Hannah Thinks

In the beginning, we all made our own clothes.

Or, at least, someone we knew made it. Hand made each garment; whether our mother, our neighbor, or our tailor, we knew where each piece came from. We might have known the person who grew the cotton, spun the wool, or skinned the animal.

When the industrial revolution hit, we outsourced textile production to the factory, and our clothes drifted away from us, both physically and spiritually. We transitioned to garments that were ‘off the rack,’ tailored to one of the many people shaped vaguely like each of us. The up side; more choice. We could be fashionable and on trend without being wealthy, all thanks to economies of scale.

Fast fashion began in earnest with stores like H&M and Zara, turning around inventory in a mere month. But this was just a stepping stone. When the internet hit fashion, it did so with the force of a second revolution. We sped from fashion seasons that lasted a month to weekly inventory shifts. Companies like ASOS and a host of smaller start ups like BooHoo make a killing turning over inventory without pausing for breath. Our ability to see new styles online and purchase vast quantities at relatively low expense has forever changed the way fashion works; even as some retailers continue to find success in brick and mortar stores, online-first and online only stores can put out more new clothing with less overhead. They can exploit niche interests, use data to judge when a product is selling, and satisfy the customer faster than ever before.

The problem here is satisfaction. Once we get our cheap, trendy new garment, we want another. And another. And one for each new season, which, of course, begins next week. The environmental and human toll of fashion is immense, from the people potentially exploited to make a good to the destructive effects of the pesticides used to grow the cotton to the fossil fuels used in shipping and in manufacturing. We have only succeeded in speeding this up; with weekly turnaround comes a culture of disposability, which wastes the resources that we have poured into each thread. But we are lured in by low prices.

I for one am not immune. I genuinely try not to buy clothes often, perhaps once or twice a year; but when I do, I go to H&M like (most) everyone else. It’s hard to beat the price.

The question now becomes; what does the future hold? How can fast fashion get any faster?

My theory is localized manufacturing. Maybe we will have, in each city or town, a factory capable of downloading specifications from the internet and making garments to order, bought from an online catalog by local consumers. Perhaps we will even 3D print each garment. What does this do to fashion’s impact? It certainly lessens the human toll of sweat shop labor, but will former laborers simply be left destitute? And while it might be possible to construct our local factories with solar panels and use sustainable cloth, this will raise prices, something consumers never want to accept.

In the end, we won’t know whether the internet will further our fashionable self destruction or provide a path out. It could do either. Today we see more and more disposable clothing bought cheaply online. But we could also turn to more high end products, or products made to order, utilizing the internet’s ability to reach unique tastes and eliminate overhead costs to bring down prices. After all, the internet is only a tool. Our human desires will determine wether we embrace sustainability, or continue to use the internet and fashion to satisfy our taste for the novel.

As we come to the end of our studies of the history of the internet, I’ve been inspired to think about its more recent history; namely, the tremor that kicked off the internet age- the dot com bubble.

In the late 90s, as the internet turned from a thing accessible only to academics and the science literate to a public good of massive proportions, people began to funnel their money into the numerous tech startups popping up around the web. These websites had high valuations and low profits, but no one seemed to care. The internet was new, fast paced, the next big thing. It was here to revolutionize the world. And make people rich.

Except, of course, the bubble burst. Capital ran out and many of the new companies burned out. I was too young to remember any of the rise or the fall, but no one else seems to remember the dot com bubble either. After all, when I look around, I see tech companies operating at a loss quite frequently; Uber and Twitter come to mind first. At the same time, cryptocurrencies have been attracting billions in investments, and now look poised to finally come under international scrutiny. When they do, with such a volatile market, the damage to currency owners as the market gets skittish could be immense.

All this being said, none of these technologies are inherently bad. Internet companies make my life easier. I am a (proud?) consumer of both Amazon and Youtube. Twitter does create some funny jokes. And cryptocurrencies offer an enticing view of a world without hard cash. My question is this; when the link between all of these things, from stock prices to bitcoin valuations, is flimsy human confidence, what surety can we expect to have? Humans are fickle, often scared, easily angered. We look out for ourselves and our kin much of the time. We run at the first sign of danger. It seems to me that we have failed to learn from the dot com bubble not to put our faith in human psychology as a backer of our finances.

What good does a dollar invested in bitcoin do, other than give to the investor some wealth that is as tangible as fog in the sunlight? Should we promote a model, much like that of Amazon, of ensuring that our investments go into research and development, and not just into someone’s pockets? Or is research and development still too intangible a backing for a financial system? How do we balance safety and innovation?

These are the sort of questions that, I hope, will be put forth into the public eye in the coming months. I only hope that it won’t take another painfully bursting bubble to get them there.

In seminar today, we discussed the concept of the program ‘FINGER’ in the early ARPA net. This was a program that would let you locate any user of the network, and subsequently would determine for you their last log on date. At the time, it was seen by some as an invasion of privacy; and so, the author of the program modified it to allow the person being searched to protect their information.

It seems like an interesting experiment to compare that personal invasion, the equivalent of a ‘read’ receipt, to today’s publicly available information.

So I googled myself. For the first time ever. (No, really!)

I started with my name and my state- Michigan- and I found my voting record, which tells me my hometown and my birthday. From my name and my home town, I find out that my Mom is on the school board; my grandparents own a cherry farm; my parents met at U of M, moved to St. Louis, then moved back to my hometown. I enjoy reading, and I own a bike which I call Sheila. I know what I look like, what clubs I’m in, some of my test scores and that I once made a presentation on Mao’s cultural revolution in Prezi.

I’m not sure how much of this I chose to share; it would all certainly have been more of an opt out than an opt in. I’m not embarrassed by the me I found online, just a little surprised. Of course, I shouldn’t be. I, like most other people of my age, know the power and persistence of the web.

After my senior party, I was addressing thank you notes to my guests. As I got to the bottom of the pile, I found a card from my friend Sophie. I had met her in my European History course that year, and I had never learned her address! In order to get her thank you to her, I had to know where she lived; and to know where she lived, I had to know how to spell her last name. Which, naturally, like her address, was a mystery to me. So I googled her, using all of the details I could think of, and found an old picture of her family. I used the article attached to the picture to get the name, and from there, the address. She received a prompt thank you.

The internet is a pretty marvelous tool. Neither I nor Sophie have Facebook accounts, but for all intents and purposes, we might as well. Our information shows up on the web almost as if we had put it there ourselves, offering windows into our lives, even if it can never provide the full picture of the people we are. Much like the early internet community in the face of FINGER, I find myself questioning wether this openness is good. Have I been harmed by the presence I have on the web? Probably not. But could I be, or are others being harmed by their own digital footprint? Certainly.

I don’t think about internet privacy too often in my own life. It fades in and out of my consciousness with each new credit card company hacked. Maybe I would do well to be a little more judicious about the information that spills from my life onto the net.