In her keynote speech at last year’s annual Netroots Nation gathering, Darcy Burner pitched a seemingly simple idea to the thousands of bloggers and web developers in the audience. The former Microsoft
programmer and congressional candidate proposed a smartphone app
allowing shoppers to swipe barcodes to check whether conservative billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch were behind a product on the shelves.
Burner figured the average supermarket shopper had no idea that
buying Brawny paper towels, Angel Soft toilet paper or Dixie cups meant
contributing cash to Koch Industries
through its subsidiary Georgia-Pacific. Similarly, purchasing a pair of
yoga pants containing Lycra or a Stainmaster carpet meant indirectly
handing the Kochs your money (Koch Industries bought Invista, one of the
world’s largest fiber and textiles companies, in 2004 from DuPont).
At the time, Burner created a mock interface for her app,
but that’s as far as she got. She was waiting to find the right team to
build out the back end, which could be complicated given often murky
corporate ownership structures.
She wasn’t aware that as she delivered her Netroots speech, a group of developers was hard at work on Buycott, an even more sophisticated version of the app she proposed.
“I remember reading Forbes’ story on
the proposed app to help boycott Koch Industries and wishing that we
were ready to launch our product,” said Buycott’s marketing director
Maceo Martinez.
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