For many of us, it’s difficult not to develop a sense of cynicism when faced with the dark side of the industries we participate in as consumers. Whether it’s clothing, food, technology, cars – most of the things we purchase, use, and participate in can only exist through human rights violations, unimaginable cruelty, and irreversible damage to the planet.
So, what can we do about it? Who should do something about it? Why should we even care? It isn’t long before the string of questions slides into comfortable nihilism.
Information and Dissociation
I’m writing this text from a flagship smartphone, the first one I could afford. Now, in my thirties, with a comfortable corporate job, an interest in technology, and highly susceptible to pretty advertisements, I feel like I’m part of the core demographic of the phone company’s target audience.
On the subway escalators on my commute to work, I sleepily gaze at the huge slick rendering of this phone plastered across the wall, sliding in focus as the stairs glide past it. Later I would look it up online on the search platform owned by the same company who made the phone’s operating system. The same company also owns the text editor I’m writing in now.
Of course, I had a number of misgivings about buying it, like the unethical and unsustainable practices in the production of smartphones, the unjustified price tag, the fact that I could still have used my previous 3-year-old phone despite its battery not holding up through a long day of use anymore, the fact that a mid-range, second-hand, or refurbished previous model would have served just as well. And yet I was carried away by the beauty and promises of the advertisement.
Earlier this year, I had a conversation with a friend – we have a lot in common, both Romanians who emigrated to “western” Europe, both of the same age and in the same tax bracket, and both concerned with inequality and social justice. And we both happened to buy a flagship phone around the same time, both with lingering guilt about it. We discussed this coincidence like a shameful secret, our cringe-worthy indulgence. So why did we do it then?
A dissociation occurs. To be able to participate in the psychological game offered up by consumerist capitalism – you worked hard, you deserve a treat – I needed to suspend my outrage and knowledge about the suffering of cobalt miners in DR Congo (Kara, 2019), suspend my curiosity about the efficacy of the companies’ efforts to address this issue in PR efforts (Gilli, 2023), suspend my practical considerations and value system.
This is important not only for the ethical dimension of a purchase decision, but also because the phone is theorized as an interface to the end of the global supply chain (Hockenberry, 2022). This means that entire infrastructures, people, places, objects, become blocks of information in algorithms at our fingertips. This disembodied structure, through gig economy workers, forms a workforce detached from the social relations and economic solidarity that can form in traditional forms of labour. Its design also keeps workers not interacting with customer, digitizing lives and work into code, pins, interfaces on a screen.
In the essay Cellular Capitalism: Life and Labor at the End Of the Digital Supply Chain, Matthew Hockenberry writes:
“To speak of the cellular is to speak of cells, of divisions and isolation, the discrete and the digital. Cellular capitalism comes with the introduction of a device that renders supply as nodes in the network as easily as it does pixels on a screen. Replacing the messy materiality of the real with the controlled computation of the virtual, it is the outward manifestation of a structure with the inevitable aim of coordinating the worldwide activity of every single connection.”
The seemingly simple purchase of an item on Amazon generates a large amount of data, as the actions of the customer are tracked, to generate data about preferences, that could then be used by the platform to sell more. Unbeknownst to the “userized” customer, large quantities of data are processed for a simple purchase, which correlates with a negative environmental impact, with the ultimate goal of increasing the company’s profits. (Moll & Rocha, 2022)
In Tilt the Scroll to Repair: Efficient Inhuman Workforce At Global Chains of Care, Joana Moll and Jara Rocha explain that:
“even though the Amazon user is the primary trigger of a huge chain reaction of events, they are blind to the material reality that lies beyond the interface, and this is particularly true for most people using (or rather used by) any Internet-based service. In that sense, the ease of use of these interfaces, whose ultimate goal is to smoothen the accumulation of revenue, acts as a well-designed smokescreen to conceal complexity and material waste—or, in other words, the negative externalities of capitalist means of production.”
The system is designed to perpetuate the dissociation between purchases, digital service usage, and the industries, people, and labour that sustain them.
Impact and Responsibility
But what if I had chosen not to buy the phone – dissenting voices might ask – how would my choice of not buying a phone, one in millions, have an impact over any of these bigger issues?
And, after all, isn’t it in the interest of corporations to shift the burden of ethical behaviour away from companies and onto individual responsibility of the consumer? If the people wouldn’t buy it, they wouldn’t make it. Or vote with your dollar, as the ethical consumerism saying goes.
Socially conscious consumerism is still consumerism, it’s still commodified, and it doesn’t affect any structural change. So does personal responsibility not matter at all?
Once, I was taken aback when I heard a colleague explain that, in order to limit her environmental impact, she preferred spending two days on multiple trains rather than taking a plane. What puzzled me at the time was how negligible the impact of her actions were in an ocean of myriad air travellers.
A mentor later explained to me that these choices don’t come from a utilitarian perspective, but rather a personal, value-driven consciousness. That concept I could understand: it’s the way I don’t eat meat not because I think that my dietary choices save animals from the meat industry, not because I sit in judgement of people who do otherwise, but because I personally cannot bear the thought of participating in the cruelty involved. Because I thought a lot about it.
I had a similar discussion with a friend who doesn’t order from Amazon for ethical reasons. And I went through a similar process of evaluating the impact of her actions in my mind and finding myself negotiating the ethics of my purchases.
But my colleague’s and my friend’s choices did have an impact. They had an impact on me – I kept thinking about it, and soon I shifted my own bar for what would constitute as “impractical” travel if it means I’d avoid taking a flight and I limited my purchases on Amazon when there is a local alternative. Without trying to convince me, just by displaying their behaviour, they socially modelled for me a more ethical way of navigating the world in accordance with my values. It also took some introspection on my part to change my perception from “what a quirky thing to do that has no overall impact” to “this is something I could do too without much effort”.
Social Dynamics and Social Engineering
The psychological tactics employed in advertising and social media algorithms intentionally designed to influence us (Lewis, 2017) require conscious effort to counter them.
We have jobs, families, immediate concerns – staying informed and sustaining an ethical consumption behaviour can take a lot of time, energy, and even money. To a lot of people, having the choice of ethical consumption is a privilege. And then, some choices seem unescapable in the modern world, like opting out of using social media platforms without any negative consequences to our social or professional lives.
Even when we do have the ability, the information, the resources, even the values, we still don’t make the ethical choices, because it requires self-awareness, effort to keep ethical values top of mind, against powerful external influences that act systemically, posing social, practical, accessibility challenges.
Yes, the structure of our societies determines a lot of our behaviours. We don’t have a direct say into what stores do we have available, what do they sell, where is the merchandise made, how are the people treated in the chain of production, and what are its environmental impacts.
But just as the social engineering of consumerism, social media, and global supply chains influence our behaviours, so we can model better behaviours for each other. Not only by making more ethical purchasing decisions, but also organizing, raising awareness, and getting involved in social movements engaged in topics we care about.
Back to that embarrassingly guilt-ridden conversation with my friend about buying flagship phones, what if we had taken the topic further? What if we would have discussed about following the social patterns of one’s demographic group, even when they clash with one’s values? I wonder what conclusions would have come out of that conversation. I wonder what behaviours we could have modelled for each other.
Bibliography
Gilli, R. (2023). Cobalt unveiled: navigating the complex world of artisanal cobalt mining. Retrieved December 15, 2024 from https://www.wrforum.org/think-piece/cobalt-unveiled-navigating-the-complex-world-of-artisanal-cobalt-mining/
Hockenberry, M. (2022). Cellular Capitalism: Life and Labor at the End Of the Digital Supply Chain. In M. Graham, & F. Ferrari (eds.), Digital Work in the Planetary Market (pp. 263-280). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Kara, S. (2019). I saw the unbearable grief inflicted on families by cobalt mining. I pray for change. Retrieved December 15, 2024 from https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/commentisfree/2019/dec/16/i-saw-the-unbearable-grief-inflicted-on-families-by-cobalt-mining-i-pray-for-change
Lewis, P. (2017). ‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia. Retrieved December 15, 2024 from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia
Moll, J., & Rocha, J. (2022). Tilt the Scroll to Repair: Efficient Inhuman Workforce At Global Chains of Care. In M. Graham, & F. Ferrari (eds.), Digital Work in the Planetary Market (pp. 319-328). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Image: Jenu Prasad jenuprasad, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.