Conversation

Replying to
When corporations pay off politicians and slap on ethics-washing labels of “free range” and “no sweatshop”... yeah, most walk away satisfied, if they cared to begin with. Most of the action has only produced theater over the last 20 years. But it doesn’t have to stop there.
1
9
The first wave of supply chain reform — the ethics-washing theater, 1995-2015 — was largely driven by passionate activist college students paying for overpriced degrees lacking both the competence to go deeper AND the self-awareness to interrogate their ethical impulses.
1
14
But don’t let contempt for the messenger blind you to the validity of the message. The set of “washing” labels produced by the ethics theater era: green, local, organic, cruelty-free, fair-paid, non-sweatshop, carbon-neutral, recycled was merely the MVP. The UI mock-up.
1
13
10 years later, a third of these activist kids turned into social media grifters writing woke-washing clickbait to make rent in overpriced cities. Another third had given up and turned normie or retreated in idealistic depression. But a last third got serious.
4
18
Covid-fragility collapse is vindication of the broad critique of industrial mode capitalism that drove left-anti-globalism activism of two decades. They got most of the details wrong, and their prescriptions (reactionary labor politics) are not even wrong. But credit where due.
1
21
The generation of millennial activist college kids from 10-20 years ago (just a little younger than me) who gave us our current state of play is now getting its first taste of political power. Their first attempts at reform (eg GND) have been mixtures of incompetence and grift.
1
12
BUT, there’s a minority that is doing the actual work. They’ve walked the fake-it-till-you-make-it path. They understand the problems, are interested in more than virtue signaling, and in solutions that go beyond reactionary labor politics and knee-jerk anti-globalism.
2
10
Perhaps most importantly, in the last 4 years, they’ve gotten a first taste of the adult political battles that will shape the rest of their lives: against ethno-nationalist extraction-oriented industrial capitalism. The anti-globalists on the right. Their evil twins.
1
9
The two sides share many elements of the diagnosis (hence the horseshoe-theory flipping between Trump and Bernie support. But otherwise they are poles apart. One side simply wants their shot at extraction. The other side wants a non-extractive approach to the economy.
1
13
This battle will mature, deepen, get 100x more serious, and dominate the next few decades. Chickenification is not an isolated pattern. It’s the fingerprint of global geopolitical and techno-socio-economic futures. Everywhere you see it, the war has arrived for real with Covid.
1
20
Show replies
Replying to
Nice sear! Yet I struggle with 500 dubiously *self* regulated chemicals that fall under "natural ingredients" in Just Egg and all the other vegetarian *processed* food. What's the middle way ?
1
Show replies
Replying to
I really don't get foods like avocado or chickpea. Why eat something that needs additional flavor to make it palatable. Why not just go straight to something that actually tates good.