The Internet and the creation of knowledge

Mon, 9 Feb 2009 22:58:33 +0300

Not all false truths about design, green building, eco-towns (and almost anything else for that matter) come from intentional manipulation of what a person is allowed to see and not see, and is told or not told about a project. Yes, such blinding and framing of a journalist or other knowledge producer by sponsoring organizations and those who have money or prestige to lose if their golden vision is shown to be tarnished often happens when the journalist makes only a quick visit to a site, doesn’t interview all potential stakeholders--and particularly those that the sponsoring organization says that they can speak for--or relies purely on press releases. The pitfalls of primary knowledge production are many, but different than the type of knowledge making that the Internet has enabled.

With the ease of linking to articles on others’ websites, or simply summarizing another’s report on one’s own online journal or blog, an extended “telephone game” is rapidly affecting what we know, and how we come to judge truth versus falsity.

Let’s take one example: On February 3rd, Paul French wrote about “China’s Eco-towns” for both Ethical Corporation and Climate Change Corporation (simultaneously published). After highlighting the failures of Dongtan and Huangbaiyu, he went on to hold up Rizhao as a successful model for future projects to green China:

An impressive 99% of households in the city centre and 30% in the
suburbs have solar panels that power their lights and heat their water.

But this isn’t accurate, at least according to what seems to be the original source: either Worldwatch Institute or the World Clean Energy Awards.
It’s really that 99% of household in the city center and 30% in the suburbs have solar water heaters. While there are solar photovoltaics in use in Rizhao, 99% of household lighting in the city center are not being powered by the sun! According to the WCEA, as of 2007, Rizhao was hoping to convert 10% of its total energy supply to solar power and biogas.

Within two days, the error in the Ethical Corporation article, was replicated by CC Huang at Responsible China, who clearly did not do any independent fact-checking. Three days after French’s post and one day after Huang’s, China Digital Times, a highly regarded and widely used source for briefs on China, repeated the error again, linking to Responsible China’s note on Rizhao. Given many China watchers reliance on CDT for their news briefings, I expect that there will soon be ever more articles and blogs that (falsely) state that 99% of Rizhao’s city center households have their lighting coming from solar power.

With quick linking to and replication of data from one page to the other without returning to the a source, or going to the place, that can verify the data, repetition creates veracity. Already more pages on the Internet state the error, than hold to the statement of the original source. With no arbiter of the methodology or data presented in work posted on the Internet, the data that is listed the most is the data that is found the most often, and therefore continues to be replicated, and replicated. Every copy potentially getting further from the original.

It is also problematic that the original source for the data on Rizhao in French’s article is unclear. First, why isn’t Ethical Corporation requiring attribution for the sources of its data? And second, Worldwatch was one of 8 nominators and jury members for the WCEA, and it seems that the article on their site is taken verbatim from WCEA’s summary of the project. This raises another question: can there be such a thing as plagiarism on the Internet?

Is a link before quoting large sections of another’s work enough? Given that thousands of websites now do so, often giving attribution only in tiny text at the end of multiple paragraphs of an article, or copied in its entirety, it seems that existent behavior demonstrates that the Internet is at peace with such practices. But what does this mean for how we come to know what we know?

With no person or organization held responsible as the source of data presented in the article, and the author of the article often obscured in dozens of poorly attributed replications (this is particularly common on Chinese language news and aggregator sites), information presents itself as existing independent of human gathering, recording or interpretation. It cannot be challenged because its veracity is demonstrated by its objectivity.

And so very quickly the truths we know, and upon which we make decisions that will significantly alter the world we live in and the world’s of others, become a dangerous substitute for the experienced reality on the ground.

Not being able to fly to Rizhao myself before writing this post, I at least went to Rizhao’s official government website. Interestingly, there is no listing of the World Clean Energy Award, no touting of its solar heated water, or use of photovoltaics or biogas. Why aren’t they proud enough of their accomplishments to highlight that information on their own website?

Under the section entitled Environmental Protection, the only accomplishment listed is that there is 38.2% “green land” in the city center:
By implementing the "Strategy of Ecology ", we will build Rizhao into an
Oriental Green City with livable environment and sustainable development.

Yet again, grass and flowers (that require watering!) in urban parks are taken as evidence of environmental protection and sustainable development. Just across the Bohai sea from Rizhao, Dalian has famously deployed this strategy of claiming green spaces in the city as signs of its environmental progressiveness, and harmonious existence between man and nature.

I think that there should be a specific sub-definition of greenwashing that captures this all-too-common bait-and-switch technique of municipal governments: the use of green urban landscaping (xeriscaping does not count) to create an aesthetic urban environment that overwhelms residents and sometimes journalists with a sense of peace, precluding any possibility of being concerned about how other policies or activities in the municipality contribute to harming human, animal, or planetary health.

Green greed and false truths

Mon, 9 Feb 2009 22:51:45 +0300

Danielle Sacks’ feature on William McDonough continues to be distributed and amplified across the Internet, as many people who were once disciples begin to question the green messiah who may be more clay footed than they had hoped. Note the URL for the story: it seems that there may have been internal editorial debate about the title, and perhaps the side that ceded ground negotiated a more subtle placement of their preferred epithet.

It was picked up February 8th by Jim Gourley on his Absurdity, Allegory and China blog. It is easy to forget when the pitch is one about saving the planet, that it is still a pitch: a sales pitch. And in a pitch that seeks to alter what (green, not brown; solar, not coal; walking, not driving) and who (green guards, not red guards; buyers of green goods, not ordinary goods) is of value, there is money to be made. Part of the great reporting in Sacks’ article is how she demonstrates that many of McDonough’s decisions about how he works to green the world are influenced by pursuit of financial gain at the cost of actually getting healthier products in consumers’ hands (see in particular the Nike case). This week, Sacks’ reports that McDonough--via MBDC’s cradle-to-cradle certification process--is now certifying individual product ingredients, in addition to the previously available whole product certification program. Whether this is actually being done to make the process more transparent, or whether it is being done as a way to maximize the payments that can be required for certification is yet to be known. Does anyone have a pricing sheet that compares the cost of whole product certification (before the new service) with the product ingredient certification?

McDonough+Partners also knew that there was money to be made, indirectly through their work in Huangbaiyu, as did McDonough himself. Designing the China’s first ecological, master planned rural community was surely a way to get fame globally, which translates into the offer of more contracts for the firm, and more speaking fees and book sales for McDonough. The financial element of a supposedly philanthropic project wasn’t lost on Dai Xiaolong either, the local salesman that McDonough and his team at the China-US Center for Sustainable Development tapped to lead the construction of Huangbaiyu on the ground.

Before the first shovel hit the dirt, Dai had claimed to trademark some 6000 marks for “Huangbaiyu” in various industrial or product areas: Huangbaiyu roofing, Huangbaiyu car, Huangbaiyu windows, Huangbaiyu computer...banking on the fact that once Huangbaiyu become a model of green development, he’d be able to sell of rights to the name, and become the rich man he had always dreamed of being.

Unfortunately for both McDonough and Dai, despite a well-crafted media campaign in which they both sought to get Huangbaiyu heralded as the missing link to a green future (see Thomas Friedman’s Addicted to Oil, and PBS’s Design e2), Huangbaiyu is now becoming reported more as a Potempkin village. There is much to be written about (and I am working on it....) why false facades are held up as successes, despite the damage that a reported “truth” does when it is far separated from the ground of reality.

It is clear that it is not only the Chinese officials who reported false harvest numbers to Mao that were guilty of such self-serving guile. As Henry Kissinger once observed that “when enough prestige has been invested in a policy it is easier to see it fail than abandon it.” But isn’t that a false choice? Watch it fail while claiming success or abandon it? What about recognizing problems as they develop, researching conditions and responding to them, altering and evolving the project to meet its goals as new information or processes come to light?

Perhaps when a project is held up as a green dream, a utopia, it cannot admit fault. For how can a utopia have errors? And I suppose that is why so many utopic visions end up in catastrophe.

Unintended Signals

The Internet and the creation of knowledge

Green greed and false truths