Status updates: ethical imperative, signaling, or both?

-My thoughts on this day are already summed up in something I just posted to Facebook:

Yes, the NAACP attack should get more coverage. No, the fact that the Paris attack (killing 12, as vs thankfully zero, and with major international implications) is more in the news isn't unreasonable. Nor (ahem, Twitter) should it be interpreted as evidence that The Zionists control the media.

What else can I say? I could add that it's upsetting to me for personal reasons when the staff of a publication that takes a stand against political correctness gets massacred, seeing as I was working at such a place until recently, but I can't imagine anyone in their right mind not being horrified by this.

-Tangentially related: Some journalists responded to my article about Facebook's sharing imperative by asking for more information about where I stand regarding the ethics of refraining to speak out politically on Facebook/social media. I've been giving this a lot of thought, and here's how I see it, at this particular moment in time; thoughts may evolve, or become less rambling...

There's a certain impulse to dismiss political status updates as either smug or pompous, or, conversely, as evidence of a foolish lack of discretion (one never knows what might upset a current or future employer). Armchair commentary has never had a good name, but social-media activism somehow has a worse one, quite possibly because the people status-updating about how a horrible thing in the news is horrible aren't risking much, and may even be motivated by a desire to seem caring or plugged-in, yet may appear to think that they're somehow saving the world.  This had long, at any rate, been my own impulse. As I've believe I've mentioned once or twice before, I'm no great fan of personal-life overshare, and thus tend to be biased in favor of discretion.

But political status updates aren't the same as cover stories about one's own family drama. Yes, it may be "signaling" when people strive to seem plugged-in, but... people should be plugged-in. I'd rather live in a society that gently pressures people (at least those who can do so without losing their livelihood) to speak out, or just to share news stories, than in one that treats social media like a stuffy dinner party, where anything even mildly controversial is to be avoided.

I do feel strongly, however, that no individual should be condemned for withholding any sort of information from any social-networking site - or, indeed, for avoiding these sites altogether. Friend A isn't a racist for failing to post about Ferguson - I mean, Friend A may well be a racist, but that's not good evidence. Publications can be taken to task for ignoring a story, as - I suppose - can demographic groups. Not individuals.

-Also tangentially related: My Tablet profile of Corey Robin, which also deals with questions of social-media political speech, can be found here.

Well-made

-In what seems strange to call good news, it appears that most of the response to the Bangladesh factory collapse is not conflation of poor labor conditions with shoddy workmanship that our sort would never stand for. Yes, we should be aware of the connection between the clothing we wear and the clothing found in the rubble - i.e. that these factories produce our clothes. It leads to outrage, and - apparently! - to sensible articles in the mainstream press about what's to be done. But I'm pleased to see that this conversation hasn't gone the let's-change-how-we-shop route, a route that tends to take attention away from things that would actually prevent such tragedies in the future, and to direct it towards unrelated and relatively petty concerns, namely that clothing these days isn't stitched together as artisanally as it once was.

And in any case, voting with our dollars-or-euros-or-pounds probably won't do much, especially considering what that tends to mean, namely going with a store that happened not to be in this latest news report, but that in all probability sources its clothing the same way. Like, if you read that the Gap is bad, you might go to Zara instead, or vice versa. But if - categorical imperative-style - everybody did as "we" are supposed to and bought only second-hand or ethically-certified local-sustainable you-pay-a-bit-more-but-you-get-to-feel-good-about-yourself clothes, or not shopping, period, would that be the answer? It would effectively shut down garment industries abroad. And certain such industries might need to shut down temporarily - must companies leave Bangladesh? perhaps for a time - but if "we" treated this shift as a kind of lifestyle change and not a boycott until various issues were properly addressed, then yes, that would be not so wonderful for workers abroad. And this gets to bigger questions re: "local" - we do need to consider that there will be consequences for workers abroad if we decide that everything must be produced domestically.

And... today's running podcast was Elizabeth Cline on Fresh Air. On the supply end, she knows so much more than the rest of us, having actually gone to China and Bangladesh and done some impressive-sounding (something for the to-read list, the author herself having redeemed my sense of what the book would be about) research. As for demand, Cline says that she herself now shops far more ethically than she once did, and cites her outfit the day of the interview - which includes a pair of high-end, U.S.-made jeans. Cline argues that we should care more about garment quality - which fabrics, and how they're stitched together - and that our indifference to this explains how we come to have cheaply-made clothing in the first place.

And this is where she loses me. We're under an ethical obligation not to consume clothing produced in terrible conditions (albeit not at the level of individual consumers, see paragraphs above), but we're not at all under an ethical obligation to care if our clothing looks nice. This isn't like with food, where you're eating more healthily if you're not eating junk. What are the ethical consequences of wearing a badly-fitting t-shirt?

The problem, then, is almost that Westerners/Americans aren't materialistic enough. We don't fetishize our clothing. We've decided we have better things to think about. Which was really how I thought about it when Cline was lamenting the fact that her own mother never taught her how to sew. And I'm thinking, let's say she had. And let's say women were still expected to do all sorts of domestic chores themselves, at home. Would Cline have gone on to write this fascinating-sounding, internationally-researched book?

-I now can't wait to read Alison Pearlman's new book about food culture. From L. V. Anderson's review:

The food movement ran into trouble when it began insisting that good taste was also capital-G good: Food that is good for the environment, for animals, for workers, for community-building, and for health will also taste the best. The argument is seductive but specious—what tastes good to one person won’t taste good to another—and dangerous. In the final section of her book, Pearlman notes that food-focused publications have increasingly covered issues related to environmentalism, labor, and politics over the last decade—but only “as problems to be solved not by collective political action but by individual shopping choices—in other words, consumption.” If consumption is virtuous, only those with the economic means to consume discriminately can have virtue. Which is how restaurant menus became infected with the elite farm brand-names and modernist amuse-bouches that proclaim how much less accessible they are than the food of the masses. The less accessible, the better.

This this this this this, and also, this.

Demand UPDATED, TWICE

Once again, garment workers in Bangladesh have died en masse while producing cheap clothing for Westerners. These incidents are so awful that awful doesn't begin to describe it. Those who know how the garment industry works need to help us sort out what could be done to prevent such things from happening. The answer may or may not have anything to do with Western consumers voting with their dollars, euros, etc. If we can do something, we should. It's just not clear what. We can expect, though, another round of commentators announcing that "we" - ordinary consumers - need to stop demanding cheap clothes, as if it were that simple. At the risk of repeating myself, some things to keep in mind:

-We don't have any reason to believe paying $50 (say) or more for a t-shirt means the extra goes to workers, and not just to materials/brand/store rent/executives. Do we have reason to think J.Crew is better than H&M?

-We don't have any objective sense of what a t-shirt should cost. Our scale for this is based on what they do cost. So our sense that $15 (say) is "normal" comes from some being cheaper, some much more expensive. Maybe it turns out that $15 is half of what an ethically-produced t-shirt would need to cost, but we're not spending $15 on a t-shirt in order to be stingy. We just don't know that $15 is too cheap for a t-shirt, if indeed it is.*

-While there are some consumers who buy cheap clothes because it satisfies their lust for the newest trends, this is not what's motivating most shoppers. Most of us just notice that our clothing has worn out - which it has, either because it was poorly-made or because its cost relative to our budget permitted us to treat it carelessly - and buy new clothing. Yes, we (almost) all want to look of our era, but exceedingly few of us can even tell FW2012 from SS2013. I read fashion blogs on occasion... and I'd have no idea.

-If consumers aren't spending $30 (say) on ethical t-shirts, this isn't because of Zara-obsession, or because consumers as individuals demand to pay $15 and not a penny more, and if that kills hundreds of factory workers, so be it. It's because it's a research project to figure out which t-shirts are ethical. The sort of consumers who do care about this will know to be wary of greenwashing, and so will not blindly pay more for brands that give the impression of being the kinder choice.

*This comes up as well re: the horse meat scandal, that consumers ought to have known that very cheap "beef" was something else. When... no. How on earth would ordinary consumers know where the cheapness threshold is between low-quality cuts of low-quality cow-meat and that which wasn't cow to begin with?

UPDATE

If the comments here and here are any indication, indeed, "our" demand for cheap cheap cheap is responsible. And there's an aspect of this that's just complete snobbery - consumers who either want an excuse to shop high-end or, worse, who just can't wait to announce that low-income shoppers are not merely crass but bad people. There's sometimes a certain amount of (sometimes internalized) misogyny - the kind of shopping generally preferred by women (as vs. gadgets, guns) is inherently more frivolous. But here, snobbery seems the order of the day. (There's apparently this thing called, like, the British class system?)

The Guardian commenters sure do like that Primark, which I'm assuming is a cheap store over there akin to Old Navy, is implicated here, and for reasons with little to do with labor conditions: Writes one: "I hate Primark. It's a brawling zoo. On a shopping trip to London (I live abroad) I went to Primark on an errand for a friend. Never again. Heaving, sweaty, pushy. It was like a bad TV reality show, with hundreds of people shoving each other out of the way, grasping for the prize." Another: "Truly shocking, tragic news. I can`t bring myself to shop at Primark because of their absurdly low prices, but I know that most other high street retailers are not much (or at all) better." But... those places have nicer stuff, so? Another: "I doubt most of the people that shop at Primark and Poundland are that interested in ethics. We live in a selfish world."

Another, winning the missing-the-point award: "Primarks clothes always seem to shrink or fall apart after a few washes, so they're not cheaper in the long run. Plus their jeans never fit properly." And finally, the nail, the head: "I refuse to shop at Primark well for one its full of poor people but also their ethics are incongruous with the standards i set for myself."

And, eh. There's no fundamental human right to a varied wardrobe, and if whichever necessary behind-the-scenes reforms are enacted and that means clothing costs more, well, that will be harder on those with stricter budgets. But given our current situation, those who spend more per item don't hold any particular moral high ground.

UPDATE 2

So the answer isn't condemning consumer stinginess. Nor, however, is it reacting to catastrophes of this scale as if they're no big deal. Even if the underlying argument there is sound, which, not convinced, but gosh, kind of a lot of people died there. It doesn't take that many words to acknowledge that.

So much for our species

Between the Philadelphia "doctor," the Boston attack in which an eight-year-old child was among those killed, and the recent revelation that a former Stuyvesant librarian (with an interesting history) may have been mixed up with the so-called "cannibal cop," this is hell-in-a-handbasket time. It's too much horrible to process. Hoping for justice all around.