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Comment by jorleif | Hacker News Reader

I have sometimes wondered if technology could be used to make some house-elves more visible. When I buy an apple or some meat in the grocery store they are simply opaque to me. Their production is completely invisible. Was it a farmer in my home country who produced it, driving around in his comfortable tractor, or was it a hard pressed third world farmer whose children go uneducated despite his best efforts? Knowing this through some technological means, even to an imperfect degree, would probably affect my choices.

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"More" visible, perhaps. Visible in general? No. You've just specified a staggeringly large torrent of information, all of which your brain will (correctly) judge as useless in quite short order, at an unconscious level you will not be able to override. A shopping trip for a single week of groceries would produce a stack of information that you would still find yourself unable to do anything about, to say nothing of what it would take to provide that for every transaction. Do you want to hear about where the tomatoes on your hamburger came from? And the onions? And the ketchup? And the wheat for the bun? And... heck, even typing and/or reading the full set of questions for just one hamburger is sort of tedious, isn't it?

While you are of course right trivially about the sheer amount of information, I'm not so sure about the useless part. Right now a lot of consumer protection and activism is driven by someone trying to sift through similar information and then make a lot of noise about their findings. That is also inefficient in a way that favors certain kinds of players in the marketplace.

For instance, if I knew the producer of certain items, I might decide to buy directly from them instead of through a middleman, such as a grocery store, but now there are all kinds of barriers to doing just that. Furthermore, if I could somehow contact the coffee farmer who grew my coffee beans, then I could also ask him for a particular kind of bean that I might prefer. This is less efficient in the production sense than shipping everything in large batches, but might be more efficient in the sense of getting what I want. It is quite common when shopping for furniture to find exactly what you want, except too wide, narrow, high, etc. Having it hand-made in the west would be prohibitively expensive, perhaps 10x of the price of the item, so we settle for the one which is not quite right. But if there was a simple mechanism for ordering the modified item from the original developing world producer then that might be very useful.

I guess the question is not whether we could make marketplaces more visible to better know whom our elves are. The question is whether we want to.

> Was it a farmer in my home country who produced it, driving around in his comfortable tractor, or was it a hard pressed third world farmer whose children go uneducated despite his best efforts?

I love that even while stating this, there's still some bias creeping in. It could just have likely been a hard-pressed farmer whose children go educated in your country, or from some other country that treats their farmers better than your own.

Interesting idea, but I suspect there would be a lot of retailers who would vehemently oppose this e.g. Apple opposing anything that might make their customers aware of where the labor and materials to make their iPhone come from.

Your concluding statement about this knowledge affecting your choices would probably be a nightmare for these retail giants who might fight tooth and nail to stop this.

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