Ian Cook – Page 3 – followthethings.com

“Maquilapolis (City Of Factories)“
A participatory documentary film in Spanish with Spanish or English subtitles directed by Vicky Funari & Sergio de la Torre, with music by Pauline Oliveros with the Nortec Collective & John Blue for the Independent Television Service & CineMamás Film.
Trailer and pay-per-view stream embedded above. Search online for other streaming options here. Read the film transcript in English & Spanish here.

Carmen Duràn and Lourdes Lujàn work in Tijuana, the ‘city of factories’, on the Mexico-US border. They work in factories on the hill making televisions and other COMMODITIES for brands like Panasonic and Sony. These multinationals treat this city as a garbage can that their workers have to live in. How can they fight back, claim their rights, their humanity? They take part in a participatory filmmaking project with directors Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre. The directors have been working with a local collective of ‘promontoras’ including Carmen and Lourdes for years. They have planned this project together for years. There’s been some filmmaking training and the promontoras take camcorders into the places where they live and work. The films they make are full of personality and a close attachment to place. They document life from these factory workers’ perspective. They document the ways in which these multinationals treat them as workers – especially when they leave – and how they treat the place where they live – as a dump for industrial waste that ruins their environment and threatens their health. They document their campaigns to clean up toxic industrial waste. In the process audiences get to know Carmen and Lourdes, to empathise with them. But the film also contains some surprising and beautiful creative scenes – often made in place of the footage that’s impossible to take inside the factory – that look like performance art. They want to show the intimate, bodily connection between the labour they perform, the commodities you buy (or are treated with in hospital) and the brands that you may be familiar with. And there’s some specially commissioned film music, made with a local music collective and featuring sounds from the factories. This is a gem of a film for anyone interested in trade justice activism. This is the film – with caveats – that these Mexican factory workers wanted to make and to show to the world. It’s one of the most intimate place-based examples featured on our site. And it was shown, deliberately, to audiences of workers either side of the US-Mexico border. Seeing empowered women like themselves struggling, resisting was an inspiration to many other women. And when the film hit the film festival circle, and there were panel screenings, the promontoras were there, answering questions alongside the directors.

Page reference: Rosie Buller, Melanie Bonner, Rebecca Lyons, Georgie Little, Tilman Schulzklinger & Jennifer Hart (2020) Maquilapolis (City Of Factories). followthethings.com/maquilapolis-city-of-factories.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 86 minutes.

Posted on December 11, 2024January 28, 2025 by Ian Cook

Inside Job

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Money & Finance

EXPERIENCED WORLDWIDE

DOCUMENTARY FILM

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

FOLLOW THE MONEY

FIND THE CHARACTERS

INCLUDE EMOTION

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

BRING REGULATORS INTO VIEW

BRING ACADEMICS INTO VIEW

JOIN THE DOTS

JUXTAPOSE EXTREMES

INVOLVE A CELEBRITY

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

BLAME, SHAME & GUILT

“Inside Job“
A documentary film directed by Charles Ferguson, produced by Charles Ferguson, Audrey Marrs & Jeffrey Lurie & narrated by Matt Damon for Mongrel Media & Sony Pictures Classic.
Official trailer embedded above. Search online to watch the full movie here.

In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, filmmaker Charles Ferguson sets out to find out how and by whom it was caused. This involves understanding and explaining complex financial instruments (like sub-prime mortgages and collateralised debt obligations), the governance of international finance and its deregulation (and its consequences), eye-watering banking losses (over $20 trillion), the organisations and individuals responsible for this happening (in financial services, government, academia) and the people plunged into poverty and homelessness after defaulting on their mortgages. The complexity is explained clearly in the film by narrator Matt Damon. And by the talking heads who Ferguson recruits to talk about what happened, their role in it, how they see their responsibilities, why so much public money was spent bailing them out, and why none of them went to jail. For many audience members, it’s shocking to see executives explaining how business works on camera. The logics and passions that drive their work, and the values that they express, can seem removed from the world, callous and dehumanising. But the experts who come out of this film looking worst are the academic economists. One of the biggest impacts of this film is the way that it encourages university business schools to look more closely at their ethics. Who are economists working for, and how responsible is their education of new generations of economists if their ideas remain unchanged after the Crisis? This is another example showing how important and how difficult it is to ‘follow the money’. But like any following study, it’s also about the ways that responsibility – in this case, for a colossal economic injustice – is understood, shared, taken. And where it isn’t. The solution sees obvious to many – regulation! But it’s not happening. If one film was going to cause a revolution, one commentor states, it would be this one. And this is just a taster page for this film. We’ll add much more detail later…

Page reference: Dom Ebbetts, Dave Simpson, Michael Brent, Mickey Franklin, Tommy Sadler & Charlie Timms (2024) Inside Job (taster). followthethings.com/inside-job.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes.

Posted on December 11, 2024January 6, 2025 by Ian Cook

Chrysal; Or, The Adventures Of A Guinea

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Money & Finance

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

CREATE A CHARACTER

START SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT

FOLLOW THE THING

LIE TO TELL THE TRUTH

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

INVOLVE SOME CELEBRITIES

MAKE IT A MYSTERY

“Chrysal; Or, The Adventures Of A Guinea“
A 4 volume fictional book series by Charles Johnstone, the first two of which were originally published by T. Becket.
An 1821 version of Volume 1 is embedded in full above. Click here to read Volume 2, here to read Volume 3 and here to read Volume 4.

Here at followthethings.com we’re keen to appreciate the historical depth of our genre. Up until quite recently, we had traced everything back to Karl Marx’s chapter on the commodity (and commodity fetishism) in Capital Volume 1 which was first published in the 1860s. David Harvey’s teachings about Capital, and his appeals for geographers and otherS to get behind the veil of the commodity and tell the story of human reproduction were what encouraged us to do this work back in the day. But when you ask what inspired Marx, what literature was well known in his day, what had been written before, this impulse to know whose lives are connected by commodities goes back to the 1700s, to the birth of global capitalism (via empire), and to a genre of cheap and unglamourous ‘novels of circulation’. These make sense of this confusing, emerging world from the perspective of the commodities which were becoming part of its expanding consumer culture. There are dozens and dozens of these novels which we could choose to feature on our site, but the first one we want to add is this one – not least because it seems to have been one of the most popular and influential, but also because it’s about money – a commodity (and means of exchange) that academics have found more difficult to follow than most. This story is narrated by a gold guinea coin, starting from its mining in Peru and talking about its life connecting and witnessing the lives of a variety of people who earn, spend and steal it in different places. Because people aren’t careful what they do and say when a coin is covertly spying on them, the tales this coin tells – to an alchemist it meets at the end of volume one, who writes them down because coins can’t write – are scandalous. Some of the people whose lives are included were famous at the time, others were not. This book is both a scandalous exposé of the lives of famous people of the time and an ethical and moral tale about the emerging economic relations of capitalism and empire. It was inventive, eccentric and a huge popular hit. What would a commodity tell you about its life if it could talk? Here’s your answer! Commodities who can speak for themselves are very much part of trade justice activism today. There are lots of our examples on our site, but here’s one of the earliest. What can today’s activists learn from this? Here’s a taster. We’ll return to this later and add some more depth and detail.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) Chrysal; Or, The Adventures Of A Guinea (taster page). followthethings.com/chrysal-or-the-adventures-of-a-guinea.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes.

Posted on December 11, 2024December 29, 2024 by Ian Cook

Suffragette Penny

Currently out of stock. Please check back.

Posted on December 11, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Our New Commemorative £2 coin

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Money & Finance

“Our Commemorative £2 Coin“
Undergraduate coursework written by Mike Swan, Will Davies, Emma Christie-Miller, Becky Woolford, Meagan Wheatley, Maddie Redfern, Robbie Black, Lucy Webber, Jade Stevens, Katy Charlton & Tom Bollands (a.k.a Royally Minted).
Available in full below. Originally posted online here.

In 2010, students start the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ by researching different examples of trade justice activism to add to the followthethings.com website (not all of them made it). Next, students who have researched different examples came together to create their own original examples of trade justice activism. They pick up some important ideas from their own research and what has already been published here on followthethings.com. They know the importance of looking beyond the usual suspects of follow the things activist – phones, fashion and food – and think about something they don’t think about, something that’s made by doesn’t have a ‘made in’ label, something that’s jangling in all of their pockets: coins. They know that they’re made of metal, but have no idea which ones or where they might be mined by whom. They’ve read about commodities embodying the labour of their creators, and being haunted by them. They’re carrying around, they’re spending, the labour of those mine workers. It’s easy to find which metals are in coins. The organisations that mint them tend to say so. And it’s not difficult to find newspaper, NGO and occupational toxicology research that profiles the labour that goes into mining these metals around the world, the multiple forms of pollution caused by this mining and the damage this does to people’s health, social structures and the environment. The group’s task is to think about how best to present their findings, to make those lives part of this thing, to insert those lives into the lives of coins and their transaction. 2010 sees the UK’s Royal Mint releasing a two commemorative £2 coins: to mark 150 years of modern nursing and the 100 years since the death of Florence Nightingale. The group – now calling themselves ‘Royally Minted’ – decide to design a third that will commemorate the labour that goes into mining those coins’ metals. They look at the Royal Mint’s commemorative coin webpages and mimic their format and content. It’s all very celebratory, very collectable. These students are particularly inspired by forms of activism – like the Suffragette Penny [see our page on this here] – which puts political issues into circulation on and as commodities. Money – with its unique status as a commodity and a means of exchange – is a perfect vehicle for political messages. If only the Royal Mint would commission this.

Page reference: Royally Minted (2010) Our New Commemorative £2 Coin. followthethings.com/our-new-commemorative-£2-coin.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes.

Posted on December 9, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Barracetamol’s Family Reunion

'Hi, I'm Barracetamol.'
'This is my old friend Benson. I never knew whayt we was talking about until I read this.'
'Me, back with my half broither talc!'
'Multivitamins and iron contain maize starch and talk just like me... I was separated from the talc in those vitamins many years ago in a talc mine'.
Barracetamil put on some neon face paint. Guess what? It contains talc.
Boozy Barry 'just chilling with my maize starch pals x.'
'I LOVE UNCLE COSTA CUP. We are made of the same materials! xxxxxxxxxxx.'
'Everyone I meet says I look a bit pasty so I decided to reunite the Talc in me with another product using talc-bronzer!'
'This royal red paint may contain talc'.
'I heard my friends in people's suitcases.'
'I stopped using toothpaste as it contains talc.'
'With my American cousins in Providence, R.I.: June 2013'.

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Health & Beauty | Home & Auto

“Barracetamol’s Family Reunion“
A cartoon character created, brought to life, placed, photographed and posted online by Elaine King, Nancy Scotford, Rosie Cotgreave, Katie Lewis, Jack Ledger, Alice Wakeley, Olivia Rogers, Dennis Yeung, Isabelle Baker and Hannah Willard.
Original interview with Barracetamol below. Family reunion photos available on Flickr here. Barracetamol’s twitter feed here. Download Barracetamol’s Family Reunion Action Pack here to print and place your own Barracetamol.

In 2012, students start the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ by researching different examples of trade justice activism to add to the followthethings.com website (not all of them made it). Next, students who have researched different examples come together to create their own original examples of trade justice activism. They pick up some important ideas from their own research and what has already been published here on followthethings.com. They know the importance of taking commodities to pieces by looking through their ingredients and searching each one for mining, factory, farm and other human stories from their origins. They know the importance for filmmakers and activists of finding or creating a charismatic character for their audience members to relate to and empathise with. They’re familiar with literature arguing – and examples showing – that commodities have their own agentic power, can teach us things, and can be imagined coming alive and teaching us a few things. One group of students chooses something they all carry around with them: paracetamol. They look through its list of ingredients on the box. And look them up online. They find stories about talc and its miners and magnesium stearate and its connection to palm oil workers. These ingredients aren’t even in the pills, but they do help to make them. They use news stories to follow these two ingredients to their possible origins, and then turn around and look back towards their consumption. Yes, these workers and these ingredients help to make the paracetamol they carry around with them. But they start looking at the ingredients in other products, and find that talc and/or magnesium stearate are loads of other commodities too: toothpaste, paint, bronzer, beer and more. The task of the paracetamol cartoon character that they create – Barracetamol – is to go shopping with them, to find his missing relations, and to have his photo taken with related commodities with a little caption to post on his socials. He’s trying to tap into the vibe of those tear-jerking family reunion shows on TV. A familiar genre. The group’s creative process seems silly. The students enjoy it. They find it funny a lot of the time. But there’s a serious message about commodity-following behind this. At a teardown-level, countless commodities have the same ingredients sourced from the same places, mined and made by the same people. So a simple ‘this comes from there and therefore I should or should not buy it’ narrative obscures the complex interconnectedness of things in the global economy. Not everything is made for its final consumer. Barracetamol tries to convey a more complex story in a relatable way. Group member Nancy imagines that these moving reunions have made Barracetamol a minor celebrity. So he’s profiled in a magazine. Below you can read the interview.

Page reference: Elaine King, Nancy Scotford, Rosie Cotgreave, Katie Lewis, Jack Ledger, Alice Wakeley, Olivia Rogers, Dennis Yeung, Isabelle Baker & Hannah Willard (2012) Barracetamol’s Family Reunion. followthethings.com/barracetamols-family-reunion.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 27 minutes.

Posted on December 9, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Kidney Trade

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Health & Beauty

2012

UNBRANDED

HUMAN KIDNEY

SOURCED IN MANY COUNTRIES

TRANSPLANTED IN MANY COUNTRIES

INTERACTIVE MAP

CROSS CULTURES

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

TEACH ILLICIT ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

EMBODY EXPLOITATION

TRACK & TRACE

“Kidney Trade“
Research mapping by followthethings.com intern Eeva Kemppainen.

followthethings.com intern Eeva Kemppainen is reading academic and activist work on the illegal trade in human organs. How they’re obtained, from whom, by whom, where in the world. How they’re transplanted, into whose bodies, by which surgeons, where in the world. Everybody and everything in between. The international criminal investigations and court cases where it comes to the surface. The covert journalism and ethnographic research that exposes it. It’s the most labyrinthine and startling example of ‘follow the thing’ commodity tracing and activism. But there’s no one example we can feature on our site. But something like this needs to be in our collection. Eeva does this by taking passages from lots of academic and newspaper articles that mention specific places, notes what aspect of the illegal kidney trade takes place there, and adds them as points on a google map. What she maps is an amazing, complex world of illegal activities, (un)ethical academic and journalistic practices, and the connected lives of differently desperate ‘donors’ and ‘recipients. How real can it make the traffic of these organs seem? See for yourself.

Page reference: Eeva Kemppainen (2012) Kidney Trade. followthethings.com/kidney-trade.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated browsing time: 35 minutes.

Posted on December 8, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

The Pill (a.k.a. A Female Issue)

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Health & Beauty

“The Pill (a.k.a. A Female Issue)“
Undergraduate coursework created by Kate Ross.

The students’ first task in the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Exeter is to make a personal connection between their lives and the lives of others elsewhere in the world who made the things they buy. These are the people who help you to be you, followthethings.com CEO Ian tells them. Because you’re a cyborg, your body cannot function without the people, animals, technologies, networks that makes its inputs like food and medicine. So choose a commodity that matters to you, that’s an important part of your identity, that you couldn’t do without. Think about its component parts, its materials, and the properties they give to that commodity and your experience of ‘consuming it’. See what you can find online and write a 500 word first person account that connects your lives. One student – Kate Ross – chooses a prescription drug that she takes every day called Co-cyprindiol. It’s a contraceptive pill that’s also prescribed for skin and other conditions. When searches online to find out more about it, she discovers women in China, Brazil and Taiwan who are forced to take contraceptive pills in order to work in the factories and on the farms which make the stuff she buys. Her argument is that her connection with them is not only through the goods they might produce than she might buy. Their connection is through their consumption – as women – of the same medicine, voluntarily or not. They have something in common. Their bodies. Their fertility. Their medication. Once she learns about their relationships with the drug she takes, she thinks about how she’s feeling every time she pops one out of the foil pack… and then I see that face. To make her coursework more visceral, she takes an empty Co-cyprindiol foil, sticks it to a piece of paper, and handwrites these thoughts around it, day by day. These are the same foils that the supply chain workers she’s read about will pop their pills out of every day. She writes her thoughts and footnotes these with academic and detective work readings that have helped her to think this way.

Page reference: Kate Ross (2004) The Pill (A.K.A. A Female Issue). followthethings.com/the-pill-leaflet-thyroxine-a-k-a-a-female-issue.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes.

Posted on December 6, 2024January 10, 2025 by Ian Cook

Hydrocortisone Relatedness

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Health & Beauty

2005-7

MERCK, SHARPE & DOHME

HYDROCORTISONE TABLETS

REDUCE DISCRIMINATION

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

ENCOURAGE THANKFULNESS

END HAPPY

“Hydrocortisone Relatedness“
A talk by Ian Cook et al, edited and updated for publication here.
Available in full below.

Sometimes the thing you want to follow chooses you. It’s October 2004. followthethings.com CEO Ian is in considerable pain. He goes to hospital. He’s got kidney stones. Lots of them. The following summer he’s diagnosed with an illness called sarcoidosis. That’s what’s causing his body to make them. It’s also causing considerable weight loss. And lethargy. And extreme thirst. This is a serious illness. It’s in his lungs. But it could spread. He’s prescribed hydrocortisone steroid tablets. They calm the sarcoid inflammation that sets off the chemical reactions that cause his body to make those stones. And he gets better. He regains his sense of self, his working body. It’s a miracle. He wants to find out more about the drug. Who makes it for him, where, from what? He wants to say thanks. He’s inspired by a student taking his ‘Geographies of material culture’ module whose medicine-following coursework was original & surprising [it’s published on our site here]. Medicines are such a mystery. Hardly anyone seems to follow them. Choosing something to follow when you have absolutely no idea what you might find can be exciting. Choosing something that you couldn’t function without but doesn’t have an ethical, sustainable, or fair trade alternative can make you think differently. If you’re used to ‘follow the thing ‘studies about the genre’s most charismatic commodities – food, fashion and electronics – medicines don’t give you what you might normally expect. Prescription medicines are procured for their consumers by healthcare services. You get what they source for you. Medicines can be made from active pharmaceutical ingredients and other materials that come from the most surprising sources. They may have been discovered / invented under the most surprising circumstances by the most unexpected people. That’s 100% the case with hydrocortisone. Ian’s pills are made and consumed in the UK in the mid 2000s. But his talk starts and ends with civil rights activism in the US the 1960s. He loves what he finds. It forces him to think differently, more thankfully, about theorising and engaging others in the lives of things: through kinship and thingship. And because of what he finds – he concludes – he is a we.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) Hydrocortisone relatedness. followthethings.com/hydrocortisone-thingship.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 44 minutes.

Posted on December 6, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Cyborg Information Leaflet: Thyroxine 50 Microgram Tablets

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Health & Beauty

2004

UNBRANDED

THYROXINE TABLETS

INGREDIENT GROWN IN EGYPT

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

TAKE IT TO PIECES

FIND LOST RELATIONS

WORRY ABOUT ANIMALS

REDESIGN THE COMMODITY

MAKE IT META

MAKE IT SNAPPY

“Cyborg Information Leaflet: Thyroxine 50 Microgram Tablets“
Undergraduate coursework created by Alison Buckler.

The students’ first task in the ‘Geographies of Material Culture’ module at the University of Birmingham is to make a personal connection between their lives and the lives of others elsewhere in the world who made the things they buy. These are the people who help you to be you, followthethings.com CEO Ian tells them. Because you’re a cyborg, your body cannot function without the people, animals, technologies, networks that makes its inputs like food and medicine. So choose a commodity that matters to you, that’s an important part of your identity, that you couldn’t do without. Think about its component parts, its materials, and the properties they give to that commodity and your experience of ‘consuming it’. See what you can find online and write a 500 word first person account that connects your lives. One student – Alison Buckler – chose the most personal example we ever saw, a medicine that’s keeping her alive. It’s not a discretionary commodity that she could do without. It’s not something where there’s an organic of fair trade alternative. So what can she find out about its origins, it’s life before it came into her life and made such a positive difference? And how can she convey what she has learned? In every box of pills, there’s a patient information leaflet. So Alison rewrites the one that comes with her Thyroxine tablets to provide a different kinds of information for a patient. A different understanding of their body and the way that it works, and what’s helping this medicine to help it work. This leaflet’s information is based on an extroverted sense of the body – a cyborg ontology – where the inside and the outside are intimately linked. What comes with this are senses of both astonishment and guilt. This was the first follow-the-meds example to appear on followthethings.com, and it inspired all the others…

Page reference: Alison Buckler (2004) Cyborg Information Leaflet: Thyroxine 50 Microgram Tablets. followthethings.com/cyborg-information-leaflet-thyroxine-50-microgram.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes.