Join the dots – Page 3 – followthethings.com

“Gold Farmers“
A documentary film written & directed by Ge Jin
Trailer embedded above. Search here for the whole film (sometimes uploaded in parts) online.

Travelling between China and USA, filmmaker Ge Jin talks to men who play Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) like ‘World of Warcraft’ and ‘Lineage’. Its players in the USA sometimes exchange real dollars for the game’s online currency in order to pay for extra game features like swords or amulets. They could earn online currency themselves in-game but, instead, talk about buying it. But that currency is produced and sold by Chinese men who play the same games all day in ‘gold farms’ to make a meagre living. Their places of work are described as ‘virtual sweatshops’ where they earn and sell virtual money through the labour of online game-play. But – unlike most – these producers and consumers meet and interact (albeit online, in the games that they play). They inhabit in the same online worlds, but as consumers and workers, buyers and sellers. This documentary film is an early example of ‘follow the thing’ activism focused on a digital commodity. So what do these players imagine and know about one another? How is one’s enjoyable leisure time activity affecting another’s full time work?

Page reference: Jack Parkin (2012) Gold Farmers (taster). followthethings.com/gold-farmers.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes.

Posted on September 30, 2024January 9, 2025 by Ian Cook

A Week In A Toxic Waste Dump

followthethings.com
Recycle my waste

DUMPED & PROCESSED IN GHANA

DOCUMENTARY FILM

POP THE BUBBLE

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

“A Week In A Toxic Waste Dump“
A documentary film starring by Reggie Yates, produced by Harriet Morter for BBC TV.
Available in full above (with ads). Available on the BBC’s iPlayer platform without ads (with login) here. Search online for streaming options here.

“A harrowing new BBC documentary has exposed the continued illegal dumping of e-waste in developing countries. … [Presenter] Reggie [Yates], whose parents were born in Ghana, heads to the country’s capital – Accra – to spend a week living on one of the largest electronic waste dumps in the world. Nicknamed Agbogbloshie, this 20-acre site was established in the 1990s and has grown from a former wetland area with rivers, farms and a lagoon, to one of the most toxic sites on the planet. An electronic graveyard littered with fridges, computers, air conditioning units and TV monitors, the dump sits beneath a permanent plume of thick black smoke. That’s because Agbogbloshie’s ‘burner boys’ – a name given to the manual workers at the very bottom of the chain – burn the waste electronics, which are bought and dismantled in bulk by wholesalers, to salvage precious metals like copper, aluminium and lead. The men, who often work in gangs in strong competition with one another, sell the precious metals on as raw materials. They’re paid in pennies for their efforts and live in extreme poverty – rarely earning enough to move further up the chain – but they’re paying the ultimate price: with their lives” (Source: Anon 2017, np link).

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) A Week In A Toxic Waste Dump (holding page). followthethings.com/a-week-in-a-toxic-waste-dump.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: tbc minutes.

Posted on September 20, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

The Oil Road: Journeys From The Caspian Sea To The City Of London

followthethings.com
Home & Auto

2012

BRITISH PETROLEUM

CRUDE OIL

SOURCED IN AZERBAIJAN

USED IN EUROPE

PUBLICATION

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

TELL THE TRUTH

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

REACH NEW AUDIENCES

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

TARGET THE RIGHT BRAND

START SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

SHOW THE VIOLENCE

KNOW YOUR HISTORY

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

“The Oil Road: Journeys From The Caspian Sea To The City Of London”
A non-fiction travelogue by James Marriott & Mika Minio-Paluello, published by Verso.
Google Books preview embedded above.

‘Oil corporation resisters’ James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello travel the length of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline which carries crude oil from Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea oilfields to refineries in Europe and, from there, into the region’s cars, buses & other oil-burning machines. They find this oil’s human stories, secret places and complex connections, and companies and governments that don’t want them to be revealed. They investigate how British Petroleum – which operates and co-owns it – wields incredible power over the governments of the countries the pipeline passes through that it is able to sweep aside everyone and everything in its path. The Oil Road paints a picture of the West’s ‘energy imperialism’ and insatiable addiction to oil. But this is far from a dry academic or NGO report of ‘energy security’ and oil geopolitics. Rather, it’s a vivid piece of industrial / infrastructural travel writing. A page-turning detective thriller that’s accessible to readers who don’t identify as oil-geeks. The authors use a familiar road trip format for political advocacy, to ‘show the filthy entrails of the global economy close up’, as one commenter puts it. Some commenters rage at BP, and/or say the authors are obviously a biased against BP, and/or bemoan the lack of alternatives and/or express greater worries about the ‘carbon web’ that the book vividly – but only partly – reveals. This is thing-following in multiple ways. It follows oil along a pipeline. It follows the pipeline itself. And it follows the money generated by the oil flowing along the pipeline.

Page reference: Molly Mansfield, Louise Ford, Olivia Rogers, Millie Smith, Bryony Board & Charlotte Watts (2013) The Oil Road. followthethings.com/the-oil-road.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 33 minutes.

Posted on September 20, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Diamonds Are From Sierra Leone

followthethings.com
Gifts & Seasonal

2005

UNBRANDED

DIAMONDS

MINED IN SIERRA LEONE

BOUGHT IN THE USA

MUSIC VIDEO

CHANGE CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER

INCLUDE SUFFERING KIDS

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

FIND LOST RELATIONS

ADD TO THE MIX

ENCOURAGE A BUYCOTT

“Diamonds Are From Sierra Leone“
A music video starring Kanye West & Jay-Z, directed by Hype Williams, music by Kanye West, Jon Brion & Devo Springstein, for Roc-A-Fella Records.
Embedded above.

Kanye West is writing and recording a new song commemorating the rebirth of his label Roc-A-Fella Records, including conflicts within the organisation and its hand-signal which is the shape of a diamond. Q-Tip, a former member of A Tribe Called Quest, then alerts him to the ‘blood diamond’ scandal in Sierra Leone. So West changes the title of the track to ‘Diamonds are from Sierra Leone’. And makes a powerful black and white music video about the supply chain linking the country’s child diamond miners to wealthy white diamond consumers shopping in high end jewellery stores in the USA. A small, black, child’s hand appears from beneath the counter to hand these consumers the precious blood diamond they crave. The video ends with a converted luxury car ramming the store and a screen with a plea: ‘please buy conflict free diamonds’. The video wants to raise awareness of the issue. But audiences point out how a diamond-encrusted mask that West wears on stage, and the bling culture he brags about, makes this plea a bit hypocritical. His core fans are also not impressed by the song’s sample of Shirley Bassey’s ‘Diamonds Are Forever ‘ (plus some harpsichord sampling) on the album where this track appears. So he returns to recording more traditional Crack Music that his fans want to hear. Nevertheless, the message of ‘Diamonds Are From Sierra Leone’ gets through. Audience members are questioning the origins of their diamonds. So is this a successful example of trade justice activism despite – kind of – not being trade justice activism?

Page reference: Hector Neil-Mee, Hannah Willard, James Kemp, Harvey Dunshire, Maddy Morgan & Luke Jarvis (2024) Diamonds Are From Sierra Leone (taster). followthethings.com/diamonds-are-from-sierra-leone.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes.

Posted on September 20, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

The First Ever Pacemaker To Speak For Itself

followthethings.com
Health & Beauty

2014

UNBRANDED

HEART PACEMAKER

MINED IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

REDESIGN THE COMMODITY

ENCOURAGE THANKFULNESS

“The First Ever Pacemaker To Speak For Itself“
Undergraduate coursework made and recorded by Jennifer Hart
Images of the pacemaker and packaging submitted is in the slideshow above, the song is embedded below.

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. 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 what properties they give to that commodity and your experience of ‘consuming’ it. Student Jennifer Hart feels guilty about the conflict minerals in her mobile phone. Then she finds that the heart pacemaker her mum is having fitted also contains those minerals. It’s a lifesaving operation. How can she reconcile her mum’s suffering and that of these minerals’ miners? How best can she express her feelings about this technological object? By making a pacemaker that knows what she knows, feels what she feels, and can sing about it. A pacemaker that can express a huge thank you.

Page reference: Jennifer Hart, J. (2014) The First Ever Pacemaker To Speak For Itself. followthethings.com/pacemaker.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated listening & reading time: 10 minutes.

Posted on September 20, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Kopuchiska’s Mother Is Shopping For Meat

followthethings.com
Grocery

CHANGE CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

“Kopuchiska’s Mother Is Shopping For Meat“
A scene from a documentary film called ‘Kino-Eye’, directed by Dziga Vertov.
Film embedded above, scene starts at 7.00 and finishes at 14.08. Search online to stream here and to buy DVD here.

When the genre of documentary film was in its infancy, Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov used it to show how food shopping involves relations with hidden places, processes and people. In one extended scene from his experimental documentary Kino-Eye – which starts with an intertitle saying ‘Kopuchiska’s Mother Is Shopping For Meat’ – the film follows a cut of meat that she buys in reverse motion, from a cooperative market, via the slaughterhouse where it is put back into the cow, who then stands up, walks backwards into the train, which returns the cow to the fields where it grazed. Vertov’s message to the film’s audience is to buy your meat from a workers’ co-operative supermarket. If Marx had been a filmmaker, he could have made this sequence to show a commoditty’s hidden relations. For us, it’s surprising that one of the earliest and most influential documentary filmmakers made follow thing work, to show audiences where commodities came from, what difference their purchase choices made, because meat’s system of provision mattered. Vertov also used techniques of montage, reverse sequencing, extremes of light and shade, in-shot camera motion, and sped up and slowed down the pace of scenes in order to ‘move’ his audiences kinaesthetically. So, is this some of the most innovative follow the things work you’ll ever see? Or a meaningless jumble? Either way, it’s had a significant influence on the ‘follow the thing’ genre’s academic and activist work.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) Kopuchiska’s Mother Is Shopping For Meat. followthethings.com/kinoeye.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 18 minutes.

Posted on September 13, 2024March 11, 2025 by Ian Cook

Ilha Das Flores

followthethings.com
Grocery | Money & Finance | Recycle my waste

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

START SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT

MAKE THE FAMILIAR STRANGE

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

CHOOSE THE RIGHT THING

“Ilha Das Flores (Island Of Flowers)“
A short film written, directed and produced by Jorge Furtado for Casa de Cinema de Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Embedded in full above. Search online to watch the film here. In Portuguese with English subtitles.

It sounds simple: filmmaker Jorge Furtado follows the life of a tomato from Mr Suzuki’s tomato field to a garbage dump ‘on the Island of Flowers’ in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Here, the rotten tomatoes binned in shoppers’ kitchens are selected to feed the local pigs. The leftovers are scavenged by local people who have queued for the chance. But, this no ordinary film. Its footage doesn’t always seem ‘real’. Its voiceover is eccentric but is delivered in monotone. It’s like an economic geography lecture – or a public information film – that’s been made for an audience visiting Planet Earth for the first time. It explains what a human being is, and what the function of money in capitalism is, for instance. It’s full of human beings whose tomato-connected lives audiences can learn a little bit about. It’s a collage made from quick cuts between filmed scenes, found media and ideas. There seem to be so many tangents. But, together, they gradually build a powerful argument that, ultimately, trashes the way that capitalism values people, animals and the environment. Humans who watched it called it a beautiful, hilarious and deeply troubling masterpiece. You’ll have to watch it to believe it. Maybe two or three times. It’s only 13 minutes long. It’s the only example of trade justice activism that we have found that follows a thing from the beginning to the end of its life. And it decentres the stereotypical shopper in fascinating and eccentric ways. But what is Jorge Furtado trying to achieve? What are his cultural reference points? Why is this highly political film presented as a kind of weird joke?

Page reference: Maura Pavalow (2025) Ilha das Flores. followthethings.com/ilhadasflores.html (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 68 minutes.

Posted on August 28, 2024February 4, 2025 by Ian Cook

Primark – On The Rack

"A little deeper into the squalour and another rung down the ladder of exploitation. Children. Several young boys working on the same Primark vest we saw those women sewing earlier...
... one could be as young as 9 or 10. They're testing the stitching so the sequins don't end up falling off in the hands of customers back in Britain. When we asked their ages, their manager kept silent."
[The film then briefly shows the vest's 'atmosphere' label. This is a Primark band promising customers affordable fresh fashion]

followthethings.com
Fashion

“Primark – on the rack“
A documentary film presented by Tom Heap & produced by Frank Simmonds with Dan McDougall for BBC TV’s Panorama series.
Screenshot slideshow of the contested scene embedded above. Watch on Box of Broadcasts (with institutional login) here.

The BBC produces an exposé of cheap clothing retailer Primark. It finds children making its clothes, and sewing and testing their sequins, in factories, slums and refugee camps in India. Primark is asked to contribute to the film before it’s shown. Instead, they decide to cut ties with the supply chains featured, then launch a website to counter the film’s claims. They research the film’s research to pick apart its claims, and then complain to the BBC that one 45 second scene (the one in the screenshots above) is fake. Their critic-silencing strategy has mixed success. The BBC is forced to admit that it cannot be 100% sure that the scene wasn’t faked, and the Panorama team are forced to hand back an award they were given for the film. But Primark’s persistent public attempts to silence this investigative journalism draws attention – for years – to the company’s reputation as the ‘poster boy of child labour in the UK’. Supporters of the film highlight the other 3,555 minutes of the film that Primark didn’t claim the producers had faked? Then, 5 years after the film was broadcast, the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapses and over a thousand garments workers are crushed to death making high street clothes. Journalists, filmmakers and others keep this tragedy relentlessly in the news. UK newspaper headlines refer to this as the ‘Primark factory’. There’s no way that this footage is fake. Primark has to react differently this time.

Page reference: Kate Adley, Richard Keeble, Pippa Russell, Noora Stenholm, William Strang and Tuuli Valo (2025) Primark – on the rack. followthethings.com/primark-on-the-rack.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 124 minutes.

Posted on August 28, 2024January 10, 2025 by Ian Cook

No Pride In Primark

followthethings.com
Fashion | Gifts & Seasonal

REDUCE DISCRIMINATION

WASH IT WITH WOKENESS

“No Pride In Primark“
Popular activist campaign against Primark’s ‘Pride’ clothing & accessories made in anti-LGBTQ+ countries.
To see what sparked this, watch Primark’s promotional video above.

UK LGBTQ+ rights charity Stonewall collaborates with high street fashion retailer Primark on its 2018 ‘Pride’ range of clothing and accessories. They will be sold throughout Europe and North America and 20% of their profits will go to Stonewall. But none of the proceeds will go to the organisers of Pride celebrations, some of whom are struggling for money. And many of the countries in which this ‘Pride’ merch is being made – like Turkey, Myanmar & China – ban LGBTQ+ events and NGOs and imprison people for homosexuality. So what should Primark & Stonewall do? Where should people shopping for Pride merch go? And what’s it like to be an LGBTQ+ worker in Turkey, Myanmar or China making t-shirts and other merch that ‘celebrates what you are not allowed to be’? These are the questions asked by social media critics and the journalists who pick up their criticisms. It’s not a huge orchestrated campaign. No NGO or other organisation orchestrates it. Nevertheless, it becomes a notorious case of a high street brand ‘pink-washing’ (a form of ‘woke-washing’) their supply chain operations. In the wake of these criticisms, Primark continues to support LGBTQ+ organisations in many countries, but has it addressed the crackdowns on LGBTQ people in those countries where its rainbow merch is made? Should it withdraw its orders from these countries? Or keep working there, supporting – via Stonewall and other organisations – the LGBTQ+ organisations and workers who need it? Does it do so? And how can it convince the media, activists and consumers that it’s doing so? LGBTQ+ people represent a big market for clothing sales.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) No Pride In Primark (taster). followthethings.com/no-pride-in-primark.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes.

Posted on August 28, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Confessions Of An Eco-Sinner

followthethings.com
Fashion | Grocery

“Confessions Of An Eco-Sinner”
A non-fiction book by journalist Fred Pearce.
Available to preview on Google Books (embedded above).

British journalist Fred Pearce travels 180,000 miles, to over 20 countries, to meet the people who produce (and sometimes recycle) the prawns in his curry, the cotton in his shirt, the computer on his desk, the gold in his wedding ring, and many other things. He wants to explore his own personal ecological footprint, and to work out whether he should be ashamed and/or proud of the impact that his shopping has on the world. This is classic ‘follow the thing’ research. A quest narrative. Starting in the Global North. With a person asking ‘who made my stuff?’ They travel the world to meet the people who they rely upon and then reflect on what this means for them (and maybe you) as a ‘consumer’. This is an approach that critics within the ‘follow the thing’ genre would like to ‘de-centre’. This work could start somewhere else! But what can readers learn from Fred’s travels nonetheless? Is everyone, unknowingly, an eco-sinner like he is? And what can be done to prevent the damage that consumption causes, out of sight and out of mind?

Page reference: Robert Black, Naomi Davies, Tom Mead, Pete Statham, Lucy Taylor and Laura Wilkinson (2011) Confessions Of An Eco-Sinner. followthethings.com/confessions-of-an-ecosinner.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes.