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aglobalwinwin Untitled -
jdentith Shaman Juice -
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sfgabe Skyway to Tomorrowland -
jennyhazel Untitled
This is part two of “Pizza, Beer & Stock Options Don’t Cut It Anymore: Technologists and Social Entrepreneurs” - part I is here.
In my role with Ethicodes I’m designing a mobile game-type app for ethical and sustainable consumption. In my professional life, I’ve been a designer and programmer for web and mobile. That means I have the unique experience of having been on both the management / programmer table. The work I do for Ethicodes can’t be done alone, and I’ll admit, there are (many) elements of programming that are better left to the specialists. In my juggling of these two worlds, I’ve come across the paradox of social enterprise technology. Most often it comes down to money, understanding and respect. Here’s some advice from both sides of the table.
Part II: Tips for Developers
- No Eye Rolling. Sometimes opportunity is about showing up. We understand everyone from your grandmother to your boss is asking you to fix something. But please be open to the possibilities and try to leave the jaded personality at home. It takes a certain type of person to be a programmer—some say it is a cynic’s exterior over an incurable optimist inside—after all, it is your job to constantly find ways to break your own code, with the expectation that there is a way to make it logically perfect eventually. I suspect the social entrepreneur is the exact opposite—incurably optimistic on the outside (we can fix the world!), with a constant cynicism on the inside (because the world needs fixing badly).
- Consultation Fees. An interview is not a consultation. Everyone understands you are in high demand, and your time is valuable (at least they do if they read the above). However a 1/3 of a total standard consulting fee should be business and overhead related. That means $50 of your $150 fee is there to account for this initial meeting, as well as computer upkeep, and the time it takes to invoice clients. I recently had a very talented developer request a consultation fee before even discussing their skills. They were off the list immediately, but a little further research revealed their skillset wasn’t the greatest—which could have been a costly mistake for me. On the other hand, if they had agreed to an initial discussion, they would have gotten the opportunity to convince me otherwise.
- Understand business etiquette. As a programmer you have a lot of wiggle room as far as business attire goes. In fact, I frequently feel like the older the t-shirt I wear, the more I am assumed to be a talented programmer. Very few people expect you to show up in a suit (and if the above is true, it might actually work against you). So when I say business etiquette, I am not primarily talking about attire (though sweatpants might not be the best idea). Despite what you learned from your brilliant CS professor, some basic social and conversational skills are necessary. Texting and muttering during a meeting are not looked upon favorably by anyone. Inability to manage your own schedule and terse, incongruous and borderline rude emails (despite a footer that says “sent from my iPhone”) are also not working in your favor. You will need to be able to work with other people in some capacity for the rest of your life regardless of how talented you are.
- Be clear about your skills. We all know you can learn as you go along, and too often that is what must happen as new technologies and languages arrive. Hiring managers should understand this. That said, be clear about what you know now versus what you can learn. When I worked at LiveJournal, all the programmers had to learn BML (Brad’s Markup Language - which only existed in Brad Fitzpatrick’s work). Obviously, no one came to the company knowing how to do this (aside from Brad of course) and all of them learned. However, there are always going to be programmers who know Ruby, C+, and all of the main languages better than you. Managers just want to know what they are signing up for in the skills department, so be honest and clear about what you know now and what you would be happy to learn in the future.
- Invest in future employers. You undoubtably will come across social entrepreneurs who are hoping that you can “share their vision.” Sometimes this means working at a discount or being available for questions when otherwise you would not. You shouldn’t do all of their work for free or let them stomp all over you. Make this clear from the start, but also let them know how interested and invested you are in their vision. Try “I {am;am not} really into the goal of {fixing the world;helping the poor;educating children} so I {can help;cannot help}. However I think it would be a good business decision if you hired {me;a specialist;a team} to do x, y, and z.” Knowing your investment level from the start will help them gauge how much they can lean on you when the going gets tough, and will prevent any misunderstandings for both sides.
- Don’t steal ideas. This should be another obvious one, but isn’t. You may have the CS talent to bring an idea to fruition with little help. However, social entrepreneurs likewise have talents that you don’t have, usually business and field-specific ones. They also (hopefully) had legal agreements, copyrights, and precedent over an idea long before they brought you in on a project. It is a much better option for both of you to work together for a common goal than get into messy legal battles later.
- Agree on Baby Steps. Entrepreneurs want a perfect product, and often don’t yet have the backing or technical process-knowledge to make it bulletproof. And you might not be sold on their product or time commitment. A good way to start off is to both agree to a minimum viable product - meaning the smallest commitment you as a programmer can get a way with while still testing some of their business and usability assumptions. It might be as simple as a programming diagram, a series of mobile web pages or a pong-level app (free of fancy graphics or complex engagements).Taking a small first step will help everyone figure out if they work well with one another and how on board everyone is. After that, you can throw in the towel or figure out the next small step.
Just like last time, I’d love to hear from other management / developers about experiences, tips, and frustrations in the comments.
Gabe Scelta is the Innovation Director at Ethicodes and Research Associate at the Ethiopian Global Initiative. A fellow at the Emerge Venture Lab, Gabe’s deep knowledge of the technology industry keeps Ethicodes pushing the frontiers of the fair trade industry. He holds a master’s degree from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and a bachelor’s degree from Boston University. He lives in New York City.
Related articles
- What is a Social Entrepreneur? (fiwal.org.uk)
- Entrepreneurship and the Social Entrepreneur (ruralstops.blogspot.com)
- Four Business Tips for Social Entrepreneurs (bayintegratedmarketing.wordpress.com)
When I was first getting interested in ethical consumption, and talking with friends about how best to encourage others buy the things we think are better for us and our planet, I suggested that it is more effective to “be the change you want to see” in as cool and impressive a way as possible, than it is to preach about it in a boring way (even if your preaching is perfectly accurate and correct). One friend thought for a second, and asked if this meant that when out in the supermarket, you should take your bag of FairTrade/Organic/ethical coffee beans, do a backflip and slam-dunk it into your trolley/basket?
Essentially, I had to agree that this was the essence of what I was suggesting. One of the most influential schools of thought which has informed my understanding of people is that related to the role of ‘affects’ on the way we think. A key lesson for me came from the work of Brian Massumi, and the idea that the ‘rational’ thoughts that we have are always the output of a continuing back-and-forth between the impact of our environments and external stimuli (the ways we are affected by the outside world) with the memories and knowledge which constitute our character. In terms of its relevance here, it is a lesson which marketing and advertising bods of the big-bads are on the cutting edge of - it ain’t what you sell, it’s the way that you sell it which is crucial: convince people, even in the crudest possible terms, that what you have is desirable then they will find themselves buying it even if they have no need for it (even better, they will invent reasons for needing it after they’ve bought it). We are, in spite of our complexities, very simple beings in many ways: use colours that are widely well-received, words which are of the moment or make people smile, and the positive association created, no matter how subconsciously, has achieved its goal.
A question that stands out, however, given that people are not completely unthinking and ignorant of rational arguments, is to what extent it’s possible to change the stimuli which give people a positive association and lead to certain actions. Should you use the lowest-common-denominator approach of selling to the most obvious and basic instincts you perceive, even if you completely disagree with the tendencies they sell to? Advantage: reaching the widest possible audience with the message you want to promote. Disadvantage: reinforcing stereotypes and messages you are not so keen on.
This advert, as discussed by UK ethical fashion entrepreneur Esther Freeman, is a good example of the kind of dilemma I’m talking about. (Question: brilliantly effective marketing campaign or hopelessly undermining itself and women’s struggles everywhere?)
This question reappears contantly for me, not least in Kris and Gabe’s disagreements on this blog. In this form, it appears as a reformulation of a classic division amongst progressives and those pushing for change: should you compromise on some issues (e.g. focusing on price to better sell ethical products) to the detriment of other issues (e.g. drawing attention away from price towards people and real costs)?
This understanding makes it a question of political philosophy: do the ends justify the means? From an ethical point of view, is consequentialism (what you do) or deontology (the way that you do it) more important?
The backflip slamdunk change model incorporates both sides of the debate under the helpful umbrella of affects: the way you do things is fundamentally important to the emotional response that it creates, but what’s more important is to recognise that ‘rational’ reasoning emerges out of this response, and that ‘rational’ elements of messages may also carry emotional impact. For Massumi, and other slightly less comprehensible theorists like Deleuze and Guattari, our understanding of the universe is based on the resonance that images, messages and the external world has with our bodies - bodies made from the affects of the sum total of our experiences.
This ‘sum total’ viewpoint suggests to me that not only do you have to do things in a way which is in line with the ethics of what you’re promoting, but that if you can give the right message in the right way to the right people its effect will be profound - the key here is to search for the highest common denominators. And a backflip slamdunk would seem to me the highest possible.
If you’re in the UK, chances are you bank with one of the “Big 5” (Natwest, Barclays, HSBC, Santander and RBS hold the vast majority of our accounts). Why? Probably because they’re big - they’re everywhere, so it’s easy to open an account, and they’ve got mahusive advertising budgets etc. etc. Also, perhaps, because their unscrupulous investment techniques have, in the past, been highly profitable. Apart from the occasional global financial meltdown.
The problem is, being so big means they can do essentially what they want (especially, perhaps, if they’re deemed ‘too big to fail’), and what they want is to make loadsa loadsa money. Amazingly to everyone, in 2008 (and apparently also in the 30s) we discovered that some people making loads of money isn’t the same as a healthy economy, and further that it might actually make you inclined to make money from propogating unhealthy economies (who knew?).
But what was really amazing was that - partly because the Big 5 are about as bad as each other when it comes to making a quick buck by any means necessary, and partly because we are lazy and ill-informed - although we (the people) Occupied and got thoroughly outraged at bankers’ pay, we didn’t actually put any economic pressure on the banks as consumers.
It was to address this gap in activism that Move Your Money Month was founded - to encourage people to put their money where their mouths are and switch their accounts away from the Big 5. I am pleased to say that last month I was inspired by how easy and straightforward they reminded me the process was and finally took a plunge I’d been meaning to for a while.
At least, it was with these intentions that I told HSBC, in no uncertain terms, that Yes please I very much would like a ‘close your account form’ and sent it back promptly.
I was then going to write this:
“So it’s goodbye HSBC - I was lured into your student account because I wanted the overdraft and the 100 MP3s you were offering (how I wish I’d got the railcard offered with Natwest’s student account), and now I can finally set you free.
[Pic of me snipping card gleefully in two here]
Ahhhhh. That feels much better.”
Instead, they sent me the ‘But You Still Owe Us Money’ form. At first, convinced of a conspiracy, I was outraged. Then it turned out I did owe them money.
So the saga continues, and let this serve as classic example of how life - in particular, a form of life where it’s easy for me to accumulate debt and continue putting money in the pockets of those whose activities I find ethically repulsive - gets in the way of the ethical decisions we’d like to take. And I’ve got it pretty easy, which makes it easier to understand the objections that many raise on the exclusivity of ethical consumerism.
BUT DO NOT BE DESPONDENT, residents of the world wide web. You do not have to be as hopeless at managing your finances as I am! YOU CAN make the switch, and you should (that is, if you don’t like: the earth dying screaming, recurrent financial collapse and instability, bankers and banks dodging tax whilst earning mega-packets) because as hardened money-makers, money (and especially not giving it to them) is one of the few things they understand. I will be paying off HSBC and getting well rid, and when I do I will inspire you all with pictures of me offending a debit card as best I can.
THE THING THAT HAPPENED (by CauseEffectAgency)
though, to be honest, my reaction was visceral and emotional. I think what bugs me the most is my own culture, the fact that the most successful recent attempt to raise awareness about a human rights abuse in Africa starred and was narrated by a handsome white man, came in the form of a high-concept, high-cost video with a booming rock soundtrack, titled to hook the 2012 US presidential race, and happily simplified its cause for the sake of an easy-to-absorb and appealing emotional narrative (protagonist, antagonist, easy solution, your role).
And it worked. Or is so far. If this is the new recipe for engaging Americans in the problems of the rest of the world, this makes me sad. Are we only able to engage with others’ suffering through the glitzy flashing lens of our own popular culture?
The idea that Americans can only speak out if they have 20 years of experience on the ground is as silly as it is undemocratic. Citizens have every right to express concerns about a tragedy far from our shores while expecting that appropriate expertise will be brought to bear by their elected officials.
Invisible Children have never been cut from the traditional Washington cloth — their advocacy is designed to appeal to young Americans. The group’s strength lies in their ability to connect with folks outside the beltway about something that doesn’t have a direct or immediate impact on American lives. To this end, Invisible Children has succeeded. They’ve connected with and inspired millions of Americans to be active and engaged on an issue that has historically been on the periphery, at best, of American foreign policy priorities.
Their grassroots mobilization contributed overwhelmingly to the passage of The 2009 LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act — the most widely cosponsored bill Africa-related piece of legislation in the last 37 years — and more generally to the ongoing prioritization the LRA throughout State and USAID, as well as to the President’s decision to deploy U.S. military advisors to central Africa. Of equal importance is that Invisible Children also supports an innovative radio program in the remote regions of eastern Congo. This program collects information about LRA movements, abductions, and defections and is often better and more up-to-date than the information obtained by the United States government.
In my role with Ethicodes I’m designing a mobile game-type app for ethical and sustainable consumption. In my professional life, I’ve been a designer and programmer for web and mobile. That means I have the unique experience of having been on both the management / programmer table. The work I do for Ethicodes can’t be done alone, and I’ll admit, there are (many) elements of programming that are better left to the specialists. In my juggling of these two worlds, I’ve come across the paradox of social enterprise technology. Most often it comes down to money, understanding and respect. Here’s some advice from both sides of the table.
Part I: Tips for Social Entrepreneurs
- Enthusiasm is contagious, but not that contagious. You are the idea guys, we all understand that. You are doing what you are doing because of a love of something - sustainable energy, or poverty alleviation, or accessible education - but don’t expect everyone to share your enthusiasm. And more importantly, don’t expect technology professionals to do what they do for free. It’s true, if you find the right person, with the right values and skillset you can get a lot done for very little money. But understand that this is very rare.
- Know what you are talking about (or find someone who does). A viable app, website or product includes a lot of moving parts. It is your job to plan and research which of those parts are needed. For example, if you are creating a web product you’ll need to know what platforms you are working on (Web, iOS, Android, etc.), what language you are working in (C+, XHTML, Flash, Ruby, etc.), and how users interact with it (login through Facebook or Twitter, create an account, etc.) to name a few.
- Rome wasn’t built in a day. In some cases you’ll have a product that gets developed and launched and doesn’t change ever, but only if you work at Microsoft. As a social entrepreneur you’re probably going to look for agile or iterative development, meaning you decide on a basic goal for a beta product and expand out from there based on a constant feedback loop. Don’t begin a programming request with “and then fireworks shoot out of the screen.” Decide what kind of core you need and worry about the bells and whistles later.
- Respect talents and time (and expect the same). If you are talking to a programmer, it’s because they are better at programming than you are. Contrary to popular beliefs, they are not kids geeking out in their parents garage anymore. They have invested a massive amount of their lives, and usually a lot of education, getting to know code. They would also be happier spending your meeting time watching Futurama. In order to respect their time and talent, be specific about what you want out of meetings and how long you will be there. If you are talking to a back end Ruby programmer, it’s a waste of everyone’s time talking about the UI and CSS, or worse yet, monetization and business practices.
- Know who you are talking to and what they can do. Again, if you are talking to a Ruby programmer, have a basic grasp of what that means and stick to it. If you are unsure what different roles, languages or processes are or what might be needed, get a technical project manager or ask around. Great tech products are not made by one person anymore, that hasn’t happened since 1998. Jut because you’ve found one programmer doesn’t mean you should expect them to do everything. In most cases they can’t and in all cases, they don’t want to.
- Appeal to desire to do good, but make it clear that you understand what the kind of commitment entails. You are asking for a lot of results, for what is usually - in the early startup days - not a lot of money. There are oodles of private companies with squillions of dollars looking for great programmers. Sell yourself as a growth opportunity and most importantly as an opportunity to try all the cutting edge stuff they wouldn’t have the freedom to play with in a big organization.
- Stock options, student ‘samples’ and hack-a-thons are lame. It’s not 2000 anymore. Developers see right through stock options and internships. Anyone who was around for the boom can paper their walls with useless stock options, and anyone who is younger than that has been in high enough demand since high school that a job that offers only these are laughable. I’ve also noticed an alarming trend toward requiring sample code tests for job applications. Code quality is important and should be tested before a hire, and third party tests like those offered at CodeEval are totally valid. However, when you request a sample that does exactly what a piece of your product is supposed to do, it is highly suspect. The same goes for design—when you are looking for someone to redesign your website and you require a “test” that forces someone to redesign your website before they are even hired, we are all on to you. Hack-a-thons—which are sometimes interesting meetups of like-minded individual, are also quickly becoming shorthand for “write my code for free.”
- Don’t steal code. This seems obvious, but it needs to be said. If you are using other people’s work without attribution or share-alike permission, you are undermining the people you are relying on most. If there is a bit of code that you think would be useful or modifiable, you’ll get surprisingly positive results by writing to the author (yes, coders are ‘authors’) and asking if they want to work with you.
Stay tuned next week for the other side of the table—Tips for Developers. I’d love to hear from other management / developers about experiences, tips, and frustrations in the comments.
Gabe Scelta is the Innovation Director at Ethicodes and Research Associate at the Ethiopian Global Initiative. A fellow at the Emerge Venture Lab, Gabe’s deep knowledge of the technology industry keeps Ethicodes pushing the frontiers of the fair trade industry. He holds a master’s degree from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and a bachelor’s degree from Boston University. He lives in New York City.
Related articles
- How to Compensate Next-Gen Venture Capitalists (christine.net)
- How to Hire a Programmer (codinghorror.com)
- Now marketers need to be technologists ? P L E A S E (newmediaandmarketing.com)
- Call yourself a ‘brogrammer’? Then get the hell away from me. (jgc.org)
Invisible Children is doing a great job on the KONY2012 campaign. A great cause and a great use of social media.
The Qualitative in the Quantitative
A lot of horrified breathtaking accompanied the checking of my finances - I’m hoping this process will help to limit that in future. This is, apart from being my first serious attempt to monitor the ethics of my consumption, my first serious attempt to monitor my finances generally. As the people at MyBnk will tell you, this in itself can be seen as an ethical action (as someone who is very much in debt, it makes sense that learning about being more responsible with money is the Right Thing to Do). But just to be clear, it doesn’t get any points, as this blog is only about the action of spending, rather than any other ethical actions I might get up to (not to say that it wouldn’t be an interesting project, just that it’s a much bigger one than I have the tools for right now).
Looking back over my spending (at least that recorded by my banks - cash is out of the equation for the time being), there were some immediately obvious big spends that are going to dramatically affect my score.
Firstly, there’s rent. I’m not absolutely against paying rent or landlords in general, but I do resent paying money for poor service - this seems to me to be rewarding bad behaviour, especially as I also secretly (well not so much any more) harbour the opinion that simply earning money from investments isn’t really an ethical way of earning your keep. I mean, maybe it is IF you are providing an ethically sound way for people to live, but our house is poorly insulated, poorly serviced, and we are reliant on some hopeless estate agents who we have to pester CONSTANTLY in order to achieve any improvements. That is neither good ethics, but sadly it seems to be good business for them. Therefore, my rent gets a score of -1. As the single biggest expense on my monthly outgoings it’s going to require some concerted effort on absolutely everything else to balance it out: the long and short of it is that I’ll have a regular score of -180 to beat.
In terms of other regular payments I make, there’s my mobile phone bill to Orange, then there’s the house broadband/phone line bill to BT. Both of these companies score less than 10 (out of a possible 20) on my go-to guide, Ethical Consumer. But with mobile networks there is no clear Best Buy, i.e. no alternative that is clearly more ethical. So let’s call it neutral for Orange, and -1 for BT.
Then there’s transport. Transport For London I’m calling neutral. My bike will be +1 as and when I spend some money on it, but for now London Transport is neither as good as a bike, nor as bad as a car. I take a mix of buses and Tubes, but given that London’s energy procurement isn’t especially green the one is probably just as bad as the other. In other transport news, I took a coach in January for the 94.8 miles to my home town and a train back, and got a coach there and back this past weekend. Although the coach and train provide different figures for carbon emmissions, I’m going to call all ‘public’ transport like this a +1. I could in theory have driven, and National Express coaches scraped into a semi-respectable score on Ethical Consumer, but also, as becomes clear from the food section, it’s a much larger and more complicated project to score individual items than to group them under categories.
As far as food goes, in theory we get all of our food for the house communally, and we’ve been trying to implement a no-Tesco policy with the food we buy, and to get a veggie box from some local organic farm. In the meantime, we get all of our veg from the local market (+1 for supporting local business?, or -1 for not knowing where it comes from and probably not buying organic?), and we get all our milk and eggs delivered (again, the eggs are free range but neither is organic, although we recycle all the bottles, so that’s worth a point, right?). But enough general background - what did I actually spent of my own cash this month?
Ahem. £37.83 at Tesco. IT’S JUST SO CONVENIENT! Damn them! As a slight consolation, no supermarkets got more than 7 out of 20. Nevertheless, Tesco are at the bottom of a bad bunch. But should I split the score between Tesco and the specific products I bought? I ask, because I know that I usually get organic milk from Tesco (which we don’t get delivered), and other Fairtrade or organic products. One of the principles behind this experiment is that spending money can count as an ethical thing to do because you are supporting the better practices- but what should you do when you support both the bad AND the good? Or the good VIA the bad? Maybe a helpful way of thinking is to go slightly beyond the money-as-votes-for-ethical-practices philosophy and incorporate what is going to be most helpful in me continuing to increase my ethical impact. As far as that goes, given that another part of the impetus for this blog was to motivate myself to do better, I think I’m going to be cruel to be kind. Tesco, if you read this - you start getting points when you top Ethical Consumption’s league table (it’s actually quite straightforward - improve wood sourcing and animal testing policies, stop using non sustainable palm oil and selling factory farmed meat, stop violating Bangladeshi garment workers, commit to sourcing gold and diamonds responsibly, erm… ok the list goes on but that surely just means it’s easier to make big improvements, non?). I could maybe give myself points for organic/free range meat and eggs, were it not for the endless list of other unethical practices that Tesco is unwilling or unable to address - by using their service it’s almost a tacit approval of their uncaring attitude…
On the plus sides, there was the meal for two at a local organic restaurant which was a lovely birthday treat to help balance the bad. And here I have to make some decisions which highlight the difficulty of quantifying ethics - does my local pub (which strives to be organic, and is always free range with its meat) get +1 or +2 (it’s better than Tesco, and better than neutral in that it’s visibly trying to do business in a more ethical way, but is it an example of Best practice?)? They weren’t offsetting any of their carbon emissions or anything, but is that a reasonable, sustainable expectation?
Someone else who isn’t, as far as I’m aware, attempting to carbon offset, but who I nevertheless feel justified in giving a whopping +2, is my favourite London food store, Unpackaged. I had some vouchers from my sister for my birthday (thanks, sis!), but spent another £25 on top of that as there’s just so much tasty stuff.
Finally, the irregulars. This month, I bought a screen so that I can watch video without putting it right in front of my face, and play XBOX (there are a number of reasons I don’t want to get into scoring the ethics of my actions). I bought it from a second-hand store which, while I don’t necessarily buy their recycling-focused greenwash, did at least seem better than buying something new. And although it’s a Samsung (getting a shameful 5.5 from Ethical Consumer for their TVs and their computer screens), I was lured into buying it because it’s an LED model (I seemed to remember Ethical Consumer calling it “the technology of the future in terms of energy consumption”), and so saves on energy as well as cutting out mercury. So, although I felt pretty pleased at my energy-saving impetus at first, the corporate social and environmental irresponsibility demonstrated by Samsung means that I think I’ll have to leave it at neutral. Nuts. Oh, and then there was the HDMI cable made by … well I don’t have the packet any more, but I bought it at Pound Plaza and it seems like a safe bet that (as a search for ’ “pound plaza” CSR ’ returned no hits on Google) I don’t think I’ll be earning any points on that. And given this blog’s commitment to moving away from business as usual, and Pound Plaza’s commitment to stackin’ ‘em high and selling ‘em cheap, it makes sense to lose as many points as I dare. Double nuts.
As a consolation prize, my subscription to Ethical Consumer went through this month. Given their centrality as a resource to this experiment, I feel justified in giving them and me a healthy +2.
Number Crunching
Utilities: MoPhone @ £26 x 0 = 0
Broadband/Landline @ N x -1 = -TBC
Rent @ £250 x -1 = -250
Gas and Electricity @ N x -2 = -TBC
Transport: Coach @ £14.50 x +1 = +14.50,
train @ £23.80 x +1 = +23.80
Coach @ £11 x +1 = +11
Groceries / Food: £37.83 x -2 = -75.66
£25.00 x +2 = +50
£30.20 x +1 = +30.20
Luxuries: 0 x £170 = 0
-1 x £5.99 = -5.99
+2 x £29.95 = +59.90
Overall score = -136.26
Conclusion
This score must be seen as highly partial - not only have I left cash payments out because I have got into the habit of throwing receipts away and they’re not so easily reviewed from a computer, but there are some items on my bills that (worryingly) I don’t recognise. Nevertheless, it’s a challengingly poor baseline to work with. Under the current system, knowing that I have to ‘offset’ the implicitly unethical payments to rubbish landlords (and fossil fuel burners when I work out what my bills are for gas and electricity) means that I can’t get complacent when I buy locally sourced or organic groceries - especially as these are easily counterbalanced by a convenient stop at Tesco’s or the local corner shop. On a more optimistic note, knowing that switching my consumption from a less ethical provider to a more ethical one can dramatically change the tide of things is encouraging, should be a motivator to change habits.
While using money as a key multiplier in this way has its drawbacks (does it make any sense to think of paying a landlord as 10 times more unethical than buying an electrical cable? Of course not - in that frame, quantifying ethics starts to lose any meaning), it does at least give a sense of the scale of my consumption in various areas, and draw attention to those areas where I can have a greater or lesser impact. This is, in itself, an aid to ethical consumption.
A CHALLENGE
This is the first of 14 posts (one a month, this intro and a conclusion/summary) on the ethics of my consumption, as I try and quantify it and measure my progress for a year. I live and work in London and have a professional and personal interest on measuring the ethics of consumption habits, and how it’s possible to improve our the impact of our consumption, or to incorporate ethics more directly into the mechanics of how we live in complex, industrialised, globally interconnected societies so that our consumption is as ethical as the rest of our activities.
I thought a bit of background on where I’m coming from might be useful:
Firstly, I’ve been thinking about a game where people would get points for doing nice things and lose points for doing bad things, kind of like a real-life Karma. As I’ve been working on issues of ethical consumption recently, I thought that points for purchases made a good starting point, and the kind of work I’ve been doing means that I’ve mainly been thinking about how this could work as an actual game that someone could play online or on their phone. I thought that exploring how you might turn real life into points for myself might be a good starting point.
Secondly, I recently came across Quantified Self, a kind of collaborative individual statistics gathering/sharing website. Generally people use the site for monitoring themselves either for pure personal interest (like “OMG I drank 3 thousand espressos in July/August, but only 2000 in September/OCtober!”), for some form of academic interest, or for some kind of self-improvement experiment. Sometimes a combination of the three. Anyway, whether or not Quantified Selfers are interested in ethical consumption, it provoked my interest.
When these two streams of thought converged, I thought that keeping a blog seemed like a good way of engaging others with the process whilst generating publicity around what I feel to be an important issue. For myself, I hope to live out some of the realities of this issue by challenging myself to consume as ethically as I can, to achieve the most impact simply by spending my pounds and pennies in some places as opposed to others.
POINTS MEAN PRIZES
All that remains, then, is to detail how this points system is going to work. Should I use the numbers generated by others researching the ethics of products? Or should I make up my own system? Quantified self had some useful tips for beginner self-quantifiers: use SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals (I remember these from rugby league training, hopefully I’ll be better at consumption than I was at being a Winger), and keep it simple.
Let’s start with the easy side: what am I measuring?
- Things that I buy with my own money. Every month I’m going to lose points for paying money to a landlord and estate agents, but council tax I’m calling neutral. You’re probably already getting a feel for how my politics informs my ethics. I’ll also be losing points for paying for gas and electricity from Npower. If we can ever convince the landlord to switch provider, maybe that’ll put me on neutral. The main focus of my experiment will be on food and luxuries.
Harder to answer is: how am I measuring them?
- Creatively. I have never done this before, and I’m not expecting to create a perfect system for scoring ethics, sceptical as I am about enumerating ethics in the first place. I am really experimenting in what works, what doesn’t, and what the challenges are in measuring, recording and communicating my consumption and what I perceive to be the ethical dimensions of it.
- Not as ethically as you’d like. Anthropology shows that ethics are culturally-relative at the very least (and individually variant within the groupings of people that we’ll call ‘cultures’ or ‘societies’ for sake of convenience). Therefore, what I find to be an ethical decision is unlikely to match entirely with how you would do things. I am fundamentally interested in this difference, as well as in the similarities, and what these may reveal about contemporary ethics.
- With these caveats in mind, I’m going to follow QS’s advice and keep it as simple as possible. As a starting point, I’m going to try and score things like this: stuff I buy will be either Best, better, ok, bad, or worst, scoring either +2, +1, 0, -1, or -2 respectively. This score gets multiplied by £X to give a slightly better weighting to the results.
- I also need to keep in mind that consumption in itself isn’t necessarily ethical. Buying luxury goods that are carted over the world at great environmental and financial cost, even if made in fair conditions, is, for me, less ethical than buying a local equivalent good, or simply not buying anything at all. How can I design the system to take this into account? One way is to differentiate between “stuff I would buy anyway” (essentials), and “stuff that I don’t Really Need” (luxuries). This distinction is fuzzy at best, and I suspect will be one that I keep coming up against as I try and define what it means to be an ethical consumer.
Quantified Ethical Consumption Month 1 - January 13th-February 13th, is coming up in a week’s time, with my new Samsung monitor, a variety of different food stores, and a number of different coffees in the mix. Game on.
