In France, several organisations including ATTAC, the French chapter of Friends of the Earth, trade unions and Finance Watch just launched a campaign against Apple, titled #IphoneRevolt.
On Friday morning, at the same time Apple opened the pre-sales of the new iPhone in the country, a viral video was posted by all organisations, high jacking Apple’s iPhone Revolution video with societal impacts messages: Tax evasion, programmed obsolescence, slave work, etc.:
Simultaneously, an editorial was in the national newspaper Le Monde, on Friday morning, signed by many organisations and several political and intellectual personalities, stating “the real “revolution” would be for electronic multinational corporations – such as Apple – to produce socially, environmentally and fiscally sustainable smartphones” – it was Le Monde’s best outreach of the day.
All the organisations are contributing to the campaign on their specific themes, such as the advertising by the French anti-publicity network:
Attac focuses on Apple’s harmful tax practices, and contributed an editorial on Monday in Mediapart, titled “The rot is in Apple’s tax evasion”.
The website www.iphonerevolt.org was set up for the campaign – in French, soon with more languages available
It calls on all Apple’s stakeholders to act:
- On clients, to opt for fixing, buying second hand or simpler IPhones, or the Fairphone.
- On the media, to stop advertising for the IPhone and start investigating Apple’s societal impacts
- On authorities, to investigate and sanction all kinds of infractions
- On citizens, to sign the call to action and on organisations, to join the campaign
- And obviously on Apple, to stop its programmed obsolescence policy, human rights violations and tax evasion.
You can follow #IphoneRevolt’s social media profiles :
In Geneva also, civil desobedience actions performed directly in shops, transforming “Apple Pay” in “Apple Pay your taxes”.
You can reach Marie Antonelle Joubert if you wish to propose translations and/or join the campaign in your country or region.
Even though it is still to launch its offline activities, the campaign already got a broad media coverage, including in the mainstream economic media, such as Capital.