File Buz

NPR Retraction of Story on Apple Factories Provides Insight into the Mentality behind Attacks on Gene Patents and Agricultural Biotechnology

On March 16, the popular National Public Radio (NPR) program This American Life (TAL) was forced to retract statements made during an episode that aired in January alleging abuse of workers at Chinese factories manufacturing products for Apple. The explanation provided by “monologist” Mike Daisy, source of the "significant fabrications" reported on the TAL program, provide some insight I think into the mentality behind the flood of misinformation that has been promulgated with respect to gene patents and agricultural biotechnology, and which unfortunately has found its way into the courts and Congress.

TAL admits to having excerpted the fabricated story from "The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," a one-man show that Mike Daisey had been performing across the country, and which is currently in production at the Public Theater in New York. In a press release, TAL says it first learned Daisey had fabricated parts of his story when another public radio program, Marketplace, tracked down Daiseys interpreter, who disputed parts of Daiseys monologue. After being caught lying, Daisey apologized to NPR, explaining that:

“I’m not going to say that I didnt take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. [] My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism, and its not journalism. Its theater."

Daiseys rationalization of his lies reminds me a lot of the response of an author after I reviewed his book entitled "Who Owns You? The Corporate Gold Rush to Patent Your Genes", and pointed out some of the numerous inaccuracies in the book regarding patent law in general, and gene patents in particular. In the book, the author characterized himself as an intellectual property attorney, but when he was unable to refute the many inaccuracies in his book that I pointed out in my review, he dismissed them, and asserted that it did not matter because he had approached the issue as a philosopher, rather than as a lawyer or scientist; very reminiscent of Daiseys explanation that his report on NPR was "theater," not journalism.

The problem is, these people target a lay audience largely unfamiliar with the subject matter they cover, and push forward their work as evidence allegedly supporting their position. It would be one thing if Daisey had explained to his NPR audience that he was merely engaged in theater, or if the author of "Who Owns You?" had explained that his book was nothing more than philosophical ponderings, with no grounding in fact. But that is not how they present their work, and unfortunately their works can play an important role in motivating others (including judges and members of Congress) to take action.

For example, according to NPR the TAL piece featuring Daisey made him "Apples chief critic and it also inspired a Change.org petition that collected more than 250,000 signatures demanding that Apple better the working conditions at the factories.” Books like "Who Owns You?” have no doubt played a role in shaping the current widespread antipathy toward gene patents.

I also found it interesting that Daisey characterizes his fabrications about Apple factories as "shortcuts in [his] passion to be heard." I suspect that this sort of mentality might explain the bending of reality routinely engaged in by the opponents of gene patents and agricultural biotechnology. They are convinced that gene patents and genetically engineered crops endanger society, and that companies like Myriad Genetics and Monsanto are evil, and will seemingly say anything in their passion to be heard. Like Daisey, they do not appear to be bothered by specific facts, and are willing to take shortcuts around the truth in seeking to eliminate these evils from the world.

The disturbing thing is that there is so much incentive for people to propagate these myths. People like Daisey clearly love being in the spotlight, and the more sensational he can make his reports of condition Apple factories, the more people he will have listening. NPR reported that this episode of TAL had the largest audience that show had ever achieved, and that Daisey became the most prominent critic of Apple factories because of the coverage. Unfortunately, I think there are also incentives at play, particularly in academia and with respect to advocacy groups such as the ACLU and Public Patent Foundation, for making overblown and sensationalistic allegations on hot button issues such as gene patents and agricultural biotechnology.

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Order and Pay from Table at Bierhaus powered by Apple Pay Clover and Estimotes iBeacon

Update: The Bierhaus app is now live in the App Store! Come play with it at Bierhaus in Mountain View, CA.

Background: Clover and First Data (our parent company) have been working with Apple to prepare for the launch of Apple Pay. Clover is enabling our cloud-based point-of-sale platform to accept Apple Pay In-App payments. Heres a sneak preview of what we did with Bierhaus, a beer garden in Mountain View, CA. Well be open sourcing most of the Bierhaus app in the coming weeks. You can read more about how Apple Pay works from my first blog post. 

When I look outside the window from the Clover office, I often see a line outside Bierha.us. Heres the line as I write this post on Friday evening.

Bierhaus, with its ever-present line, shot from my window.

Now, Im someone who hates waiting in lines, particularly if Im going for a quick happy hour break at work. Id like to just sit down, order from phone, and have my beer magically appear. So we built an app for that.

There are several key components to making the Bierhaus app work:

• Apple Pay. Users can download the Bierhaus app and order and pay without typing in a credit card number or creating a user account. This is a leap forward in convenience and usability.
• Clover. Clover is a cloud-based point-of-sale platform. POS systems are the central nervous systems of restaurants and retailers. We built Clover to be hackable (in the positive sense) to enable app developers to build new apps that use menu/inventory data, submit orders/tickets, make payments, print to kitchen printers, etc.
• Estimote. We use Bluetooth Low Energy beacons to know the user is in the store.

The Bierhaus app for iPhone 6 lets you order:




We have several Estimote Beacons placed around Bierhaus. Right now, this is mostly to restrict people from ordering beer when theyre not at Bierhaus. In the future, you could do much more interesting things, such as automatically determining the table number (e.g. see Downtown) or creating a real-time map of where your customers are and doing path planning for delivery.


Thanks to the beacons and the Estimote SDK, I get this handy lock screen app:

Where to from here?

Clover has thousands of merchants on its platform, and is growing at thousands of merchants per month. Over the coming weeks and months, well be enabling developers to build a raft of experiences: self-checkout, order ahead, pay at table, and order+pay at table. We expect that most apps targeting small and medium businesses will act as aggregators serving many merchants, not a single merchant like the Bierhaus app does.

Well be open sourcing some apps and experiences weve been developing. Our goal is not to be a consumer-facing brand, but we need to develop these apps to prove out our platform quickly and iteratively. We welcome developers to pick up where weve left off and commercialize these experiences.

Other Wallets and Android

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