The YESman need you!
iPhone App About Apple’s Rotten Supply Chain Gets Past CensorsThis and upcoming Yes Lab projects no hoax
Contact: info@molleindustria.it, michael.pineschi@gmail.com
To the great surprise of its creators, a funny new iPhone gamecritical of Apple’s human rights record was accepted by the iTunesstore and is being released today. The app, called Phone Story,teaches players about abuses in the life-cycle of the iPhone byputting them in the manufacturers’ shoes. To win, players must enslavechildren in Congolese mines, catch suicidal workers jumping out ofChinese assembly plant windows, and conscript the poorest of theworld’s poor to dismantle toxic e-waste resulting from obsoletephones.
The seriously funny new game will sell for 99 cents on iTunes; allproceeds will go to organizations fighting to stop the horrors thatsmartphone production causes. Read more about Phone Story below. Butfirst, a word from Phone Story’s sponsors.
Yes Lab Fundraising Campaign a Shocking Success
Last week the Yes Lab sent you an appeal for support. We set asideforty days and forty nights to reach our goal on Kickstarter—but withyour help we’ve gotten there in just five! (Note: if you haven’t yetdonated, don’t let our success dissuade you! We’ll use the extra moneyto fund more projects, and to develop tools and resources to helpfolks carry them out. And by the way, if you’re a Drupal programmerand feel like helping to make those tools, please write to us!)
Since our fundraising appeal is doing so well, we’re launching ourvery own curated page on Kickstarter, to support other coolprojects—like Beautiful Trouble, an activism manual and websitewritten by over forty troublemakers from around the world, includingthe Yes Men. Beautiful Trouble’s goal is to put the best tactics forcreative action in the hands of the next generation of change-makers.Support Beautiful Trouble!
So back to those phones….
Would you like to force an African child to mine for precious metalsat gunpoint? “Phone Story,” a new iPhone app produced byMolleindustria, puts the player in the unsavory shoes of a smartphoneexecutive. Each level in the game explores a different real-lifeproblem in the consumer electronics life cycle: slavery and abuse inColtan mines, suicide-inducing manufacturing plants, andhealth-destroying e-waste processing are reduced to a cute, low-resaesthetic driven by simple, addictive game play. The game is availablein the iTunes store for 99 cents.
UPDATE: the game has been banned from the Apple app store. If you still had any doubt, now you have another reason to think that app stores are bad for you.
