Airdrop as Anonymous Protest, Apple and the CCP:
This text was made specifically for the ‘Airdrop’ exhibtion by Johnny Pratt, an exhibition in which all the contents were airdropped to different devices in apple stores over the course of a few months. It should be read with this specification in mind, and is not designed for this format.
I await the swift death of this essay by an apple shop employee any moment now, should it ever manage to be covertly airdropped and appear on an iPhone screen in the first place.
In October of 2022, Foxconn, a major Taiwanese technology manufacturer, faced a series of worker’s protests resulting from strict Covid-19 policies. Foxconn is said to produce 40% of consumer electronics worldwide, this includes: Kindles, Nintendo and Xbox consoles, Blackberries, Xiaomi devices, iPhones, iPods, and iPads. Foxconn’s factory in the Zhengzhou municipality is the largest assembly site of iPhones in the world. During the period leading up to the strike, China’s strict implementation of zero-covid policies meant that the site’s 200,000 - 300,000 employees were forced to move between the factory and on-site accommodation. Foxconn employees soon began to escape, many were reported jumping over fences or leaving the factory in groups of up to 200. This lost labour was quickly replaced by a mass hiring of veterans and young people from the local area, who were promised bonuses most would never receive. New workers were forced to quarantine for up to 3 days when entering the site, and any employee who fell sick was condemned to an unpaid quarantine, often left without access to food in a small, unfurnished room. In short, the factory became both a prison and a sweatshop. Terry Gou, the company’s chairman, had formerly responded to sweatshop accusations in a blasé way in 2012, stating:
What's wrong with sweatshops? We bleed and sweat, but as long as we comply with the law, we believe that hard work pays off
However, Foxconn did not comply with the law, and investigations found employees working over 5 times the legal limit in some cases. In a statement released in early November 2022, Apple gave an explanation for their low iPhone 14 stock, claiming:
‘We are working closely with our supplier to return to normal production levels while ensuring the health and safety of every worker’
In early October of the same year, 2022, another infamous protest occurred in China, which inspired a wave of protests including the aforementioned Foxconn demonstration. This protest, dubbed the ‘Beijing Sitong Bridge Protest’ was a solo endeavour by Peng Lifa. On the morning of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, Peng unfurled banners from Sitong bridge and burned tires to attract attention, then spoke into a loudspeaker. The subject of his protest was the upcoming unlawful third ‘election’ of Xi Jinping, and Lifa advocated for a revolution against dictatorship, censorship, and oppression. That same morning, at 4:00am (before the protest), an anonymous source emailed Peng’s ‘manifesto’, a protest against the state. Peng was dubbed ‘Bridge Man’ by many, in reference to the famous Tiananmen Square protestor referred to as ‘Tank Man’
Peng was quickly arrested, where he remains, likely imprisoned, to this day. His family still remains under close surveillance. Despite this, his words echoed for many months, inscribed on public restrooms and COVID testing booths, but also disseminated through airdrop. It is in the aftermath of this that the unique value of Airdrop emerges, as a form of anonymous protest.
Airdrop provides a method of sharing information which is implemented using low energy bluetooth and wifi to pair two devices. After pairing, airdrop information is transferred to a device via a ‘web’ of interconnected devices, which use radio-waves to send the information, avoiding the need for a router. Because this transfer cannot be traced, and circumvents the Great Firewall's tools for censoring politically critical media, Airdrop became a unique way to avoid suspicion while spreading dissent.
This was not the first time Airdrop was used for this goal, and during the Hong Kong protests Airdrop had played a similar role, however this time it was used to disseminate Peng’s words and to protest Jinping’s reelection, a rare occurrence in mainland China. Vice reported that one message Airdropped on a subway read: ‘Oppose dictatorship, oppose totalitarianism, oppose autocracy’, and that the Shanghai resident who received it from ‘Xi Jinping’s iPhone’ claimed ‘This is the first time I saw or received a medium of any kind that is critical of the current regime’
What this untraceably, anonymous, form of image sharing provided was clear; a tool to disagree with the dictatorship of the CCP and not face the consequences, a tool to allow the public, when together, to openly share information and avoid censorship. However, this dissent was soon quelled by the CCP, as Apple began to roll out changes and restrictions to Airdrop within a month, limited to only mainland Chinese-made iPhones, and months later to the rest of the world . Do you wonder why the device you are reading this on, in this apple store now, has the option to only receive airdrops from everyone ‘for 10 minutes’?
While Apple masked these changes as a tool to reduce cyber-flashing and unsolicited content (though until they were caught they had shipped the change silently), it is clear that Apple had rolled out this change with the intent of damaging rebellion and the people’s voice in the region, whether this is due to CCP pressure, or fears of slowing their own production lines in a region that is essential in Apple’s manufacturing and mining, is unknown. Later, in January of 2024, the CCP claimed that they had created a way to decrypt Airdrop logs from local devices, which Apple has still not commented on.
It is easy to see the nature of this series of events, and how they outline the importance of free and uncensored information, as well as the forces that govern how we can access it. While it seems easy to disconnect from Chinese politics in an Apple shop in Belfast, the device you are reading this on is just as much implicated in this as a whole web of other things. This is visible if we look at the Baotou mines, in which the rare earth metals were mined to create the device, which requires huge amounts of environmentally damaging work and incredibly unsafe labour conditions. These conditions cause 1 out of 7 local residents of the mines to get cancer, which is staggering when contrasted with the average of 2 in 1000 people. However this is also visible on a social level, as the UK government moves to restrict access to ‘adult’ information, and the apple shop employee will undoubtedly remove this essay any minute now. Maybe this essay was never read, or maybe you, and only you, have finished it in situ as intended. But let this brief essay act to remember the airdrop that once existed, and the way it once moved through censored crowds like a virus; like a spider in a web.