Tag: Handbook

PROJECT: we’re slowly adding a set of shadow followthethings.com pages. They’re the draft pages of a ‘Handbook for trade justice activism’ that will condense and summarise many of the compilation pages on our website, identify and define their intentions, tactics, responses and impacts, and identify patterns that we hope will be helpful for those making new work in this field. We’re experimenting with how this looks, and how it might work, here as well as in an actual book one day.

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Handbook: example page

Hiatt shackles

Made in England
Worn in Cuba

KEY FACTS

Type:
Protest & activist campaign
Dates:
8 Sept 2005 & 1 Jan 2007
Organisers:
Amnesty International, Reprieve, Save Omar Campaign, Birmingham Guantanamo Campaign, Muslim Public Affairs Committee
Location:
Hiatt & Co., Baltimore Road, Birmingham, UK

INGREDIENTS

INTENTIONS

Change government behaviour
Change corporate behaviour

TACTICS

Target the right brand
Hold ’em accountable
Put your bodies in the way
Embody exploitation
Make the hidden visible

RESPONSES

There is no alternative
Who’s responsible?

IMPACTS

Corporations change
Workers suffer

Image credit

followthethings.com


Tackle the shackles

IN BRIEF

British citizens are detained in the USA’s Guantanamo Bay detention centre, but none are charged with a crime. They notice the shackles restraining them are ‘Made in England’, just like them. When some go on hunger strike in 2005, and when the 5th anniversary of the centre’s opening takes place in 2007, musicians, doctors, lawyers, comedians and activists protest outside the factory where they are made. Their use at Guantanamo, they argue, is unethical and illegal.

How to read this page

We are slowly piecing together a ‘followthethings.com handbook for trade justice activism’ and are publishing the pages here as we write them. This is an ‘example’ page. The wide column paraphrases and condenses this example’s followthethings.com page, section by section. The narrow column contains some details about the commodity, some key facts about the activism that took place around it, and a list of its ‘ingredients’: its intentions, tactics, responses and impacts. These have been identified during the writing of this example page and, as more handbook pages are added, you will be able to click each one to read about it, and there will be links to other examples where we have found that ingredient, and a list of linked ingredients. This hypertext format, we believe, will help readers to understand how trade justice activism can work, and what it can do.

Original

Description

Human rights activists wearing Hiatt shackles protest outside Birmingham factory where they are made. A band plays on a flatbed truck as 20 people dressed in orange Guantanamo Bay jumpsuits dance the ‘Shackle Shuffle’. Comedian Mark Thomas, doctor David Nicholls, human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith and the brother of Omar Deghayes, a hunger-striking British detainee, climb up to speak. Media, police and locals watch them accuse Hiatt of being complicit in, and profiting from, this torture and illegal detention. 14 months later, 70 or 80 are back in orange to ‘celebrate’ the fifth anniversary of Guantanamo’s opening. Sandy Mitchell, tortured in Saudi Arabia in Hiatt shackles, speaks and returns his shackles through the factory’s letterbox. A birthday cake is made for Hiatt with a detainee inside. This old company made ‘n***er collars’ for the slave trade. ‘If William Wilberforce were alive’, Nicholls says, ‘he’d be standing here today, doing the Shackle Shuffle, saying ‘this is outrageous’’. The UK government, with its ‘ethical foreign policy’, should press the US to charge the detainees with their crimes, or set them free.

Inspiration / process / methodology

The Three Piece Suit chains your hands in front of you and attaches to a waist belt. Another chain links the belt to your ankle where a foot-long chain ties both feet together so you can only shuffle, not walk. They can tie you to a ring in the floor, as you stand or squat, or to a ceiling or the top of a cage where you can hang, for hours. Each has ‘Hiatt’, ‘Made In England’ stamped into it, British detainees told their lawyer, Stafford Smith. ‘It was ironic’, Moazzem Begg said, that they were ‘made in England, just like me and him’. Nicholls wrote to Hiatt to stop US sales while their goods were being used for torture. ‘This is what happens when you don’t answer your post’, he said at the protest. In 2007, NGOs published media and campaign packs to coordinate actions and focus messages. Local MPs joined in. These protests were national news.

Discussions / responses

I’d love to see President Bush and Prime Minsiter Blair shackled outside the factory. A freedom of information request was refused as not in the ’public interest’. It wouldn’t make a difference if Hiatt ceased production. Others would make shackles and Hiatt’s employees would lose their jobs. If the factory shut, its new US owner Armor Holdings could blame the protestors. Factories were shutting all around. At least this one was still making things. And maybe the Guantanamo shackles were old stock, exported years ago, before the UK export ban. Maybe they started as legally-exported handcuffs and were modified in the US? Shackles aren’t illegal there. We weren’t aware of supplying Guantanamo, Hiatt said. We do sell to the US Department of Defence but we’re not responsible for what they do with stuff, said Hiatt. They don’t tell you to cuff someone to the top of a door, do they?

Impacts / outcomes

Hiatt’s Birmingham factory shut in 2008 and 15 people lost their jobs. This followed a consolidation process by BAE Systems who bought Armor Holdings in July 2007. Production shifted to a Hiatt factory in New Hampshire, USA, nearer its customer base, to be stamped ‘Made in USA.’ UK police bought Hiatt handcuffs on eBay. The Hiatt brand was dropped. Protestors were glad that one less British company was supplying equipment for use in Guantanamo.

FOLLOWTHETHINGS.COM PAGE

Shifrina, D. (2013) followthethings.com/tackle-the-shackles

DEPARTMENT: Security

By Ian Cook (June 2025)

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Handbook: example page

AK-47 bullet

Made in Ukraine
Shot in Sierra Leone

KEY FACTS

Type:
Short film (movie credits)
Duration:
3.01 minutes
Director:
Andrew Nichol
Visual effects supervisor:
Yann Blondel
Watch in:
Lord of War (2005)

INGREDIENTS

INTENTIONS

Cross cultures
Show capitalist evils

TACTICS

Make the hidden visible
Follow the thing
Show the violence
Add mood music

RESPONSES

LOL capitalism
They aren’t experts
It’s so badly made
That’s racist
I’m humming that music

IMPACTS

Now we’re talking
Activism is publicised

Image credit

followthethings.com


Life of a bullet

IN BRIEF

Imagine you can follow the life of a bullet from sheet metal in a factory shot into the head of a child soldier, like a Point of View (POV) video game. These are the opening credits of the Nicholas Cage movie ‘Lord of War,’ set to Buffalo Springfield’s 1960s counterculture song ‘For what it’s worth’. For some, this 3 minute CGI creation is the best part of the movie. For us, it’s the most brutally clear follow the thing example we’ve found.

How to read this page

We are slowly piecing together a ‘followthethings.com handbook for trade justice activism’ and are publishing the pages here as we write them. This is an ‘example’ page. The wide column paraphrases and condenses this example’s followthethings.com page, section by section. The narrow column contains some details about the commodity, some key facts about the activism that took place around it, and a list of its ‘ingredients’: its intentions, tactics, responses and impacts. These have been identified during the writing of this example page and, as more handbook pages are added, you will be able to click each one to read about it, and there will be links to other examples where we have found that ingredient, and a list of linked ingredients. This hypertext format, we believe, will help readers to understand how trade justice activism can work, and what it can do.

Original

Description

You’re sitting in front of the screen. The movie ‘Lord of War’ is about to start. Its star Nicholas Cage makes a short spech to camera. Then the music starts. There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. There’s a man with a gun over there. Telling me I got to beware… Buffalo Springfield’s 1966 song ‘For what it’s worth’. Playing over the opening credits. A three minute point of view (POV) mini-movie: the life story of a single bullet. You see what it sees. You hear what it hears. You are the bullet. Emerging from sheet metal in a Ukrainian factory and dying in the flesh of a Sierra Leone firefight. People along the way inspect, carry, load, fire and are killed by you. In the final slo-mo scene, you whiz down a street into the forehead, the brain, of a black African boy, a child soldier. He stands there, looking you in the eye as you career towards him. Death is the end product. The music stops. The credits fade to bloody red and black. Thrills give way to chills. The film starts with a bang.

Inspiration / process / methodology

Conceptualised by Andrew Niccol and overseen by Yann Blondel, it was built using Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) – XSI, Shake, After Effects, Photoshop, Matchmover – not by strapping a tiny camera to a bullet. Studying factories, they found bullet-making ‘insanely complicated’ and simplified it. Arms trade people might find it ‘inaccurate’. Stephen Stills wrote the song after Hollywood’s 1966 Sunset Strip curfew riots and it became a civil rights anthem for the Vietnam War. Blondel didn’t have it in mind when the CGI was created. This jarring film and music combo nails the movie’s message: ‘violence round the world begins and ends directly at your doorstep’.

Discussions / responses

It’s like a Bond intro. Or bowling alley graphics. An episode of ‘How It’s Made’. An NRA ad. ‘The adventures of the little bullet who wanted to kill’. A magical journey from Russia to Africa. Seeing more of the world than I have. Bullets fear no death. I wish I was a bullet. Longest killcam ever. Wish mine played that song. A ‘mindblowing’ end. LOLz. He should have seen it coming. It was moving so slowly. Don’t stand up in a battefield. You’ll get shot in the head. What an aim! Most bullets miss. Imagine how many bullets they had to follow to find the story they wanted. How did they strap a camera to it? Or is it CGI? That killing gave me a warm glow. It made me want to fire my BB gun. I like guns, but I’m anti-ammo now. The killing of a child soldier, forced to fight? Yeah, but look closely. He had a gun too. It’s like a POV game. But how many gamers have fired an actual gun? Or worked in a bullet factory? Do they know who these bullets kill? No! It’s just a job, like any other. Gunnies will be mad. Bullets aren’t made, shipped, loaded or shot like that. It’s not a documentary. It’s a movie. Enjoy it. Arms manufacturers should die this way. Bullets don’t kill people, people do. The Russians give guns and ammo to spread communism, the US to spread democracy. White people make weapons for black people to kill each other. You could blame the ‘white man’ or get activist. Following the trade’s money would be a better story. 10 years on, that CGI looks sooo bad. But the message is there. Don’t shoot people in the face. Two fingers, repeatedly picking up the bullet. Men blankly peering at it along the way. Responsibility is collective. What’s that song?

Impacts / outcomes

What it showed was true, said Amnesty, Oxfam and the Internatonal Action Network on Small Arms. Audiences should sign their ‘control arms’ petition, to press for an international arms treaty. My mates in the USA have been talking about it. Especially because the DVD has that spoof AK-47 advert on it.

CONNECTED EXAMPLE

Teleshopping AK-47

FOLLOWTHETHINGS.COM PAGE

Cook, I. (2019) followthethings.com/life-of-a-bullet

DEPARTMENT: Security

By Ian Cook (June 2025)

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Handbook: example page

Textiles

Made in the Third World
Managed in the First World

KEY FACTS

Type:
Prank & movie clip.
Date:
August 2001
Creators:
The Yes Men
Location:
University of Technology, Tampere, Finland
Watch in:
The Yes Men movie (2003)

INGREDIENTS

INTENTIONS

Reach new audiences
Show capitalist evils

TACTICS

Make a website
Choose an audience
Create a character
Bring managers into view
Make the familiar strange
Embody exploitation
Juxtapose extremes
Lie to tell the truth
Include the digital
Make it funny

RESPONSES

My Hero!
I laughed my ass off

IMPACTS

Can’t tell

Image credit

Assorted Fashion Industry Textiles – Assortment of beige tone colored pants (https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/assortment-beige-tone-colored-pants_66105704.htm#fromView=search&page=2&position=46&uuid=4f93b6cd-f230-48f0-bce8-48ec11bbaecd) by freepic (freepic) Modified August 2024


Employee Visualisation Appendage

IN BRIEF

The Yes Men set up a fake WTO website and offer Hank Hardy Unruh to speak at conferences on its behalf. A textile conferece in Finland take up the offer, and its audience watch him reveal a gold lame telematic suit with an inflatable phallus which allows managers to sense and manage the energies of remote sweatshop workers. It’s an offensive and outrageous stunt. Will its audiences understand or remember the critique that it brings to life?

How to read this page

We are slowly piecing together a ‘followthethings.com handbook for trade justice activism’ and are publishing the pages here as we write them. This is an ‘example’ page. The wide column paraphrases and condenses this example’s followthethings.com page, section by section. The narrow column contains some details about the commodity, some key facts about the activism that took place around it, and a list of its ‘ingredients’: its intentions, tactics, responses and impacts. These have been identified during the writing of this example page and, as more handbook pages are added, you will be able to click each one to read about it, and there will be links to other examples where we have found that ingredient, and a list of linked ingredients. This hypertext format, we believe, will help readers to understand how trade justice activism can work, and what it can do.

Original

Description

It’s time for Hank Hardy Unruh’s keynote. As a representative of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), he gives a detailed talk on the economic history of capitalism and slavery, arguing that – left to its own devives – slavery would have developed into today’s system of remote sweatshop labour. What we are now facing, he says, is a worker management problem. The WTO’s solution is a skin-tight golden Management Leisure Suit. After its reveal, he inflates from his groin its Employee Visualisation Appendage. By transmitting information about levels of physical work from chips impanted in workers’ bodies to the screen on its tip and electrodes implanted in the manager’s body, he can gain rapport with workers and exercise real time control over them while engaging in healthy leisure actvities. With the WTO’s golden phalli, corporations could better control the Third World.

Inspiration / process / methodology

The Yes Men are an American activist duo and/or a genderless global network of 300 people who aim to reveal uncomfortable truths via whopping lies. They target the injustices of free market capitalism through pranks and public spectacles that combine amateurish impersonations, ridiculous exaggerations and a keen sense for news-making. The WTO is a target targets because of its colonial attitide and system of loans and regulations that export jobs to low wage, less regulated Third World economies for the benefit of First World corporations. In 1999, they set up a gatt.org1 website identical in design to the WTO’s but clearly supporting the anti-WTO Seattle protests of the time. Visitors thinking this was the real WTO could email Hank Hardy Unruh to speak at conferences, like the one in Finland. They created an absurd, overblown narrative and image of the WTO that audiences wouldn’t easily forget. This golden phallus that could electrocute Third World workers was much less dangerous than the exploitative labour relations the WTO helped to establish and maintain. Accompanied by a film crew, the duo traveled to Finland. How would the organisers, the audience and the WTO respond? Applause? Laughter? Anger? Realisation? Calling security? All would be filmed for The Yes Men movie.

Discussions / responses

In the hall, there were gasps at the reveal and polite applause at the end. That was it. One offended delegate complained about the design of the suit, asking if it a more bra-like version could be made for female managers. Movie viewers speculated. Were the delegates puzzled, bored or zoned out? Were they politely tolerating this shambolic American idiot? Were some impressed or riled but refused to respond? And who were the Yes Men making fools of: the WTO or the delegates? In the conference hall, was this an epic comedy fail? Can satire change the world? Or does it just feel like that sometimes? You might remember that silly, offensive suit, but not the WTO’s evil deeds. If only its workings were better known, someone would challenge these lies at every turn. At the movies, The Yes Men’s intelligence, bravery, shambolic performance skills and regular-guyness were celebrated. People laughed their asses off and bounced their own jokes off this iconic scene. ‘My next halloween costume.’ ‘Leisure suit, bwhahaa’.

Impacts / outcomes

After being ridiculed in the press for calling the Yes Men’s gatt.org parody ‘deplorable’, the WTO said nothing. The Yes Men shared free software for others to replicate and parody other organisaton and company websites. The Yes Men movie had impacts of its own.

FOLLOWTHETHINGS.COM PAGE

Best, T., Gibson, T., Massey, B., Rees, C., Ross, K. & Sherman, J. (2018) followthethings.com/employee-visualisation-appendage

FOOTNOTE

1 GATT was the predecessor to the WTO.

DEPARTMENT: Fashion

By Ian Cook (June 2025)

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Handbook: example page

Tomatoes

Grown in Brazil
Eaten in Brazil

KEY FACTS

Type:
Short film (Portuguese with subtitles)
Duration:
13 minutes, 9 seconds
First shown:
15 June 1989
Director, Writer & Producer:
Jorge Furtado
Production company:
Casa de Cinema de Porto Allegre, Brazil

INGREDIENTS

INTENTIONS

Pop the bubble
Show capitalist evils
Teach economic geography

TACTICS

Make the familiar strange
Follow the thing
Join the dots
Lie to tell the truth
Embody exploitation
Make it incomplete
Make it funny

RESPONSES

Wow! WTF?
Capitalism is sh*t
They aren’t experts!
I gotta do something

IMPACTS

Now we’re talking
Now I know!

Image credit

Fresh Tomatoes, Loose – Tomato isolated (https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/tomato-isolated_7481096.htm#fromView=search&page=1&position=26&uuid=9e0c895b-6975-47d6-a7cc-9e1dc7cb06d1) by timolina (Freepik)


Ilha das Flores

IN BRIEF

Filmmaker Jorge Furtado follows a tomato from Mr Suzuki’s field to a garbage dump on the ‘Island of Flowers’ in Porto Allegre, Brazil. Here, a rotten one binned in Mrs Anete’s kitchen is fed to pigs. What’s left is then scavenged by local people. This eccentric 13 minute ‘masterpiece’ was made for Martians visiting Planet Earth. It explains what a human being is, what the function of money in capitalism is, why pigs are valued more than some people. It’s a parable of poverty.

More about this page

We are slowly piecing together a ‘followthethings.com handbook for trade justice activism’ and are publishing the pages here as we write them. This is an ‘example’ page. The wide column paraphrases and condenses this example’s followthethings.com page, section by section. The narrow column contains some details about the commodity, some key facts about the activism that took place around it, and a list of its ‘ingredients’: its intentions, tactics, responses and impacts. These have been identified during the writing of this example page and, as more handbook pages are added, you will be able to click each one to read about it, and there will be links to other examples where we have found that ingredient, and a list of linked ingredients. This hypertext format, we believe, will help readers to understand how trade justice activism can work, and what it can do.

Original

Description

This is not a fictional film’. ‘There is a place called the Island of Flowers’. ‘There is no God’. Mr. Suzuki is Japanese. He grows tomatoes to sell for money. Mrs Anete sells perfume and uses her wages to buy things. Like tomatoes to make a sauce for her family’s pork dinner. One tomato is rotten. Diseased. She throws it in the trash. It ends up on the Ilha das Flores (the Island of Flowers) being fed – with others’ discarded veg – to pigs. What they won’t eat, poor and hungry locals queue to scavenge. The narrator explains that that the ‘organisms’ on this planet with ‘highly developed brains’ and ‘opposable thumbs are called humans. He explains the economic system they have created with the help of this tomato. Despite their intelligence and admirable ideals, that system is terrible. ‘Freedom’, he quotes Cecilia Meirelles, ‘is a word the human dream feeds on, that no one can explain or fail to understand’.

Inspiration / process / methodology

Jorge Furtado described his film as a ‘letter to a Martian who knows nothing of the earth and its social systems’. It’s a collage of juxtaposed elements. Monty Python-style animation. Hitchhiker’s Guide narration. Archive and stock footage. Religious and historical iconography. Advertising cliches. Parodied quiz show and educational film formats. Original film footage. And precise, repeated definitions of concepts like ‘Human’, ‘Tomato’, ‘Pig’, ‘Money,’ ‘Freedom.’ Human and nonhuman are equally interesting. Humans’ highly developed brains have allowed them to improve their planet (cut to a nuclear mushroom cloud). ‘Money was created in the seventh-century before Christ, Christ was a Jew, and Jews are human beings’ (cut to World War Two images of Jewish people as Nazi death camp trash). Humour is a trap. The tomato’s on a quest. Disparate dots are connected. Cognitive estrangement can dismantle neoliberal disourse, and bring social and environmental injustices into view. This film was cheap to make. It showed at festivals. Teachers brought VHS copies to class. It’s online now. Freely available.

Discussions / responses

It’s beautifully disheartening. Painfully hilarious. Head-battering. Stomach-punching. Entertaining and humorous. A brilliant depiction of capitalism, poverty, the human condition and consumption’s toxic connections. Marx could have written it. I stopped watching after ‘There is no God’. God exists. Amen! Why attack people’s faith? Seriously?!? Is your brain highly developed? Have you heard of satire? If God exists, he forgot about the people on Ilha das Flores. Brazilian bishops gave the film an award! ‘God is dead’ is a quote from Nietzsche’s ‘Thus spoke Zarathustra’. It means it’s up to us to change the situation. The pig scene was staged. But this isn’t a documentary. You can stage things that are true. I saw it in school when I was 9. Our geography teacher rolled out the TV, turned down the lights, and didn’t say a word. Our conservative teacher wouldn’t show it. My mind exploded. For my generation, this was a collective trauma. A landmark in Brazilian cinema. How can a 1989 film say so much about society’s ignorance and lack of compassion today? I saw it in 2024 in my admin class. In psychology. Portuguese. Philosophy. Sociology. Nutrition in public health. Human beings are still free to go hungry. I still talk about humans’ opposable thumbs. Imagine a feature length version. Unbearable

Impacts / outcomes

It’s one of the most influential short films ever. IMDB’s best Brazilian short and documentary film ever. The Gramado Film Festival audience gave it an hysterical standing ovation. Documentary film would never be the same again. It still gets students talking.

FOLLOWTHETHINGS.COM PAGE

Pavalow, M. (2025) followthethings.com/ilha-das-flores

DEPARTMENT: Grocery

by Lucian Harford (June 2025)