21 May 2024. Fashion | Forecasting
Fixing the fashion problem will take more than mycelium // ‘Prediction’ comes down to perspective and worldview [#572]
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1: Fixing the fashion problem will take more than mycelium
One of the recurring themes in the climate business literature is that new production models that don’t involve high levels of emissions will spring into life and replace the existing models that are wrecking the climate. And what we’re seeing in mass production sectors such as food and fashion is that these production models don’t work. Broadly speaking, getting the technology right is difficult, they have problems scaling, and investors have been pulling out as the plume of loose financial capital has hit higher interest rates.
There’s an article in Inside Climate News that has a quick look at the state of this story in the fashion sector, which is responsible for 10% of emissions and 20% of waste water. Here people have been talking up the fungus-based mycelium, and other natural products, as a leather substitute. (I’ve written about mycelium here before):
Currently, a small number of companies and startups are developing and selling materials made almost entirely of mycelium, living cells found in mushrooms that can yield fabrics strikingly similar to leather. Others are experimenting with orange peel fibers, algae and invasive lionfish skin to develop fabrics as a way to tackle the fashion industry’s gargantuan waste issue.
So how is that going? Not well:
(S)everal companies in the eco-friendly textile space have buckled, including Renewcell, a startup that aimed to turn old clothes into pulp for new materials. Similarly, materials company Bolt Threads announced last year that it was halting production of its mushroom leather, Mylo. “We are not immune to the same macroeconomic pressures everyone else is facing, so we have paused Mylo to reassess what works and what will work in the future,” Bolt Threads CEO Dan Widmaier told Vogue Business.
One of the problems is that loose investment capital, which is known to like bright shiny new things, has gone into AI instead, which is an area which seems no more likely to make money. Bolt hopes to renew production at some point.
MycoWorks, meanwhile, is developing a luxury leather alternative using mycelium, which is in early production. But this is a niche market.
(Pile it high, sell it cheap. Photo: RawPixel)
Some of the recent coverage of the fashion sector was prompted by a $75,000-per-head Vogue event at the New York Met which was themed on ‘The Garden of Time’, a title taken from a J.G.Ballard short story. Vogue promoted the event as a “celebration of clothing and fashion so fragile that it can’t ever be worn again,” according to an article in Fast Company, which seems to be a perfect metaphor for the relationship between the fashion industry and the planet right now.
Given that fashion industry types are not known for their irony or their self-reflection, this probably wasn’t intended. In fact, they may not have got further than the title of the short story. Jamie Ventino, who wrote the Fast Company, spoke to Carry Somers, of the League of Artisans, who had read the story:
They used Ballard as inspiration for a $75,000-per-ticket affair while skipping over the fact that he “delves into issues of inequality, highlighting the stark contrast between the opulent lifestyles enjoyed by the few and the struggles of everyone else.” She says the author’s proverbial garden is fragile, its blooms poised to shatter, and so too are the reputations of the stars and designers.
Of course, as far as emissions and waste is concerned, the biggest problem is not what the materials are made of. It’s the entire industry business model.
The industry has become addicted to “fast fashion”, in which clothes are designed barely to be used before they are discarded. As Monica Buchan-Ng, the head of knowledge exchange at Centre for Sustainable Fashion, based at London College of Fashion, told Kiley Price of Inside Climate Change, the critical issue for the industry is overproduction.
The Centre for Sustainable Fashion has produced a useful guide to sustainable fashion. It summarises the fashion industry problem in this way:
(F)ashion’s current demands far exceed nature’s capacity to supply the products and services that our industry, economic and societal practices rely on... At the heart of the problem lies a deep-rooted, widespread failure to value fashion in environmental, social and cultural terms as the basis of its economic contribution. The industry is also implicated in long-standing social injustice; built on the colonial model of exploitation, the concerns of fashion are intersectional and intergenerational.
As if to amplify the point about “colonial models of exploitation”, there are piles of discarded clothing from the rich world piling up all over the majority world.
The CSF report also has a striking quote from Blackhorse Lane Ateliers about the pursuit of profit in the fashion business:
"Throughout the years when I was producing garments first of all to make money, I realised that while you’re doing that, you always give up something from yourself because the profit takes over everything. For example, the profit takes over, so you decide to move your production from London to Turkey. Then profit takes over and you decide to move to China. So, gradually, through that profit-making, you give up something from yourself, your own values.
In the end, as in every other issue about climate change and biodiversity, it comes down to the way that capitalism works. You judge a system by what it does, not what it says it does.
And that got me thinking to the I = P x A x T equation, under which environmental Impact is said to be a function of Population x Affluence x Technology. But there’s clearly something missing in this equation.
Because the fashion industry shows us that Affluence and Technology aren’t enough to assess Impact. Business models clearly matter; we could have a whole different fashion industry working on a completely different model, and getting through a lot less resources, but still keeping people clothed. (Perhaps we could insert a ‘C’ for capitalism somewhere in the equation.)
As Buchan-Ng said to Inside Climate Change:
“I genuinely think the biggest solution isn’t the easy one because it’s the one that requires these large fashion companies to make significantly less money. It’s just to make less stuff and to pay more for that stuff and to look after what we have,” she said. “We still need these amazing materials. But we just need fewer of them with less fashion overall, essentially—and I say that as a person that genuinely loves clothes.”
2: ‘Prediction’ comes down to perspective and worldview
In his 1995 book The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker includes a section on predictions. Obviously futurists don’t do “predictions”, and we try to decline conversations on “likelihood” since we are all operating in a complex and emergent world, but this is an epistemologically difficult area which I think the futures community has skirted around rather than trying to address it.
You can see patterns, but timing is much harder to judge. Philip Tetlock’s ‘superforecasting’ work, which is much less squeamish about this, tends to focus on shorter term outcomes where there is a known answer after the event: election results, yes, likely effects of fourth wave feminism maybe not so much.
Obviously if you are in the business of ensuring the safety of your clients, as Gavin de Becker and Associates is, being able to make operating decisions based on the likelihood that someone might decide to threaten, harass, or attack someone else is an important part of your workflow.
As it happens, I’d been doing some research for a client on how to validate forecasts (though sadly can’t share this at present) so I’d been thinking about some of these issues.
De Becker lists out some of the methods used by his business to anticipate violence, and in particular to assess the reliability of predictions of violence. He’s a vastly successful specialist in this area, but his approach has value beyond just predicting possible violence.
In the world of potential threats, you are looking for clues to assess the risk of an actual event. de Becker has an acronym for this: JACA. (There are multiple acronyms in the book.) It stands for
Perceived Justification
Perceived Alternatives
Perceived Consequences, and
Perceived Ability.
These are from the perspective of the potential attacker, not the possible victim.
Justification sometimes goes with ways to justify something. de Becker quotes John Morahan (unsourced, like every other damn’ quote in the book) as saying:
How a person appraises an event may have a great influence on whether he or she ultimately responds to it in a violent manner.
As in, for example, “You were trying to knock me over when you bumped into me just now.”
Anyway de Becker’s approach involves assessing eleven variables, which I’ll run through here, even if 11 is always too many to be useful.
Measurability: will you be able to assess the outcomes? In other words, we’d know if it happened. ‘Will a bomb go off?’ Is measurable. ‘Will we have a good time in Hawai’i?’, less so.
Vantage: do you know what’s actually going on? Can you tell what’s happening?
Imminence: how soon is this event likely to happen?
Context: is the context of the situation clear to the person making the prediction? Can you evaluate the conditions, the circumstances, the relationships involved?
Pre-incident indicators (which he call PINs): which usually emerge through effective intelligence.
Experience: what does the person making the prediction have experience of the domain that is relevant to the prediction that is being made?
Comparable events: he means substantively comparable, but this can be a fraught area since the parameters of what is comparable are often contested.
Objectivity, which might be better described as Neutrality or Dispassion: because you need to believe that multiple outcomes are possible. Conversely, “people who believe that only one outcome is possible have already completed their prediction.” (p99)
Investment, related to (8): to what extent is the person making the prediction invested in the outcome? Meaning: how much do they care about the outcome?
Replicability: is it possible to test the prediction in a low-stakes environment first? Probably not: he acknowledges that this is useless in high-stakes predictions of human behaviour. “I cannot test whether an angry employee will shoot a supervisor by giving him a gun and watching him at work” (p100)
Knowledge: does the person making the prediction have relevant and accurate knowledge about the topic?
As I said earlier, having 11 things is too much to work with cognitively, although I am sure that it conveys competence and thoroughness to anxious or distressed clients.
At the same time, when you look at this list, they actually cluster quite well.
There’s a set about the nature of the incident, including measurability and imminence. Let’s call this Event. (1 and 3)
There’s a set about pre-existing knowledge, and the mindset of the analyst. These cover experience, objectivity, knowledge and investment. Let’s call this Analyst. (6, 8, 9, 11).
There’s a set about the information about the specific incident: vantage, context, and PINs, which are better thought of as recent history. Let’s call this Information. (2, 4, and 5)
And finally there’s a set which is about testing and assessment, covering comparable events and replicability. Let’s call this Hypotheses (7 and 10).
de Becker notes in the next chapter in the book that context is almost everything, and the pre-incident indicators are better thought of as part of the incident.
There’s some resonance here with John Boyd’s ‘OODA loop’, which goes through the four stages of ‘Observe-Orient-Decide-Act’. de Becker’s model seems to cover the first three stages of Boyd’s loop.
But it is the middle two that are the most important: the mindset of the analyst and the fullest possible understanding of the context and circumstances—almost at an epistemological level.
It reminds me of a sequence in Errol Morris’ film The Fog of War, which is based around a long set of interviews with Robert McNamara, who was US Defense Secretary under Kennedy as America plunged deeper into the Vietnam War. American policy was completely configured around the idea that the communist takeover of South Vietnam needed to be prevented because of the ‘domino theory’, that the fall of the south would increase Chinese influence in the region.
Years after the Vietnam War was over, he tells Morris, he went to a dinner where he met his North Vietnamese counterpart. He learns, seemingly for the first time, that Vietnam had fought China for hundreds of years to maintain its independence.
If the analysts don’t have the tools or the background to interpret the event, they’re going to get it wrong. In the case of the US, thousands of young men died because of this mistake.
Worldview and context is everything.
j2t#572
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