On October 23rd, activists gathered outside the Apple store at TRX to protest the launch of the new iPhone Duo phone. While shoppers lined up in droves to pay a minimum of ten thousand ringgit for a piece of technology that is already reporting cracked screens and other durability issues, a small group of protestors stood on the second floor of the Apple store, a massive, illuminated dome that more resembles a temple than a phone shop, and began to sing.
But their voices were quickly silenced. A group of TRX security guards, who seemed to be waiting in the wings for the protest to start, soon cornered protestors from both ends of the second floor balcony. In a video taken of the incident, the guards are visibly aggressive towards the protestors; one rips a cardboard sign out of a woman’s hands. Guards also forcibly chased and detained two protestors, holding them in TRX management offices for several hours under threat of arrest. The crime they were accused of? “Breaking the rules of the mall”.
When the police finally did arrive to investigate the matter, both protestors were released. Because it is of course not a crime to sing, chant or hold up a cardboard sign, even in private premises such TRX, and certainly not in an Apple store. And yet, the way that these activists were treated—chased, manhandled, detained and threatened—by TRX security staff point not only to an open disregard of their rights to speech and safety, but also to a deeper, darker injustice that pervades all our lives.
Apple is, after all, a foreign technology company, owned largely by American institutional investors; two of the largest being Blackrock and Berkshire Hathaway, both companies with well-documented ties with Israel. Apple is also known to not only operate in Israel, with its second-largest R&D centre located in Herzliya, but also employ dozens of Israeli ex-spies, directly donate money to the Israeli military, and acquire Israeli AI companies developing facial and audio recognition surveillance tech. The IOF recently made it mandatory for senior officers to use iPhones, and the Israeli Air Force has cross-promoted the iPhone Duo using images of soldiers in Gaza. These are crimes that spit in the face of not only our shared humanity, but also the purported pro-Palestine stance of the Malaysian government. This is not even to mention Apple’s long-standing use of conflict minerals, specifically cobalt, tin, tantalum and tungsten, from the Democratic Republic of Congo; marking the company’s complicity in yet another genocide, one that has killed thousands of people, displaced hundreds of thousands, and led to mass cases of sexual violence against women and children.
When faced with a peaceful demonstration attempting to bring these crimes to light, the security staff at TRX chose to defend the Apple store by enacting violence on the human beings standing inside it. This is a microcosm of the dystopian world we find ourselves living in: where private and public security forces (which are becoming ever more indistinguishable) protect corporations over people. This is especially true for tech giants like Apple, which paid over USD 1.2 million in 2024 to hire officers directly from the San Francisco police to provide security at its Silicon Valley stores. TRX is a private premise, but it is also largely owned by TRX City Sdn Bhd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Ministry of Finance. Why choose to open the flagship Malaysian store of a known supporter of the genocide in Gaza in TRX? Why train its security staff to prioritise the property and profits of an American tech company over the rights of Malaysians protesting it?
The reason is techno-imperialism. Apple is not only complicit in genocide, but in a major player in a global technology economy that exists by extracting labour and resources from the Global Majority to feed the consumer habits of the Global North and its vassal states. It is part of the same system that has fuelled the data centre boom in Malaysia, at the behest of the Big Tech giants currently automating the Zionist slaughter like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
It is the same system that promises the glitz and glamour of foreign direct investment and fancy digital toys, while enabling genocide and pushing the world irreversibly closer towards planetary collapse. In a way, the TRX security staff were strangely honest in their violent reprisal of protestors for “breaking the rules of the mall”. We are all living under “the rules of the mall”—where the buying and selling of iPhones matter more to capitalist states and the security institutions that maintain their power than any one of us.
So what can we do? Start by boycotting Apple. Support and organise more demonstrations at the TRX Apple store. Condemn TRX for harassing and detaining the protestors on October 23rd. Learn more about techno-imperialism and its role in the Gaza genocide and other genocides around the world. Reclaim our digital sovereignty as Malaysians and individual tech consumers by learning to repair our own phones and laptops, which you can learn to do in community spaces like Repair Cafe KL,and buying tech secondhand. Protect your data from AI and Big Tech by implementing simple digital security measures.
Boycott Apple! Free Palestine! Free the Congo! Death to empire!
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Since they were assaulted and detained before they were able to complete their demonstration on October 23rd, we are sharing below the lyrics they would have sung in protest that day, to the tune of “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Misérables.
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?
We are here protesting so Congo's
Kids will not be slaves again!
From genocide in Congo
To genocide in Palestine
Apple's complicity just grows
With every war crime
Child slavery and death
Ignored by courts of highest degree
Donations to the IOF
To kill for “charity”!
Will you join the fight to set Congo and Palestine free?
Do you hear your iPhone ring?
Made in rich Congolese cobalt
Mined in the name of rape and slavery
Then sold for armed assault
Boycott all the Apple stores
Till Apple ends support for war
Cut ties with Israel or
We boycott forever more!