Take it to pieces – Page 3 – followthethings.com

“Phone Story“
An iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad game created by Paolo Pedercini & Michael Pineschi for Molleindustria in partnership with the Yes Lab.
Banned from the App Store. Google Play archived page here. Play online here. Game website here.

Imagine you’re on Apple’s App Store looking for a new game to play on your iPhone or iPad in September 2011. You see one called Phone Story. Its levels show how your iPhone or iPad were made. The rare metals that make them work so quickly – like Coltan – are extracted from the soil in the Democratic Republic of The Congo by children. The devices are made in a factory in China where the regime is so relentless that workers jump to their deaths from the roof. When a new model comes out, people queue for days and it seems they would run across a busy highway to get to the store before someone else. And then there’s all the e-waste that is generated when the phones that are replaced get thrown away. So, how do you progress through the levels? You’re a soldier who has to bash kids on the back of the head if their Coltan-digging slows. You’re ambulance crew trying to catch workers trying to jump to their deaths from the factory roof. You get the picture. This ‘first anti-iPhone iPhone game’ is hilariously cruel, tasteless, offensive, meta. But it’s 100% based on what’s happening in Apple’s supply chain right now. And what’s more offensive: the game or what it depicts? 901 people pay 99cents and download it. But it’s only available for 4 days, before Apple remove it. People speculate. How on earth did it get there in the first place? And what does its removal mean for free speech? Phone Story went viral as the ‘game Apple didn’t want you to play’. But, you could still play it on your Android phone or computer. You can still do the latter, here. How well would you want to do? What does it mean to get a high score?

Page reference: Eeva Kemppainen, Charlotte Edwards, Toby Bain, Wilhelm Wrede, Sophie Biddulph & Jamie Hall (2012) Phone Story. followthethings.com/phonestory.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 46 minutes.

Posted on September 20, 2024March 11, 2025 by Ian Cook

Bright Smiles, Dirty Secrets

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Health & Beauty

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

TAKE IT TO PIECES

START WITH A PARADOX

TARGET THE RIGHT BRAND

PLAY WITH BRANDING

EMBODY EXPLOITATION

INCLUDE SUFFERING KIDS

“Bright Smiles, Dirty Secrets“
Undergraduate coursework designed & written by Talisker Alcobia Cornford.
Originally published on the followthethings.com blog here.

Talisker is taking ‘the’Geographies of Material Culture’, the Exeter University module behind our website. At the start of the module, CEO Ian asks everyone to choose an everyday commodity, zero in on one or more of its ingredients, search online for human and other stories of its making, and then experiment with forms of cultural activism to make these relations public. It’s often more interesting to choose something you have absolutely no idea about – he says – no preconceptions about, like something whose ingredients are chemicals, with names you don’t recognise, listed on the packaging in tiny writing that’s hard to read, especially when we use them bleary-eyed, first thing in the morning. Toothpaste is an excellent example. Whose lives are in these kinds of commodities? Talisker culture jams some Colgate ads to add some missing supply chain information to them. But why isn’t her response to simply shop for a different brand? Why’s she making these spoof ads? Who does she want to see them? Where would she like them to be displayed?

Page reference: Talisker Alcobia Cornford (2020) Bright Smiles, Dirty Secrets. followthethings.com/bright-smiles-dirty-secrets.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

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

Kopuchiska’s Mother Is Shopping For Meat

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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

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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 September 13, 2024January 9, 2025 by Ian Cook

Plastic China

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Recycle my waste

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

INCLUDE SUFFERING KIDS

BRING MANAGERS INTO VIEW

ENCOURAGE EMPATHY

“Plastic China“
A documentary directed by Jiuliang Wang for CNEX, Beijing TYC & Oriental Companion Media
YouTube trailer and pay-per-view stream embedded above. Search online for other streaming options here.

Recycling plastic is a good thing right? But where does it go to be recycled? Who does recycling work? And what’s that work like? This film traces the world’s plastic waste to a small village in China where families sort, clean and shred it by hand and by machine. Some of it is processed to make nurdles – the tiny plastic beads that factories buy in bulk to melt and make recycled plastic goods. A lot of it isn’t – partly because there are so many types of plastic, and those nurdles can’t mix them together. The film shows the labour of plastic recycling from the perspective of an 11 year old girl called Yi-Jie. Her family eke a living processing plastic waste shipped into their lives from all over the world. She recycles full time to help earn money for, and alongside, members of her impoverished family. Some of the plastic packaging she processes includes images of wealthy consumers enjoying the goodies that they used to contain. These images feed Yi-Jin’s dreams of a better life. She plays imaginative games with the plastic packaging that surrounds her. In one scene she makes and plays with a plastic waste computer. But her family doesn’t earn enough for her to attend school. She doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Audiences for trade justice activism are used to worrying about who makes their stuff down the supply chain. But the hidden lives and labours in commodities don’t disappear when they’re purchased. Others become attached to them when they’re thrown away. The same labour (and environmental) rights issues are there to worry about too. The materials that commodities are made from never disappear. They just appear somewhere else, in other people’s work, lives and landscapes. This film was terrible PR for the Chinese government. Not surprisingly, they banned it from being shown there. But they went much further, banning the importing and recycling of plastic waste from overseas. Shutting down an industry is perhaps the most powerful impact that trade justice activism can have. But is this what the filmmakers had in mind when they decided to make Plastic China? Could they have predicted that this might happen? What’s their responsibility towards Yi-Jon and her family?

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) Plastic China (holding page). followthethings.com/plastic-china.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: tbc minutes.

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

My Fancy High Heels

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Fashion

SHOW CAPITALIST EVILS

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

“My Fancy High Heels“
A documentary film directed by Ho, Chao-ti for Conjunction Films, broadcast on Public Television Service, Taiwan.
Embedded in full above. Mandarin & English, with Mandarin subtitles.

Everyone has challenges, dreams and sources of sorrow and happiness in their lives. Wealthy young women in New York city. Impoverished slaughterhouse, tannery and factory workers in China. Maybe even baby calves. And their lives can be connected by following things. Like a pair of sculpture-like Bally, Prada, Gucci, Fendi high heel shoes that sell for $300 to $1,000 a pair. Each person connected by these shoes is worth knowing, spending time with, walking in their shoes for a while. The calves – and the people who kill, bleed and skin them – too, because their hide makes the softest leather. There’s empathy here for everyone, but connecting these lives, sorrows, happiness through these shoes is jarring for its audiences. The extremes of wealth and poverty, glamour and horror, are so extreme. Exploited workers don’t only make clothes for high street brands and retailers. The most exclusive brands, with the biggest profit margins, are just as tainted. This is a Chinese language film, and it’s difficult to find or buy a DVD with English subtitles. So a lot of the discussion below has been Google translated. The audience, for a change, is not English-speaking and not in the Global North.

Page reference: Jenny Hart & Ian Cook (2024) My Fancy High Heels (taster). followthethings.com/my-fancy-high-heels.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 9 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]

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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 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Ballet Shoes

followthethings.com
Fashion

“Ballet Shoes“
Undergraduate coursework written by Maya Motamedi, published in the Primary Geography journal.
Full text below.

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. 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’. And write a 500 word first person account that connects your lives. One student – Maya Motamedi – is a ballet dancer. She loves her Grishko pointe shoes. They’re part of her dancing body. After some online detective work, she’s finds who made them for her, far away in Russia. The shoes’ component parts come from plenty of other places. This kind of thinking, this kind of detective work, means you are never alone, never do anything by yourself! The lives of thousands of people are wedged into those shoes, says Maya, dancing with her.

Page reference: Maya Motamedi (2006) Ballet shoes. followthethings.com/ballet-shoes.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes.

Posted on August 21, 2024January 5, 2025 by Ian Cook

Homeland

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Home & Auto

TEACH ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

TAKE IT TO PIECES

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

“Homeland“
A social art work created by Dan Gretton, John Jordan, & James Marriott of Platform London, funded by Arts Council England, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, London Arts, London Borough Grants Committee, Paperback & Rex.
No longer available from the App Store

There’s a lot of social tension about immigration in the UK in the 1990s. So a group of arts-activists called Platform invites Londoners into the back of a truck for conversations about their lives and how their city is lit. Its lightbulbs have been manufactured in Hungary, the tungsten for their filaments was mined in Portugal, and the coal firing the power stations providing their electricity was mined in Wales. Their argument is that, if London’s global sense place is created by such border-crossing commodities, Londoners could appreciate its border-crossing people too? So what happens in the back of that truck? What conversations take place? How does Platform measure its effectiveness? At followthethings.com we love this example. It’s one of the earliest examples we can find of this kind of arts-activism, and it’s fascinating to learn that one of Platform’s most famous fans at the time of Homeland was Professor Doreen Massey, the author of the (1991) ‘Global Sense of Place’ article that has influenced so many culture-crossing thing-followers since that time. We love it when trade justice activism and geographical theorisations of relationality come together like this.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) Homeland. followthethings.com/homeland.shtml (last accessed <add date here>)

Estimated reading time: 40 minutes.