Povertyjacking, Fearjacking, Sympathyjacking: Parasites Spamming a Noble Cause

Onion Magazine, October 2009

Lou Reed died Sunday.  Saturday night, I watched Steve McQueen in Papillon, my favorite movie of the early 1970s.   I read the book in Junior High School.   Steve McQueen died at 50 years old.

I'm 51.  So let me take a few minutes to write down what I'd call my "nudge the world" contribution.  Because "e-waste" is a debate about something people have already discarded and want to check off a mental list, it's over.

I'm not being smart or trying to be pulling my part
And I'm not gonna wear my heart on my sleeve
But you know people get all emotional
And sometimes they just don't act rational
And y'know, they think they're just on TV  
- Street Hassle, Lou Reed

What we have to expose is the "jacking" or "hijacking" of our collective compassion.  Our species has either evolved or been blessed with the ability to nurture, to care about others, to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.  But we are not blessed with omniscience.  So we have to choose what we care about, or let others choose for us.  Social cognitive dissonance creates a vacuum, which is easily filled by "celebrity experts".

What did we care about, and when did we care about it?

The blog noted Chevron Oil's titilating exploitation of the poverty aversion in May 2012, and other blogs have noticed, too.  "We agree".  Embrace the poster child image, get in front of it, own it.  Whether it's a small NGO with half-baked "statistics", or a big oil drilling natural resources in Africa, a certain number of people are going to get "cognitively dissonanced" (to verbization) out of caring.

Chevron Economist Ads

Below is chart credited to someone in the "art of self promotion" business.   Don't really care to give the guy a hyperlink, it looks like he wrote his own Wikipedia entry.  But you have to give him credit, he is correct in the life of a news story, and the opportunity between when a story becomes popular and people start to form opinions, or care about it.

As the chart shows, there's almost an art to "riding the wave" of social guilt, of channeling the "caring" to your own cause.  The African Arguments blog (Diana Jeter) taught me the phrase "parasites of the poor", reminding us to do the shakeout, in the end, of how much of the money goes back to the poster child's family.  In the math of exploitation, tinkerer trade is more balanced than either raw material mining (resource curse) or Basel Action charities, or even textiles and contract manufacturing.  More of the value of the sea container of monitors winds up in the hands of the Egyptians, Nigerians, Indonesians, Malaysians, Chinese, etc. Tinkerers or GOCs (Geeks of Color) than drilling, assembly, or even USAID.

But today's blog isn't about the math, or the Economics.  It's about how to hijack the white guilt as a force to kill the tinkerer's "gray market" and "white box factories", and how you, too, can put BAN's pictures on your website and show how much you care, with absolutely no accountability for the royalties the E-Steward branding costs your company.

The chart is about hijacking or "newsjacking" media attention, about the art of inserting yourself as an expert in order to catch the tailwind of public attention, and the benefits of whatever those eyeballs, clicks, or awareness gives you.   If your goal is to become a "celebrity expert", there is an art to that.  And most of us have a distaste for someone who plays the system this way, it's a single surf, an opportunistic ride of the wave.  We hope that the reporters, or the followers of the story, give more credit to people who have been "in the trenches", "boots on the ground", who somehow "deserve" the attention they accumulate.

Charm Offensive

Being charming and being offensive at the same time is tricky.   It's also fascinating, an entire Hollywood genre.

Anti-slavery advocate John Brown may be my hero... he created a space for Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas to work inside.   But if you don't have a popularity guru, and aren't part of a Lincoln-F.Douglas team, it does help to build up chits, credits, and bitcoins of goodwill.  Count your cultural ammo before you embark on something really worth being contrary over.  It's not a secret, but it has to be a habit, like a banker saving interest, or a cowboy counting his bullets.

Sometimes we discover an injustice in our group, and we have to buy or earn attention to it, until we recruit our Great Communicator like Abe Lincoln, Mark Twain, or Frederic Douglas.

Until then, how do we promote justice while remaining acceptably affable?   How do we communicate the need for change to people who aren't really in the business and whose attention we are borrowing?  It's kind of like selling Civil Rights Movements at a Little Rock Garden Club meeting, or Women's Suffrage to a Chicago Country Club, in 1925.

Take note of what you are spending with this Charm Econ earnings report by Sebastian Drake.

13 Characteristics of Likeable People by Sebastian Drake

1. Smiling - 

2. Eye contact – 

3. Touch – 

4. Not talking about yourself – 

5. Not talking too much - 

6. Empathy – 

7. Not trying to impress – 

8. Showing praise and appreciation – 

9. Never criticizing, ever, for any reason –

10. Not trying to fix other peoples’ problems – 

11. Eliminate negativity - 

12. Never complain –

13. Never impose weakness on others –

Maybe we can assign earnings per day to each habit and treat it like a checklist.  Follow these steps, and be less unpopular.  But when is Charm over-rated?

What I do at the Beach: Masters in Capitalism

This doesn't really fit in a blog.   And like many of my college papers, it was written at one sitting (I used a typewriter with white out and being able to re-write a paragraph was rare). Sometimes I do this and park it for months, and eventually publish a "robin masterpiece" like Monkeys Running the Environmental Zoo.  Sometimes I do it in one sitting at a place like Motherboard.TV and an editor there helps me to produce "Why We Should Export Our Electronic 'Waste' To China and Africa.", which becomes subject of a documentary on European cable news.

I haven't reread this at all, so buyer beware.  Here's my attempt at relational relativity applied to Marxism and development economics.   It was too windy at the beach. (pun intended).

Cleaning Up in Capitalism:  Relative Aspirational Pyramids
by Robin Ingenthron, July 21 2012.  Written in Le Barcares, France.


In journalism, they say you need to know your audience.  I'm obviously not a journalist, and don't think I'm competing in "free content" for the news writing community.  But I think there are a lot of works I admire where the author (e.g. de Tocqueville) probably didn't exactly "know his (future) audience".


I'm also re-reading Herman Hesse's Siddhartha.  In chapter one, he's an arrogantly admirable son of a brahmin (SOB).

The word Siddhartha is made up of two words in the Sanskrit language, siddha (achieved) + artha (meaning or wealth), which together means "he who has found meaning (of existence)" or "he who has attained his goals".^[3] 

"How E-Waste Benefits Your Children"

It has always been "think about the children", perhaps.

Programming was made for children.   OEMs used it to sell the appliance to the parents.



So, the electronics get sold to us via "cognitive risk" - that our children will be left behind socially and intellectually if they don't get the electric gadget.  Then, if we sell it for reuse (so someone doesn't buy a brand new one), we are sold the cognitive risk the "e-waste" poses to the poor black children.

It's all about consumption, selling consumption any way they can.  We own stocks and retirement IRAs in their corporations and can't complain too loudly about the way they market sans sustainability.  And ENGOs are really not any different at all in their use of this "think of the children" marketing.  But we can be smart about what panics us.

I'm from the WWF generation - that's "World Wildlife Fund".  That's when Greenpeace was powered by Jacques Cousteau, and caring about endangered species and whales.   It's a dicey topic to debate which we should care more about - whale, tiger, orangutan, and rhino extinction vs. toxics in a child's environment.

But let's start by being smart.  What are the real numbers?  What are the real risks?  Is this about children's health, or is it about planned obsolescence?  Look at the enormous resources spent on non-toxic ink cartridge refilling.  Grinding those cartridges into pieces of plastic to be plastic-recycled in China is a lot worse of a job than refilling those ink cartridges with new ink for the "grey market".   But look at the attention given to ink cartridge refill risk vs. plastic recycling.

It's howdy doody time, it's howdy doody time...

Organic Recycling: Compost Happens

compost windrow - wikipedia

A 16 year old recycling worker was pronounced dead, and two others unconscious, at a compost operation in Bakersfield California yesterday.

Evidence suggests that when the three went into a drainage ditch, that heavier-than-air gas hydrogen sulfide had gathered there from the decaying compost windrows, and sunk to the lowest point in a ditch.  Employees went into the ditch for some reason, and were overcome by fumes... see Bakersfield Californian report, which interviews company, colleagues, and regulators.  It appears a "Lake Nyos" accident, heavy air pushing out oxygen.

Death from compost would be exceedingly rare, though NIMBY interests generally oppose them as neighbors (due to odors).   Allowing organic matter to gradually decompose seems about as passive a waste recycling activity as one could imagine.  There are no "witches brews" of unnatural electronics circuit toxics involved... though the regulator quoted notes that a ditch is a "confined space".  This is strictly organic recycling danger.

Too early to draw conclusions.  But much of what I've focused on in this blog is how people make law and policy from a bad impression... photos trip a "cognitive risk" lobe in our brain, and environmentalists might forget that mob law and sanctimony (sancti-money) are not something we are immune to.