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iPhone 4CF

followthethings.com
Electronics

iPhone 4CF
A spoof website, press release and direct action by The Yes Men & students from the Parsons New School for Design via the Yes Lab.
Website pages embedded in slideshow above. Original iPhone CF website – www.apple-cf.com – shut down. Now partly available here.

Culture-jammers the Yes Men create a spoof ‘Apple’ website to launch a new iPhone whose ingredients are ‘conflict free’. They announce that you can upgrade your iPhone 4 to the conflict-free version free of charge. Working with students from the Parsons School in New York, they dress up as Apple Store employees and hand out leaflets that encourage shoppers to go inside and upgrade their iPhone to a conflict-free one, at no charge. This is such a brilliant idea, especially with all the recent news stories about a civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where these regular iPhones’ rare earth ‘conflict minerals’ could be sourced. For many, Apple is taking the lead in this highly competitive and fast moving sector. As it always loves to shout about. It’s acting to remove conflict minerals in its supply chains, and inviting its shoppers to come on board as ethical consumers. When the shoppers take their leaflets into the store and are refused their free upgrade… When they realise that a ‘conflict free iPhone’ does not exist… When the Apple Store staff, many of whom were pleasantly surprised that Apple was doing this, realise that some of the people who look like their colleagues may be activists causing trouble… When the police are called in… When the story gets into the press (the whole idea) and Apple is forced to quickly publish a press release denying that a conflict-free iPhone exists… When the Yes Men quickly release a fake Apple press release that explains what the company is (not) doing to remove conflict minerals from its supply chains… When Apple forces the web host for The Yes Men’s fake iPhone 4CF website to take it down within hours… … the knowledge that Apple’s iPhones contain ‘conflict minerals’ has become an international news story. It helps that the Yes Men are highly experienced corporate impersonators (they call this ‘identity correction’). It helps that the carefully planned and often hilarious unravelling of the lies they tell are a magnet for business journalists who often don’t have many fun stories to report. And it helps that this is a positive critique: it’s perfectly possible that Apple could produce a conflict-free iPhone if it put its mind to it. This isn’t a negative, anti-capitalist critique of Apple – although the company seems to respond as if it is – it’s a good idea. They’ve shown what it looks like. How Apple could market it. That shoppers would trade their only iPhones for a conflict-free upgrade. Critics call the activists’ understanding of supply chain sourcing and the war in the DRC simplistic, but this prank kickstarts a debate which – years later – saw the production of conflict free smartphones. We plan to add a page to followthethings.com about the most famous of these – the Fairphone – in due course.

Page reference: Jack Parkin (2018) iPhone 4CF. followthethings.com/iphone-4cf.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Page also available in Finnish here (coming soon)

Estimated reading time: tbc minutes.

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Mark Thomas Comedy Product S5 E4 ‘Pester Power’

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Sport & Fitness

Mark Thomas Comedy Product S5 E4 ‘Pester Power’
An episode of a satirical TV series starring comedian-activist Mark Thomas broadcast on the UK’s Channel 4.
Full episode embedded above.

Mark Thomas is a British activist-comedian who has a long-running stand-up comedy / satire show on TV. He’s filming an episode in a North London secondary school with a geography teacher called Noel Jenkins and his students. It starts off being about government cutbacks which mean that schools are relying on free books from publishers like Jazzy Books which contain advertising. When the Jazzy Books CEO refuses to talk to them on the phone, he asks the students if they would like to talk to one of the advertisers: adidas. Mr Jenkins has been teaching them about sweatshop production Indonesia, so they are primed. Mark Thomas says he has the phone number of David Husselbee, adidas’ ‘Global Director of Social and Environmental Affairs’. He calls him, and his crew film what happens. Husselbee is out of office. So Thomas asks the students to leave him a message. What questions do they want to ask him? They’re all about adidas sweatshops. Everyone at the school goes go to lunch and, when they get back to class, Husselbee – surprisingly – returns the call. He spends an hour on the phone answering the student’s sweatshop questions. It’s all filmed. Thomas asks the students if they’re happy with Husselbee’s answers. Nobody is. Husselbee says it would be different if he was there in person. So Mark Thomas and Mr Jenkins invite him to visit. He does so a few weeks later. Thomas also invites Richard Howitt, an MEP who has been trying and failing to get adidas to turn up to an EU hearing about sweatshop labour. Also present are two women from Indonesia, one who works for a mission supporting factory workers like those who make adidas shoes, and the other her translator. Thomas’ crew films the discussion, which Thomas talks about in the stand-up comedy show that’s made about it. This classroom is the site of an extraordinary get-together of supply chain actors, and an extraordinary discussion unfolds that is rooted in the direct, heartfelt and cheeky style of questioning from the young people present. This is ‘pester power’ (the episode’s title): showing what young people can do to get adults to change their behaviour. It’s common knowledge in trade justice activism that different actors in supply chains have different experiences of, and roles in, keeping the flow of commodities going. And it’s common knowledge that different priorities, ethics and value systems are more or less at home in different roles. But, when you bring these together in a discussion like the one in this classroom, with people they don’t normally talk to each other as equals, they can clash horribly. That’s what’s so revealing about this example and why it has to feature on our site. This example of trade justice activism comes from an time when corporate executives were less guarded, when they might turn up to explain on camera the way that the economy works from their perspective (see also our page on the BBC documentary Mangetout here), and before they started using corporate PR firms to protect themselves from such scrutiny (when they didn’t come out of this very well). Putting corporate executives under the spotlight this can have an impact. Husselbee says to Howitt at the end of the discussion that adidas will turn up to the next EU hearing. Would that have happened without this ‘pester power’ show? The students are inspired by the power they find they have.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) Mark Thomas Comedy Product S5 E4 ‘Pester Power’. followthethings.com/mark-thomas-comedy-product-s5-e4-pester-power.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 40 minutes.

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The Nike Email Exchange (NEE)

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Sport & Fitness

The Nike Email Exchange (NEE)
An email exchange between student Jonah Peretti and the Nike Corporation.
The full email exchange was posted online on shey.net. Screengrab above. Read the whole exchange here.

Student Jonah Peretti experiments with Nike’s offer to customise its shoes with words you type into its ID website. Most people would add their name or their team’s name but he wants to add the word ‘sweatshop’ to a pair of running shoes. He wants to do this so that he can ‘remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes’. Nike say no. Peretti replies, arguing it’s OK. They say no. He replies again, saying he hasn’t breached their ID guidelines. They say no again. They just won’t let him do it. So he forwards the conversation to friends by email. They forward it to friends, who forward it to their friends, who …. It’s posted on a website called shey.net (above) and, within six weeks, millions have read it. Next, he’s invited onto national US TV to debate sweatshops with a Nike executive. This is one of the most iconic examples of viral online trade justice activism that happens 3 years before facebook is founded. It’s also an iconic example of the activist tactic of ‘culture jamming’ – turning a brand’s values and identity against itself. Peretti didn’t consider himself (or what he did) to be ‘activist’, he was just messing around with the opportunity that Nike gave its customer to personalise their shoes. What he did became known as the ‘Nike Email Exchange’ (or NEE) and was a important part of a swarm of public criticisms of Nike’s record on labour rights – including Indonesian Nike factory worker Cicih Sukaesih’s North American speaking tour [see our page here] – that cemented its sweatshop reputation in the late 1990s and 2000s. It’s also an iconic example in trade justice activism research. Peretti gave researchers Dietlind Stolle and Michele Micheletti the email addresses of everyone to whom he sent the email string, and everyone who replied to it. They got in touch to ask them about the impacts that it had had on them as citizens and consumers. The publications that emerged from this helped establish a significant body of scholarship on what’s called ‘political consumerism’. After becoming a public figure through the NEE, Peretti continued to experiment with viral online media before setting up Buzzfeed in 2006.

Page reference: Edward Jennings, Alex Hargreaves, Matt Goddard, Amy Joslin, Millie Whittington & Charles Bell (2024) The Nike Email Exchange (NEE). followthethings.com/the-nike-email-exchange-nee.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 73 minutes.

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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.

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Barracetamol’s Family Reunion

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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.

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Cyborg Information Leaflet: Thyroxine 50 Microgram Tablets

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Health & Beauty

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.

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Mirror

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Health & Beauty | Home & Auto

Mirror
Undergraduate coursework written by Lucinda Lawrence.

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 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 – Lucinda Lawrence – creates the most ‘meta’ example we have ever seen. It’s about a mirror that she bought in a market. It’s about the science and ingredients of mirrors. It’s about the people who mine its ingredients. Like tin. It’s about who you see when you look in the mirror, who helps you to be you. And – aaaand – she submits two things. A piece of paper with some typed writing on it. And a mirror. The writing has been reversed, so it can only be read in the mirror. And the mirror has a message written in red lipstick on its surface. ”If you fall, no one’s gonna carry you out (Rubin Age 13)’ (Cook 2007, p,2).’ It’s a fantastic piece of work. But you’ll need a mirror to read it. It’s worth the effort! When we showed this at an academic conference, one member of the audience called it ‘conceptual art’.

[If you want more ‘who I see in the mirror’ trade justice activism, see our page on a short film called Handprint here]

Page reference: Lucinda Lawrence (2009) Mirror. followthethings.com/mirror.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

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B’eau Pal Water

followthethings.com
Grocery

B’eau Pal Water
A spoof commodity-based activist campaign created by the Yes Men and the Bhopal Medical Appeal.
Video playlist embedded above posted on YouTube by the Bhopal Medical Appeal.

It’s the 25th anniversary of the Union Carbide chemical factory explosion in Bhopal, India. It’s the worst industrial accident in history. 3,700 people died immediately. Between 8,000 and 25,000 people had died since. And up to 200,000 were permanently injured and countless more continued to be affected by the leaching of toxic chemicals into the water table. Still, the factory’s owners (Dow Chemical, who bought Union Carbide) refuse to pay compensation. So the Bhopal Medical Appeal get together with pranksters the Yes Men to design a new brand of bottled water. It’s a mineral water. B’eau Pal Water. A taste of Bhopal. “Bottled at source”, they say. Presented in a beautifully designed bottle. The Yes Men travel to Dow’s UK HQ to challenge its executives to drink it, just as Bhopal residents have for the past 25 years. When they arrive, the building is empty. Why won’t they drink this? When they offer it to passing members of the public , everyone understandably refuses once they know what’s in it. So is this campaign a success? Does it draw renewed attention to this long-running scandal? Is it OK that what they’re doing is ridiculous, funny, and that people are disgusted but also laughing about this prank? The Bhopal explosion wasn’t funny. So is this prank in poor taste? Is it offensive? Or can its humour embarrass Dow and bring the Bhopal factory explosion back into the news cycle? Can offering people a fancy bottle of toxic mineral water that they would never drink bring them closer to the people living in Bhopal who have no choice but to drink it? What’s the logical response to this? What has to happen to make this situation right? This bottled water later becomes a potent symbol of the compensation campaign at the 2012 London Olympics – where Dow is a corporate sponsor and a Bhopal survivor challenges the chair of its organising committee to drink it – and in Bhopal itself, when the victims and their families invite the Indian politicians and scientific advisors who had dismissed their complaints about contamination to a buffet of toxic delicacies including bottled B’eau Pal Water.

Page reference: Jack Parkin (2018) B’eau Pal Water. followthethings.com/beau-pal-water.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 44 minutes.

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The First Ever Pacemaker To Speak For Itself

followthethings.com
Health & Beauty

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.

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Behind The Leather

followthethings.com
Fashion | My Shopping Bag

Behind The Leather
An activist stunt by Ogilvy and Mather Advertising, Bangkok for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) Asia.
YouTube video embedded above.

A new luxury store called ‘Leather Works’ opens at the high end CentralWorld mall in Bangkok selling coats, ties, gloves and bags. Shoppers come in to browse. As they touch and try them on, they see flesh, bones, muscles and sinews inside. As they open the handbags, there are beating hearts too. Shoppers get blood on their hands. This leather was clearly ripped from the bodies of crocodiles, snakes, lizards and other ‘exotic’ animals. It’s like a scene from a horror film. Shoppers recoil in shock. These luxury leather goods are disgusting. The video goes viral. Behind this shopping prank is an NGO called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather who made it all for them. PETA’s Asia office wants to draw attention to the cruel conditions under which ‘exotic’ animals are farmed and butchered for luxury leather fashion. But how genuine, how ethical, can a ‘hidden camera’ stunt like this be? What can these shock tactics do?

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) Behind The Leather (taster). followthethings.com/behind-the-leather.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes.

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