Age of Accountability: ESG & CSR
Artwork by Henoscene, www.henoscene.com
In 2020, over 2 billion people purchased goods or services online, and during the same year, e-retail sales surpassed 4.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide. To me, the Age of Accountability orbits consumer action, because every dollar spent shapes the world we live in, for the better or worse. It results in the types of packaging we find as litter in the world. Who would have thought how a supermarket merchandises its storefront and creates temptation checkouts through their POS (point of sale) items, can accurately predict the extent to which that brand’s packaging choices is found as litter in local vistas? Placement can prompt the impulse purchase of low ticket items that are invariably unhealthy for both people and planet.
Let’s examine the consumption of junk food and the amount of waste the wrappers they are swathed in would have generated at such gluttonous sales tallies: In 2012, companies sold 799 million pounds of potato chips, 657 million pounds of tortilla chips, 222 million pounds of pretzels, and 1.2 billion pounds of cookies (SFA, 2013). Companies sold $11.3 billion of these products in 2012 (SFA, 2013). Candy is an even bigger business, with annual sales of $34 billion (NCA, 2014). But is such mass consumption of nutritionally impoverished foods beneficial to public health and well-being?
Whose responsibility is ethical, biodegradable product packaging? Whose responsibility is it to discern how much visibility a product deserves based on the negative impacts it will have when consumed? Whose burden is it to ensure that retail choices promote a sustainable lifestyle, and are C2C in their design expression? Who is in charge of regulating and curating each product’s footprint so it does not bear unintended negative consequences?
These questions haunted me until I made a career of obsessing over them. Consequently, I began designing full strategy campaigns for brands, nonprofits, universities and government agencies. Nothing debilitates me emotionally and psychologically, like pernicious consequences from seemingly innocuous consumer choices. I spent years coining fun, interactive, immersive ways for consumer demographics to be targeted, engaged, educated and enabled as change agents.
At present, we have a guns and butter model trade off when it comes to corporate social responsibility. The extent to which our two hands are aware of the impact each has on the other defines how pointless the social or environmental good being executed by the brand or institution is. If one hand is merely offsetting the inputs of the other, then that is not a commitment to do business any differently than we have thus far, and thus far we have been extractive and linearly consumptive in the name of progress.
Nothing in nature is a straight line, yet all we chart are straight lines through properties, through economies, through governance structures, through financial frameworks. We do not think in circles, spirals, ellipses, and sympodial growth. Nature does. We do not. And in that dissonance lies all the problems we face as a society. Not in a difference of opinion, but the shapes and patterns we think in and organize ourselves through.
The shapes and patterns we think in and organize through are particularly relevant to scrutinize around ESG and CSR, because if anything needs to be self-sustaining and capable of reclaiming itself, it is these two prongs of impact outreach.
Through the years, I have found that it is what goes unsaid that often speaks volumes. It is when we fail to distill a brand’s purpose five whys deep that the unsaid and undone arise as unmet public expectations, bad press and consumer trust erosion. Bad press and PR pushes a brand to have to mitigate that which it could have proactively prevented had there been a true, and dimensional commitment to actionable purpose.
94% of consumers would prefer to purchase from a brand that exhibits actionable purpose. What do I mean by actionable purpose? Actionable purpose is a brand directive or investment strategy with a quantifiable, qualifiable deliverable that can be realized within a predetermined period. 83% of consumers surveyed by the Zeno Group said companies should only earn a profit if they also deliver a positive impact.
This means how we use cutting edge technology to enable equity and access is of paramount significance.
We cannot afford to have people behind screens, escaping the hard realities of the world, because negligence and indifference are the most enunciated forms of privilege we can express today. The choice to disconnect belongs to the privileged few, the vast majority who are subsidizing our costs, on whose backs the activist billionaires and mobilized millionaires stand and donate from. Consequently, we cannot further divorce ourselves from reality through VR, AR and their most deluded cousin, the Metaverse. Time is of the essence, and we cannot use it to escape ourselves or the consequences we have caused. Assuming unwavering accountability is the only way forward for our species and the world we depend on, but take for granted.
We need critical thinking around who can afford to buy into the hardware to gain access to the software. The price of things intentionally excludes vast sections of society, and Web3 cannot claim to be peer to peer if it is centralized in its architecture either through monetary stake or technical stack.
Scrutinizing affordability informs accessibility.
Knowing how purchasing power positions a product or service in the world helps inform what content or use cases can be distributed through it, i.e. the Metaverse isn’t actually for everyone, consequently the benefits it can truly bring to collective wellbeing has to be exhaustively investigated. The same reasoning holds true for any and all forms of technology, including blockchain and their offspring NFTs.
In the age where we have lost 70% of global biodiversity since 1970, 771 Million people lack access to clean drinking water, and 884 Million people did not even have access to safe water. So can we really be this narcissistic and self indulgent as to continue on this path of delusion and self-destructive inattention? I ask you who is accountable?
Let’s look at the converse to avoid resignation to doom and gloom projections. If we took responsibility as individuals, brands, non profits and government agencies, we would feel compelled to evidence agency and stewardship. We would apply ourselves toward achieving lasting good through measurable outcomes by incisively deploying capital and balancing the greed for profitability with the need for prosperity. Contrary to popular perspective, investing in social and environmental good generates considerable returns.
Every dollar invested in WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) interventions gives a $4.3 return in the form of reduced health care costs, reduced pollution of water and land resources, and gains in quality of life (such as improved school attendance, fewer sick days, greater privacy, safety, and sense of dignity). — CDC
We now have technology that can help us find that which we shirk daily, transparency, enforced integrity and accountability, a federated consensus based database, also known as blockchain. This is a needed solution, because as a society, we are being gaslit daily by biased media, marketing spin and opaque advertising. What does blockchain offer? Protection against gas-lighting, and the capacity to verify why we can agree on moments of reality that have found expression, as it gets immutably recorded and archived within its framework.
Blockchain prioritizes the many over the one activist billionaire who believes he is a benefactor to the masses, when he has arrived at his wealth concentration at the expense of the masses. Blockchain disempowers a unilateral agenda backed by large cash reserves from dictating a paradigm’s focus, and denounces the ability of one to approve outcomes for the many. A technocrat oligarch should not decide the fate and future of the collective. At some point, we seem to have subserviently handed over the reins of democracy to a plutocracy. Doing so has led to a few affluent egoic minds (the 1%) becoming the determining factor in the well-being of the many (99%), who come from starkly different backgrounds, cultures, races, proclivities, value systems and income levels. These plutocrats are not benevolent, but propagate solutions anchored in self-aggrandizing agendas that strategically dictate how much they allocate to a problem and why they even elect to solve it. Purging society of government bail outs and tax deductible donations from the 1% would be key in ameliorating the crippling state of inequity and injustice plaguing it.
Blockchain moves us away from models of faith based trust to fact based trust. Its scope of use in the traditionally obfuscated space of CSR and ESG is enormous, but how many brands are willing to bare the skeletons in their closets and the dust under their rugs? Blockchain is nothing new. It’s democracy at its best, it’s self-governance at a local level. For example, a DAO (a decentralized autonomous organization) is a replica of a sovereign, community-centric council at a tribe or village level, just as cryptocurrency is a debt relief and credit extending mechanism created, circulated and validated by a system held by the collective. It flips the titular pyramid on its head, and empowers a bottom up approach. When used right, it ensures a level playing field while protecting identity and advocating accountability.
We have propped up a few rich white men (diversity is the exception, not the norm). Savior complexes fueled by self importance and backed by the monopolies we have allowed idolized entrepreneurs to amass under the banner of technological freedom, have perpetuated poverty and planetary denudation. Blockchain can provide urgently needed checks and balances. Techno-oligarchs who gallantly swoop in to bail us out of our many crises for aid that their wealth creation resulted in, blockchain is the proletariat uprising, the public revolt. However, instead of independence, we are now having to think inter and intra-generationally and fight for our interdependence. It is no longer about individual inheritances, but rather about the collective legacy.
To use a mechanism for its intended purpose, one must be predisposed to a holistic understanding of value, that balances ecological and social capital on one scale with economic capital on the other. This notion has been expressed through various terms: triple bottom line, blended value, 3D PNL (profit and loss), prosperity over profit, etc., but none of those labels stand for much if our inherent perspective doesn’t stop being one of conflict.
Blockchain as a philosophy, at its most rudimentary state, is about consensus, not conflict. If we cannot agree upon value, and fail to show up from shared values to equitably share value, then there is no healthy way forward for us all, and we fail the technology's true potential. Technology we build is populated by our biases, and thus cannot give rise to solutions that we are incapable of evidencing within and for ourselves.
This brings me to why I coined my tech startup IncOperate Inc., because I care how brands, consumers and nonprofits operate after incorporating. We are using blockchain to bring transparency to ESG (Environmental Social Governance) and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) by offering insight into transaction instances, so everyone can see where the dollars go and why they do so. The app we are launching will be entitled Henoscene. Henoscene is a portmanteau, composed of two classical Greek words, Henosis denoting consensus on a fundamental unified reality + Kainos (i.e. Cene) meaning new, often used to denote geological periods. Henoscene ushers in an inclusive era after the destructive Anthropocene (age of man). My team and I intend to combat the Anthropocene, by championing the Henoscene, where every action nets positive for people and the planet.
So I ask you, are you mindful of your footprint? What is your position? Have you taken on one yet? Is it accountable to the whole that you are part of? Are you whole? For only wholes can understand and account for wholes, anything less ends up being a fragmented, desperate, scattered repeat of the myopic modalities that have failed us.
The time to be neutral has passed us by. Take a stand, because how you show up today, what you spend your money on the next time you open your wallet, leaves ripples across the world, not just in your immediate backyard. The true brand stories are not in what a brand tells us through their ads, but rather in what each transaction your wallet enables in the world. We have gone too long asking for stewardship from the top down. It's time to see that shift from the bottom up.
73% of surveyed consumers say brands must act now for the good of society and the planet. What better way to apply this pressure and ask for this change than by voting with our dollars? We have the power. Through Henoscene, we aim to realize the age of unity and accountability by powering it with blockchain, a shared fundamental reality where consumers everywhere will be empowered to wield their voices and dollar votes effectively, objectively and with transparency.
Individually, we may give rise to stories of change, but together we can transform the narrative. It is time to stop coping by addressing issues at a symptom level and begin curing problems at a source level. This cannot happen without transparency, accountability, and wisdom of the crowds. Inviting all stakeholders to be continuous co-owners of the outcomes and payouts of each act of human productivity will ensure everyone bears the costs and no one pays the price. This logic is indispensable to sculpting a new economy.
Contact us if this ethos appeals to you. We look forward to working with individuals, nonprofits, brands and government agencies worldwide, to disrupt the status quo to the point of no return, until we collectively feel the pain and discomfort of a true transition. Instead of continuing business as usual, we cooperatively need to let go of the known shore, which is compromising our natural world and costing us our shot at a fertile future. No change occurs without pain and discomfort. Think back to any moment in your own life that felt awful to endure, but extraordinary to expand past.
Let us have the courage of character, the conviction and commitment to navigate through the hurt with both brains and a backbone, to an evolved state of consciousness that accounts for the whole. Unity and coexistence anchored in accountability are the healthiest and most inclusive path forward, but it requires consensus around a period of reckoning for consumerism and capitalism. Such mass metamorphosis can only be catalyzed when we surrender our acquisitive nature and address the void within that makes us seek fulfillment from Amazon instead of from self actualization.
The human brain is the highest bloom of the whole organic metamorphosis of the earth. -Friedrich Wilheml Joseph Schelling
