Apple Bans App That Shows Electronics' Blood Trail

[marmar]

Apple Bans App That Shows Electronics' Blood Trail


Phone Story is a funny game with a not-so-funny message. By allowing players to assume the roles of technology's manufacturers, it teaches players a lesson or two in the life-cycle of Apple products and the blood trail technology leaves behind. But Apple, apparently not too psyched on selling an app that reveals its own atrocious human rights record, banned the silly app just hours after its release.

The Yes Men are some of "more than forty trouble makers" behind the game, and its premise is right in line with their previous involvement in activism, which often involves targeting "leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else" and "Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them." As their Guerrilla Drive-In attack on the Koch Theatre at Lincoln Center shows, their activism is often rooted in fun.

The Yes Lab, The Yes Men's activist training/brainstorming association, described the game this way:

"Would you like to force an African child to mine for precious metals at gunpoint? "Phone Story," a new iPhone app produced by Molleindustria, puts the player in the unsavory shoes of a smartphone executive. Each level in the game explores a different real-life problem in the consumer electronics life cycle: slavery and abuse in Coltan mines, suicide-inducing manufacturing plants, and health-destroying e-waste processing are reduced to a cute, low-res aesthetic driven by simple, addictive game play. The game is available in the iTunes store for 99 cents."

............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/666574/apple_bans_app_that_shows_electronics%27_blood_trail/

[RKP5637]

1. Recommend! n/t

[sudopod]

2. Yes Men?

I love those guys.

[LeftyMom]

3. The Yes Men are awesome.

LOVE THEM.

[arcane1]

4. Such things are only evil if Nike does them n/t

[ElboRuum]

5. Make it for Android.

There. Sorted.

[al bupp]

6. The same be said of the electronics we're using to post messages here

Any computer, I think, shares more or less all the same problems of resource extraction and toxic waste stream management that the iPhone has, do they not?