu and you're seeing a pair of Jeanes for two dollars, like what you are seeing is the raw exploitation of the Chinese working class.

And this is also true of like the rest of the fucking shit you buy from China, right, like almost all of the price of like a shirt that you're buying, I mean, Chinese textile manufacturing is kind of like not what it used to be right, but like you know, but like you're buying like fucking some bol shit from China. Like if you're buying from like another drop shipping company, right, like the thing you're actually paying for, you're paying the

drop shipping company. You're not fucking paying the workers. They're not they're fucking not making shit all like all of the stuff that's like, I mean, it's not like one hundred percent, like a huge portion of of the fact that the price is higher on non Temu sites is just like it's just markups because this is this is just what the Chinese economy is. It's just sort of like it's you know, it's it's it's it's unbelievable exploitation.

And this brings us to the thing we're going to end today on, which is does Temo use slave labor? Oh oh okay, And the answer is probably, but it's hard to tell. So this has been a big thing because Ten is one of the companies that the State Department brought up when they were doing their investigations into like like Sheian was the other one into like are these companies using shing John slave labor? And you know this is labor from people put in in the fucking camps.

I think the answer is probably because I mean, so the thing is, the State Department doesn't have any actual evidence, right, Like they're all and they're they're doing this incredibly what We'll get into this in a second, Like, you know, obviously they're doing this because this is like this is an intra like capitalist feud thing, right. The State Department's talking about this because they're pissed at China.

fucking vet it at all. So yeah, probably, like quite possibly. Yeah, the stuff the stuff that they're selling from shing Jun, and they have a pretty large presence there, like was using sort of like prison slave labor from the camps there. However, Comma, we can't talk about prison slave labor without talking about the fact that fucking every goddamn US firm also uses

prison slave labor. Everyone from fucking McDonald's, the Starbucks to Walgreens to JC Penny, like fucking every every company, every American company you can fucking think of, uses slave labor or their slave labor in their in their supply chain. And they're using slave labor because in the US, under the Thirteenth Amendment, slavery is legal as long as the person as long as the person being enslaved is incarcerated. So you know, like it doesn't fucking matter, like this

is this is this is the problem. It doesn't matter whether you buy from the US or China. Right like you're you're getting fucking slave labor. So if you if you want to not do that, you're you're your only option.

If if you do not want to, if you do not want everything you consume, like the food that you eat, if you don't want, like everything that you use in your daily life to be the product of unfathomed human exploitation, your only option is to destroy the monstrous economic system that reduces humans to commodities and tear up the fucking roots of every single one of these companies from San Francisco to Shanghai and burn it to the grounds. That's that.

Those are your options, like, it's not your individual consumer choice, not gonna make it any better. That's what I got. I okay, all right? Well oh god, like was it the Super Bowl great this year? Yeah? What a game?