Phone Story, a new iPhone game app, was launched then quickly banned today by the iTunes App Store. It's an educational game that takes players on a tour of the darkside of iPhone manufacture — mining of blood minerals by children, toxic recycling centers in developing nations, suicide-inducing working conditions of Chinese factories, and more.
The reasons for banning given do not seem to hold up if you understand the game and read the maker's response here. But I don't want to talk about the banning per se because it's been covered extensively and is to be expected in a closed system. Corporations and their products are not democratic. And Apple is definitely not democratic. This is not news.
What's interesting to me is the game itself, which is a market campaign in the form of a iPhone app. That's a first as a far as I know. A little background — market campaigns are a stock strategy used by activists to get corporations to behave responsibility. Basically, a market campaign publicly outs a corporation's bad behavior in order to get them to change.
Apple has been a target of market campaigns before, but they don't seem to have been particularly effective. The best market campaigns dramatize corporate crimes in such an effective way that it captures the public's imagination. An example is ForestEthic's Victoria's Dirty Secret Campaign which featured a full page ad in The New York Times of a lingerie model with a chain saw. This dramatized how Victoria's Secret and the catalog industry's promiscuous catalog mailing help drive deforestation. The ad and two year campaign was so effective that Limited Brands, the parent company of Victoria's Secret, introduced an industry-leading responsible paper sourcing policy and became an advocate for similar policies within the catalog industry.
So, it is a shame that Apple banned this app, but the news isn't Apple's draconian ways, it's the loss of the potential for social change. And the birth of a new tactic for activism. That's one clever app. Phone Story is immersive activism — it actually takes players inside a simulation of the crime that's running inside the product of the crime. Marshall McLuhan would have a field day. My bet is that we'll be seeing more of this soon.
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Comments
Neal Gorenflo wrote on 09.13.11, 5:59pm:
Thanks for the thoughtful comments Paul. On market campaigns, clearly they have not changed corporate behavior in the big scheme of things. That said, there have been successes like Nestle, the Paper Campaign, The Great Bear Rainforest Campaign, and Victoria's Secret. I think of them as one tool in the arsenal of civil society rather than a silver bullet, and a tool that is very difficult to use well so should be used with care or it's a waste of time or worse it backfires.
Shayne O'Neill wrote on 09.14.11, 12:37am:
Paul, these campaigns do actualy work. Foxconn was absolutely put under a burning lens over the suicides, and this was largely as a result of pressure put on apple to do something about it. Apple is notoriously sensitive to its PR, and you can bet there was a tonne of full decibal screaming going on between Jobs (Or tim wasshisname the new ceo who used to run supply chain) and Foxconn management, and because apple is such an incredibly large client, when apple says "jump", Foxconn says "how high?".
As a result Foxconn has actually been doing a lot of work trying to get to the bottom of its suicide crisis.
Its a variant of the basic idea behind direct action;- "This is not a protest, its an intervention in a specific injustice". Arguing that it might not solve the broader structural picture is fine, but its a bit like yelling at a cancer doctor for wasting time fixing some dudes cancer instead of being in the lab trying to cure all cancer. Sure, but theres still a dude dying who needs help.
If apple are going to the trouble of banning the app, it means the app is working, because its making Apple nervous. The ball is now in apples court if it wants this drama to go away.
Paul M. Davis wrote on 09.14.11, 8:03am:
Great points, Shayne. I agree that Apple is more concerned about bad PR than is often assumed — they've backed down on a number of draconian App Store policies when press and developer outcry reached a fever pitch. As for their response to the Foxconn suicides, was that a result of market campaigns or the thorough drubbing they were receiving in the press? For a while last year, a lot of major outlets that give them consistently good press — the NYT, WSJ, etc — were hitting them pretty hard, at least on the publications' tech blogs.
I guess my concern is less about these campaigns affecting large structural change — that happens slowly, and is the result of a number of factors — and more about whether they effectively inform and build public sentiment for change. In my perception, many of them muddy the issues (in this case, singling out Apple when I doubt we'll be seeing this game in the Android Marketplace, WiiWare, Xbox Live,or PSN, all curated app stores for devices that share the same supply and manufacturing chain.) I also fear that they alienate people who are not already familiar with the issues for their stridency and sensationalism.
Shayne O'Neill wrote on 09.21.11, 1:23am:
Ugh. Get some spam checking guys. Akismet is almost flawless.
Shayne O'Neill wrote on 11.18.11, 9:53pm:
Its funny that I stumbled back here (email notifications), post Jobs. I was just talking about this the other day with a friend and we where discussing that Jobs dying actually represents a potential lost opportunity in a campaign like this as Jobs was almost certainly in his last couple of years, a CEO looking to firm up his legacy, and with his obsession with "perfection", and the guys surprising accessibility (I've literally had email conversations with the guy as an independent developer where he tended to some complaints from me) , it might have been possible to actually put the guy on notice that we where planning on making a very big deal about apples dodgy supply chain. The guy was a bastard, but he was insanely self-conscious as well, and thats exploitable by activists. I guess time will tell how this Tim chap pans out. But I still think taking Saul Alinskys advice and personalising your demon is sound advice. The problem might be structural (I dont even know if capitalism is truly reformable, I have my doubts), but if the Nike campaign re sweatshop labor is anything to go by, when you frighten the big dog all the little dogs get the fear too.
Interesting perspective, Neal. Having tracked these issues over the past year, I have some issues with the tendency to single Apple out for their supply and manufacturing chain when all of the major tech manufacturers are complicit, mostly because "iPhone" and "iPad" is better for SEO than "Samsung Galaxy Tab" or "Dell laptop". Apple shouldn't be absolved or excused, but the problem is industry-wide. I'll be writing more about that here on Shareable in the near future.
I'm also somewhat dubious about the effectiveness of market campaigns. PETA may be the worst practitioners — I'm entirely unconvinced that their nude photoshoots and Flash games and the like have done anything more than piss off feminists, gamers, and god knows who else, while turning popular sentiment even further against vegans and vegetarians. These sort of attention-grabbing stunts get page views and blog chatter, but do they educate or affect real change?