The size of a small city —with an estimated half a million employees—Foxconn's Shenzhen plant gets media attention not just because of its vast scale and brand-name clients, but also because of the numerous reports of atrocious working conditions it has engendered, and the stories of employee suicides, protests, and even riots within the campus walls.

It might be the biggest and best-known, but Foxconn is only one of several hundred factories in and around Shenzhen. In fact, the megacity is responsible for producing an estimated 90 percent of the world's consumer electronics, the vast majority of which are far less glamorous than iPhones and PlayStations.

"It's where all the electrical crap we buy comes from," Kate Davies, an academic and architect who studies extreme places, tells me as we walk through Shenzen's LED-lit streets. "[T]he cheap toys, that box of chargers and adapters that you have, that you've no idea what they're for anymore, the cemetery of old phones in your kitchen drawer… Shenzhen is one of those points on the planet where the world condenses in high density into one place, it's an artifact of the contemporary global supply network that weaves matter and displaces earth across the planet." And we're standing on ground zero as she speaks.