iPhone App About Apple’s Rotten Supply Chain Gets Past Censors
Yes Lab, Inc.Molleindustria partnered with the Yes Labs to create Phone Story, an iPhone app that teaches players about abuses in the life-cycle of the iPhone by putting them in the manufacturers’ shoes. To win, players must enslave children in Congolese mines, catch suicidal workers jumping out of Chinese assembly plant windows, and conscript the poorest of the world’s poor to dismantle toxic e-waste resulting from obsolete phones. Below is the write up about this brilliantly crafty app from the Yes Labs website.
How would you like to force children to mine precious metals, save suicidal workers from jumping to their deaths so they can labor another day, or find the cheapest way to dispose of mountains of e-waste—all while keeping productivity up so you can toss shiny trinkets to adoring consumers? Each of the levels of “Phone Story,” the newly released iPhone app from Molleindustria (with some help from the Yes Lab), contains a mini-game exploring a different problem in the consumer electronics supply chain. Players of the first anti-iPhone iPhone game are placed in the digital shoes of forces within the lifespan of a smartphone—from Coltan mines in the Congo to e-waste facilities all over the developing world. It’s a simplified virtual tour of a world that doesn’t want to be changed.
Phone Story is available in the iTunes store for 99 cents. All revenues will go directly to organizations helping to put a stop to the horrors that smartphone production causes.