TL;DR Something is wrong with our relationship to the things that we own, and Reddit communities for companies could provide part of a solution.

The Marx Locke Pork Chop (this will make sense later, but only sort of)

Marx, Locke, and “Proper Ownership”

Karl Marx and John Locke have very little in common. Marx wrote much of the theoretical basis for Communism, while Locke famously used his argument for the foundational right to private property as the keystone on which to define limits for the extent of civil government. They get to wildly different conclusions about how we ought to organize society, but there is a revealing similarity in the relationship between individuals and their property that they both use as a fundamental assumption of their theory.

Both Marx and Locke thought that the most natural type of ownership came from being involved in the creation of the good that is owned.

Acorns, Factory Workers, and Property

Locke approaches it this way. Let’s do a thought experiment: there is no government, no state, no laws, etc. and we are in what thinkers from his time call a “state of nature” — which is to say, plopped down on the earth with no pre-existing human society.

You and I live on opposite sides of a meadow, and in that meadow there are acorns. Neither of us really could say we “own” the acorns — they’re just there in the meadow and we both happen to live nearby, gathering acorns, using them as a common good.

Unfortunately, acorns are hard to make edible. They need to be ground, boiled, etc. to be made useful. When we’re both gathering the acorns it’s pretty obvious that they’re fair game. But, if you’ve boiled, ground, and prepared a bunch of acorns to eat and I come over to your side of the meadow and gather up all the acorn flour you spent all day preparing to bring over to my side, it’s obvious I’m doing something dickish.

Why?

Well you’ve mixed your labor with the acorns to make them into something different. That new, different value — the acorn flour — is yours. Your mind and your body are yours (we take that as an obvious given), and new value the acorns have as ready food is something that sprang from your mind, and actions you took with your body. The edible acorn paste is yours because you participated in its creation, its value is an extension of yourself. The concept Locke creates here is that before money or exchange of value, the original and fundamental form of ownership comes from those who have mixed their labor into the creation of something.

Marx, being Marx, is not using some thought experiment but is assessing the nature of workers and their relationship to the fruits of their labour in a capitalist society. Marx wouldn’t use the language of property as Locke does, and instead talks about how the sickness of his early-industrial capital came from alienation. This meant alienation of the worker from his own labour, and from the product of his labour: the worker would rent out his work (renting out his body) to perform repetitive tasks and produce something that he would never be able to afford.

A worker, screwing a bolt over and over again in an assembly line, onto a car he will never be able to buy, experiences a sense of alienation from his labor, the product of his labor, and — because our own productive labor is so inextricably linked to our human identity and selfhood — himself. If you spend, instead, 10 hours every Saturday working on building your new gardening shed, that would likely provide much more fulfillment.

I am not here to endorse or defend either political philosophy: instead I want to highlight that (despite coming from opposite ends of the political theory spectrum) both of these imply we ought to have some ownership over the product of labour — that it is a basic and true form of ownership, that the participation of creation in something generates a special relationship to the product.

But let’s flip that on its head and start not from the laborer and whether he should own what he creates, but from the consumer. What does it do to a consumer to have had no participation in the act of creation?

Consumers, Proper Ownership, and Moral Distance

Let’s start with this: there is something different about our relationship to things we own that we helped to create and things that we own that we did not help to create. While the two above examples are using this concept in high-falootin’ political discourse, I think this is an extremely relatable idea.

If you’ve ever done work on a car, built a gaming desktop for yourself, cooked a meal, or done any kind of project where you’re involved in the creation of something you own, you understand that you hold a different relationship to that thing than you do to something you buy. Maybe you’re more likely to fix it than to throw it out, or more likely to upgrade and improve it than replace it with a newer model and toss out the old. This kind of connection and relationship engendered by participation in the process of making things is what I’ll call “proper ownership”.

It doesn’t even need to be something that was entirely your creation: my business partner bought himself a white jumpsuit and went to a dye-shop to dye it blue. The experience taught him a lot about dyeing, about the effect that has on the environment in large factories, and even about how to look at color. That jumpsuit is his favorite article of clothing — he wears it all the time and I’m sure if it broke he would try to fix it rather than replace it. Anecdotally, at least, it seems that the “bad” behaviour of consumerism is less pronounced when the person owning the product is also a participant in its production.

So why do we behave differently with objects that we just buy from stores? We lack any connection to the process of production, which both makes the object alien to us (we have no personal connection with it, which makes it more disposable), and also allows for “moral distance” between us and the process of production (we don’t know how it was made, and don’t care to ask — it isn’t our business, and we’re just using the final product).

What I mean by “moral distance” is this: let’s say you have two neighbors, both pig farmers. If one neighbor mistreated his pigs egregiously and the other one did not, almost anyone would prefer to give their business to the neighbor who was nice to his pigs. But, we don’t have that kind of closeness with the production of our goods. Instead, we see two pork chops vacuum sealed in a grocery store, side by side. Most people don’t even think about their origin, and it would take work to get an answer. As a result, we might buy pork from the evil pork farmer, helping him stay in business, and leading to more pigs being mistreated. Your experience as a consumer is built around receiving the final product with complete separation from the process of production.

So what is the consequence of “moral distance”?

Our complete separation from the process of production, as consumers, might be an underlying sickness that diminishes the value we get from our belongings and also leads to negative externalities we would not consciously abide. There is a dissonance between what we value and what we support with our purchasing decisions — and the utter separation between our consumptive experience and the production of consumer goods exasperates this. The “moral distance” we have from production results in decisions we wish we didn’t make.

Depending on who you are this could manifest as seemingly innocuous purchases of ground beef at a supermarket that feed a meat industry practicing mass cruelty while damaging the environment, creating superbugs (through the abuse of antibiotics, for example), etc. , or it could manifest as convenient clothing purchases of fast fashion — supporting an industry that produces more carbon emissions than aviation and shipping combined.

The clothing industry is a particularly good example of this, especially because the disconnection between the consumer and the production leads to sub-optimal product design as well as negative environmental externalities (which I’ve previously posted about here).

There is a rising understanding of these problems in the mainstream, at least at a superficial level. And that superficial understanding has led to a lot of helpful (if superficial) solutions. In every vein of consumptive goods there have popped up brands whose essential promise is diminishing those negative externalities, whether it be through ethical sourcing, sustainable production, what-have-you.

Companies that do things like make t-shirts out of algae, are attempting to treat the symptom (negative externalities) without addressing the underlying cause (consumer decisions caused by their separation from design and production). In many cases, early adopter consumers are willing to use these services — but are almost invariably paying a premium to lower negative externalities. There is, almost universally, either a higher cost for the same utility or a lower utility at the same cost if a good is “ethical.”

But what would happen if we focused on the core of the problem, increasing the connection between consumer and product by involving them in the process of creation? Could a system that encourages more “proper ownership” and eliminates “moral distance” create better outcomes for users as well as reducing negative externalities in production?

Experimenting With A Lasting Solution

A real, robust solution would require a change in approach that both involves users more closely in production and creates better value products. The solution, then, is to increase consumers’ interaction with product design and production decisions: the more interaction consumers can have with design the better suited the product becomes (producing more value for the users) and the less alienation they have from the process of production (producing a greater connection between consumer and product). In practice, this would look like a company primarily focused on participatory design: achieving the highest possible bandwidth of communication between the users and the decision makers of production, and iterating on sourcing and design decisions based on user feedback.

To put it more concisely, a company who designs clothes with their community not just for their community.

This new type of company is possible now (at scale) in a way that it has never been before. In the world of pre-industrialization (Locke), or early industrialization (Marx), there existed no platform where such an information exchange could live — and barriers to creating companies (capital requirements for brick and mortar, limited media avenues for customer acquisition) were much larger.

Now, a clothing brand can be run from a computer with a global production line, a Shopify storefront, and an online portal receiving detailed feedback from every user of the product. Designs can be updated and tweaked in a constant iterative loop with direct feedback from their users, and then updated patterns and tech packs can be sent to factories instantly for the next production order.

The next question is: what platform makes the most sense for this company to live on?

We think the answer is Reddit. It is the only platform that is simultaneously:

-High Bandwidth: permits long form, nuanced discussion — no constrictive character or size limit and a culture that celebrates long form text posts

-Multi-directional: decision makers can talk to consumers, consumers to decision makers, and consumers to each other

-Multimedia: video, text, image commingled

-Transparent: anyone can come and see the conversations that are happening

And, perhaps most importantly, some of the important conversations already live on Reddit. For a clothing company, like ourselves, that means rich design discussions from subs like r/MaleFashionAdvice, sourcing conversations on subs like r/EthicalFashion, and more. While we’re specifically attempting this in the clothing industry, the concept of reducing moral distance and getting consumers more involved in the process of production through participatory design is abstractable to multiple industries.

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If You’re Interested In This Stuff

We’re starting a Reddit native project at r/MeritStore to capture the conversations already happening on design and sourcing, and translate them into real products. We think this fundamentally different approach to design will both produce superior product design outcomes, and allow deeper sense of connection between user and product (a relationship). If you’re interested in this stuff, we’d love to have you join the discussion.

Making stuff is fun and meaningful, and more people involved in creation and design means more meaning, more fun, and better stuff.