HELSINQI CREATIVE

The Transparency Race

Saturday, 30 January 2010

In this podcast, Ethical Corporation‘s Toby Webb and columnist Mallen Baker discuss CSR-ranking applications like GoodGuide, designed to give consumers a quick and easy way of choosing responsible, sustainable products.

The dream, of course, is of seamless point-of-sale transparency, which is great. The problem is the same old fundamental issue: CSR, sustainability, equitability — all these great matters are churning seas of rich, labile information that can’t be squeezed into the poor vessel of a single score without sacrificing all the juice. Part of that juice is your own judgment, your own values.

In other words we shift the question of trust from the producer to a rating entity. A timeless issue, as old as the existence of advocacy groups and scoring schemes and questions about their motives and legitimacy. The pitfall of tech is that it speeds us past those questions ever more easily and conveniently.

The fundamental issue in the Transparency Race is that misinformation (e.g. greenwashing) uses the same bandwidth as real information. This principle is the recurring bane of all who would trumpet the utopian promise of a given tech shift. Sometimes, yes, the game changes. It doesn’t get easier, or better. It gets different. Forward-thinkers will leverage the junctures, for good and for ill.

Is this a fatalistic view? By no means. It’s a reminder. We need to look at technological and other infrastructural shifts soberly, with two things in mind:

1. The first and most essential is that where we can make progress — where we can evolve and improve our lives, individually and collectively — is in the human mind and the human heart. That’s the prize to keep our eyes on.
2. The second is to remember not be seduced by the promises of tech, but to watch it avidly nonetheless, to seize the opportunities created in the shifts, so that we can leverage the junctures for good, in the service of item 1.

I’m thankful to groups and people like Ethical Corporation and Mallen Baker, among myriad others, as that’s the work they’re doing. It reminds us that it’s a Transparency Race — an Integrity Race — without a finish line. No killer app ever decides it. So it remains, as always, up to us to keep it on the right track.

(Thanks to Rob Bruer for Tweeting that EC podcast.)