Apple’s advocacy promise was contradicted by extractive business practices

Evidence

There were missteps, shortfalls, and vulnerabilities, to be sure. The potential significance of Apple’s tacit new logic was never fully grasped, even by the company itself. Instead, the corporation produced a steady stream of contradictions that signaled business as usual. Apple was criticized for extractive pricing policies, offshoring jobs, exploiting its retail staff, abrogating responsibility for factory conditions, colluding to depress wages via illicit noncompete agreements in employee recruitment, institutionalized tax evasion, and a lack of environmental stewardship—just to name a few of the violations that seemed to negate the implicit social contract of its own unique logic. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 144

Categorization

• SEED: Case-study angle: the advocacy-capitalism promise as PR cosmology that extractive supply-chain practices always belied — a pattern now generalized across tech.
• XREF: connects to: Apple’s privacy-friendly claims coexist with tax avoidance and poor labor conditions — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 189