Consumerism for Change

TEXT & ILLUSTRATION FILIp ZAWADKA

We all know this feeling. A new package just arrived, one you ordered just long enough ago, so that you aren't completely sure of its contents. A small element of surprise as a cherry on top of having your brand-new gadget. Best of all, the satisfaction of unwrapping plastic with one swift motion.

The enjoyment is followed by a brief moment of doubt. Do I really need it, or did I just act on impulse? How much exploitation and pollution came into making this product? It’s nearly impossible to track every single thing that goes into the production of the things we buy, so this brief moment of disbelief is hard to avoid.

One solution to this is holding our trust in the companies that actually care about the ethics of commodity production. For example, “Fairphone”, a company born out of an awareness campaign, aimed at changing the phone market from within. The phone's sheer existence is proof that our electronics could be created while respecting the rights of workers, have lower CO2 emissions than usual and last much longer.

Unfortunately, our economic system is expansionary by nature, so the only true solution to ethical consumption is minimal consumption. Even the Fairphone owners state that the most ethical phone is the one that you already have, discouraging people from buying their phone if they don’t need to. This and many other practices of the company go against what we would consider a profitable way of maintaining a business. We are not used to commodity producers telling us not to buy their product. This feels very strange for a very good reason. We are used to the complete opposite. Advertisers spamming us with the reasons why we actually need the thing that they produce and then limiting the lifecycle of the product just so we need to buy a new version as soon as it’s released.

In response to that, the simple living movement was created (today better known as minimalism). A lifestyle showing people that through internal perseverance they can overcome urges to buy and live only with the things they absolutely need. Unfortunately, the word need is critical here and form a few additional problems. How do we define a “need” and is it actually defined by us? Can we trust ourselves that our perception of the need isn’t enforced by the companies themselves? In the case of the things that we do actually need, like for example food, how can we, as consumers, make sure that it’s ethical?

The easy and unfortunate answer is that we can’t. One of the movements aiming to mitigate this issue is veganism. It employs an utilitarian viewpoint that we ought to minimize the suffering caused by our consumer choices. This is a great metric, which we could follow to make our decisions, but it also has a few problems. Can we trust companies to accurately mark the ethical food? An example of the problem could be Häagen-Dazs ice cream produced by Nestle. Some of those products containing chocolate are marked as vegan, even though the company making them faced allegations of child slavery in their production of chocolate. This fundamentally disagrees with what most would consider "vegan", yet it’s labelled as such. Nevertheless, some might argue that since the ice cream doesn’t contain any animal products, the label could be still considered accurate under a different definition of the word.

A conclusion is that, while conscious consumerism is definitely an effective way to limit our negative impact, it’s unfortunately only that. A smaller negative impact is still a negative impact. Keeping in mind that our good intentions can be the next tool for marketing arsenal, consumer choices without corresponding political stance, can leave us with good intentions alone.