The Ideal Future

I was just gonna say, it's, it's maybe even more if you count, like, dyeing of the textile and, like-

Exactly

... who made the trim.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I think I read 35 pairs of hands touch a single garment at least.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's wild.

And yeah, when you talk about just going back to the technology element, it is interesting 'cause I feel like a lot of the time when I hear people espousing the virtues of capitalism, which is not very often in my circles, but [chuckles] when I read, you know, critiques of other, like, political and economic frameworks, is there's this notion that, you know, capitalism has, like, done a lot to lift up and advance people, and I think really that that's technology.And technology can be decoupled from capitalism, and it can serve people.

And in this case, specifically with the garment industry, I feel like there's almost no way to parse out AI from education.

And, like, a lot of it is about teaching people, like, who is-- At some point, ha- like, hands have to go on these things that we're making.

So w- a lot of what we've been hearing in this series prior to this interview is that there are a lot of folks doing, like, augmented reality and using AI for, like, teaching models.

And there's a lot more emphasis that I'm hearing about, especially in the nonprofit space, in training people about worker autonomy and understanding-- like, having general business acumen, even for someone who's at the end of a line trimming or whatever, you know, whatever they might be doing.

So I'm really skeptical of new technology and all of the promise that is espoused to us and how oversold it is to us.

But I also see some silver linings in there, and I think there are some really interesting ways that it can be manipulated to, to better a cause and better effect.

And yeah, talking about degrowth and deco- decommodification as well, it's a really dicey topic, especially in this space, because it's, uh, it's so competitive.

And a lot of the people I work with as a consultant and e- you know, even in the nonprofit space, when I talk to th- these, like, small and medium-sized producers especially, like, they're trying to make it, and they're trying to carve out a living doing the thing that they love doing.

And it's-- You hear the phrases degrowth and decommodification, and they kind of are like, "Oh, what? Like, what the-- Wait, I need to make more money." And another thing, too, that I've been thinking about a lot and that has come up in this series quite a bit is th- is circularity as a design practice.

Like, both honoring craftsmanship and circularity as a design practice so that we're-- if we are making new stuff, like, let's have it stay out of the waste stream for as long as possible.

Like, how do we, how do we just build that in at the front? And I think the biggest thing for me that I-- definitely does not get talked about in this space very much is land stewardship and land back.

I think those are two-- Like, specifically land back through the process of stewardship and taking care, like, being sure that industry is considering the natural world.

And we have so far to go in that space, but I, I have a lot of hopes and aspirations about it.

I think there's so much that's already happening, and we'll kinda get into some of that in the second part of the episode.

But the land back thing is really interesting 'cause I feel like it just is not on the forefront of anyone's brain in, in this space, or I should say very few people's brains.