It is time for us to demand change …

It is time for us to demand change …

We are often a selfish race. As a society, we sometimes care more about the touch of a paper straw on our lips than the long-term damage that the plastic equivalent will do within our oceans, or in the energy it took to make and distribute them.

We think little about the destruction of our rainforests for palm oil for the sake of a smooth lipstick. Why? Just because it is all hidden away from us. We have created a factory world, and where we do not see what goes on in the factory, but only see the shiny new car at the end. We are driven by packaging, by advertising, by supermarkets, by branding … we have become a slave to the machine. We are tracked for our data, and it is our data that oils the machine — and sustains it.

It is an ever increasing cycle downwards. The machine learning that processes our data cares little about our deep beliefs and our ethics, and can only see us as identifiers on purchases. Most things, too, are driven for profit, even if it has a long-term effect on our world. If we don’t see the effects that our purchases have, we care little about them.

Sometimes it feels a bit like The Truman Show, where there’s a whole lot of things going on, that we just don’t see. Our world is created around us, for us, and to make us happy. But, if you saw a picture of tree of being chopped down in the rain forest for the sake of your pizza dough, would you still buy it? If each product had the energy consumption of manufacturing and distribution rating on it, would you start to look at that rather than on the pretty branding?

We have become a factory world, and where little can be traced and audited, and we now need TV commercials to actually show us the wrong we are doing. Did you know that almost half of the packaged products we see in our supermarkets have palm oil in them? Have you recently seen the effect that palm oil production is having on rainforests? We have become a generally uncaring world, and where we think of the legacy that our society will have on our planet.

As individuals, we might think that our choices will have little impact on our world, but our actions as societies damage our planet at an ever-increasing rate. Unfortunately, none of us are blameless in the damage we do to our world. Virtually everything we consume is moved away from our sight, and where we cannot see the impact that our choices are having. The debate around palm oil is just one example of how naive we are in not understanding that every single thing that we do has some impact on our surroundings. We live in a “Not in my backyard” world.

The supermarkets are probably one of the sources of the blame, as they hide so much away from us, and where we are never really given the full facts and where we can never make a full proper decision and what is the most moral and ethic approach that we make on our purchases.

Cheaper is always better. Fresher is always the best. 20 different types of shampoo for every type of hair. Must re-hydrate, but not from the tap, but from the branded plastic bottle of water that has been shipped halfway across the planet.

And so, we need better ways of looking after this planet, and if the food manufacturers and supermarkets are not going to do it for us, we need to improve things as a society. We need technological change, and for our governments to provide full definitions and audit trails for our products. A simple approach is to implement an ONS (Object Naming System) in the same way that we have DNS. The details of the products for the ingredients and where they are sourced should not be hidden away from the consumer, but be free to be integrated, either for research or for others to write applications which properly define the impact that each product has on our planet:

There are two sets of strawberries in front of you, and you live in Edinburgh. One set our grown from a farmer in Fife, and who has a strong ethical statement on the usage of pesticides and in encouraging wild life within their farm, and the other set were grown in a factory setting, and shipped by many trucks and planes. The factory derived one has a consistent looking strawberry — as ones that don’t fit the model size are thrown away — and has a happy picture of a strawberry on it. Which will use chose? Without any additional information, you will probably walk off the factory-derived strawberry — as it’s a happy strawberry — and the supermarket marks it as another success for our factory world of smoke and mirrors. The local supplier has just been squeezed a bit more.

So why Blockchain? Well, the data on the products can be made available to anyone who wants it, and not just generalised on the labels (that we never read anyway, as they are often confusing). Companies can then start to write applications which provide the full details of products, and, at least, experts can analyse them for their sources, without relying on the supermarkets to investigate for us.

Governments of the world now need to open our world up, and put the citizen at the centre, and allow them to be better informed. Most of us care about our world, and legacy that we might leave. None of us are perfect, but at least we can try and improve things, and put the power back in the hands of the citizen. We are now in a digital era, so let’s use digital for good, rather than just for profit.

I leave you with this …

Please question more.