So I looked Elon Musk spoke at TED, and I came home with a mixture of empathy for the man and amazement at the depth of his self-importance. Since his subsequent decision to buy Twitter, most journalists I know have either predicted the end of the Internet as we know it or maintained that no one cares about Twitter except journalists. If you’re not a journalist, help me here: Who’s right? Please weigh in the comments. In the meantime, here’s the update.
Inside SideInside
When misinformation and hate speech spreads on social media, most people like to blame the platforms. The users who post and repost those toxic things? They are unfortunately manipulated by algorithms. If that’s your take, let me ask you this: When the platform is a giant online clothing store, the manipulative incentive is ultra-low prices, and the harm is the environmental impact of kilotons of disposable clothing, do you still think it’s mainly the is the company’s fault, or are its greedy customers just as guilty?
That’s an implicit question in Vauhini Vara’s profile of Shein, the Chinese ultra-fast fashion retailer. If you don’t have teenage children, you may not have heard of it, but among American teens, Shein (originally “SheInside”) is the most popular e-commerce site after Amazon. In a 12 month period it was 1.3 million individual clothing designs – 50 to 100 times as much as other fast-fashion rivals, and several times cheaper. Vauhini’s story is a laundry list of the slack business practices you’d expect from a cheap clothing store — copyright infringement, lax labor and safety practices, opaque sourcing — but as she points out, even as the growing attention forces Shein to clean up his act, other players are likely to step in to undermine it, just like its competitors. “In the absence of well-enforced regulations adapting to the practices of high-growth global e-commerce companies,” she writes, “the burden of making fashion more ethical will largely rest on individual consumers — a strategy that is bound to fail.”
That tends to be one of our central motivating questions here at WIRED: What does it actually take to create positive change? One might see some hope for the clothing industry by looking at the food industry, which has spawned entire sub-industries that cater to consumers’ ethical and environmental concerns. If you can be vegetarian or vegan or locavore you can… well I think the first thing we need is a word for someone with an ethic of clothing consumption: sustainable? anti waste? durable? (Suggestions in the comments, please.) Sure, if more people shopped more ethically, they could at least give it a push some garment makers are moving towards reducing emissions and using less synthetic and toxic materials and more recycled and upcycled. Or you could just rent your clothes instead of collecting a closet full of stuff you’ll never wear again.
But just as all the vegans and locavors and foragers in the world can’t change the wider food system’s incentives to feed as many people as cheaply and profitably as possible, a rescue army of secondhand clothing shoppers and community-centric design mavens isn’t going to make a dent in itself. the fast fashion supply chain. Governments will be needed, under voter pressure, to step in and declare cheap wires a public health hazard.
Beyond the Web3 Bubble
A few months ago in a WIRED staff meeting I asked, “Can we write a guide to the ‘good’ crypto?” By which I meant: what will blockchain-based technology be useful for after the psychedelic carnival of NFT auctions and DeFi Ponzi schemes collapses into a giant mushroom cloud of digital glitter? Judging by your responses to my last post, you all want to know that too.
I’ve asked this question of pretty much every Web3 booster and venture capitalist and decentralized guru I’ve met over the past few months. I’ve talked to some very, very smart people who can’t think of anything that has to do with a blockchain that in practice couldn’t be easier and easier to do with something else. Of the rest, the most convincing answer I’ve been able to get is essentially that Web3’s technology is less important than the movement: An interest in new models of decision-making, ownership, and social organization that will have lasting consequences, even if blockchain itself proves to be a useless solution for all. Which…maybe I buy? Or at least find it intriguing.
