adidas opens a digital oasis for underpaid workers/

Fake DJ Marshmello hypes "adidas" plan to pay workers only in virtual reality

Fake DJ Marshmello hypes "adidas" plan to pay workers only in virtual reality
Real Marshmello tweets denial, suggests legal action over Web Summit impersonation  

[Lisbon, Nov. 21] It took a giant web conference in Lisbon nearly 36 hours to notice they'd been massively had.

On Wednesday, a standing-room-only audience at Web Summit watched a fake DJ Marshmello drop his "new single" celebrating adidas' launch of the "adiVerse" — a  bizarre virtual playground for faraway garment workers, that would "pay them in dreams" rather than money, as an "adidas rep" explained in great detail.

The activists behind the action expected chaos and maybe arrests. But disturbingly, no one in the thousand-strong audience objected to the concept, even after seeing the slides depicting "outsourced" concentration-camp labor in WWII and Hieronymus Bosch-like animations of the "adiVerse." Even when the "adidas rep" and "Marshmello" amped it up yet further at the press conference, no journalist asked any hard questions. One even called it "revolutionary."

It wasn't until late the next day that the conference learned from a journalist they'd been had, and took down their video of the event, which they'd already furnished to the activists.

"The acceptance of such awful ideas is especially alarming at a venue like Web Summit," said Andy Bichlbaum, one of the activists and co-founder of the anti-corporate culture-jamming group the Yes Men, who collaborated with Threads & Tits and the Clean Clothes Campaign. "Given how powerful these new technologies are, and given how corporations have wielded current technologies like social media and what's resulted from that, we should probably be pretty nervous right now."

The action was meant to put pressure on adidas to pay their workers the money it owes them, as well as to highlight the problems with today's outsourcing system.

"To make the companies at the top of the supply chain finally take real responsibility for the working conditions of the people who make their products, we need binding, enforceable agreements between companies and unions as well as national and multinational legislation holding companies accountable for their supply chains," said Christie Miedema of the Clean Clothes Campaign. 

"We call adidas on their fancy words about caring for workers, and challenge them to sign the Pay Your Workers agreement," said Miedema. "If we succeed, it will be an important step towards holding any  company that outsources labor responsible for the working conditions they now condone and co-create."

Press kit: https://bit.ly/adiversepresskit

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