ETHICS WASHING refers to pinkwashing, greenwashing, bluewashing, datawashing, artwashing and other DECEPTIVE STRATEGIES1 in which a set of values (like “diversity” or “sustainability”2) is communicated without making any tangible effort to set concrete effects3 in motion. Deliberately4 hiding actions, circumstances and situations that instead go against these very values often motivates the practice of ethics washing. When a mandate is presented but not followed through, when intention becomes the focus and reward irrespective of its required labour, we encounter ethics washing. The inconsistency5 and discrepancy in this phenomenon cause feelings of alienation and frustration across society. In this text we attempt to first unpack and define ethics washing through our own vernacular, without solutionising.
We try to make a definition of “ethics washing” by presenting some examples from the contexts of BIG Tech, (super/)stardom and cultural work. We are writing from our position as artistic practitioners, who are struggling with6 avoiding these dynamics ourselves.7 This text is the start of a set of articles that circle topics like ethics washing, branding, technocracy and harm.8
1. This brings up a question: how does this ethical illusion work relate to one of the roles visual art has had in the West, e.g. presenting spectacles of illusion like a Trompe d’Oeuil? What are the comparisons between this visual trickery and the kind of facadery happening in ethics washing? How are these questions related to romanticised and confessional notions of honesty, realness and truth as preferable in cultural production? From what assumptions and wishes are we operating here?
2. As commodity culture rises and deep-care lessens, concepts intended to help us co-exist with less harm become increasingly co-opted and mis-practised.
3. insert picture: DEEDS NOT WORDS, extinction rebellion
4. Hiding harmful actions is a deliberate decision made by the most powerful, and executed by the least powerful
5. Us Autistics Obviously Hate Inconsistency
6. (the problematics of complacency and especially apathy in)
7. And the urge to counteract and contest
8. as situated within the racial capitalocene (coined by Françoise Vergès, building on the term capitalocene, a counter proposal to the term anthropocene, by Andreas Malm)
Everybody’s using ethics, but the term has lost its context and function. Do ‘we’9 have ethics (noun), or do we do ethics (verb)? Doing ethics is a form of labour; it’s contextual and applied, where frameworks only exist as entry points to get any real efforts started. In BIG Tech, however, frameworks such as guidelines, checklists, codes and principles10 have taken centre stage as destinations in themselves. This distracts from the harm deeply rooted under the attractiveness of the paint-wash. Google’s principles once included the ambiguous and inconsequential phrase ‘Don’t Be Evil’.11 However, the company has since funded AI military technologies.12 On a broader scale, BIG Tech companies invest time, money and expertise into fool-proof codes of conduct, to convince us that our data is safe and private and that upcoming technological developments will be “fair and humane”.13 But critics have called out these, and more companies, for the lack of transparency within their practices, where one thing is said and another is done. When no outsider has clear insight into an organisation’s activities, this organisation is shielded by its practice of ambiguity.
9. from BIG Tech to individual cultural workers
10. i.e. deontological ethics approaches; “Deontological approaches within the context of AI ethics attempt to codify ethical theories and principles, and conceive ethics as intimately connected to policy and regulation” (van Maanen, 2022). For more, see the article AI Ethics, Ethics Washing, and the Need to Politicize Data Ethics by Dr. Gijs van Maanen.
11. To give ethics ambiguity, to announce ‘do not harm,’ disregards the complex nature of how things really work and become, how un-list-like the lived experience is and how generalised statements, like ‘Don’t Be Evil’ don’t hold people & systems accountable.
12. For example, think of Project Mayhem: a collaboration with the U.S. Department of Defense using AI to analyse drone footage. Also see Facebook’s motto “Work Hard And Be Nice To People”, which is not really going well…
13. What does that even mean? Why is that a priority?
In our neoliberal entrepreneurial14 economy, we’re forced to constantly develop ourselves into a saleable brand. We design ourselves, pushing certain aspects to the foreground and certain aspects to the back. We each look in the mirror, pick a suitable colour, and ethics-wash ourselves all over. Ethics washing is hugely influenced by the logics of branding, design and advertising, which have deeply permeated our culture. This aesthetic logic particularly crystallises in the figure of the superstar.
For example, musician Beyoncé profiles herself as an ethically engaged genius individual who deploys an afrocentric feminism, but in reality she’s supported by a huge amount of invisibilised labour - not only from uncredited and marginalised people contributing to her humongous productions, but especially from underpaid girls of colour working in Sri Lankan factories. It is the quintessentially American way of producing capitalist culture, which releases her from the responsibility to align her actions with her words.
14. e.g. artists and cultural workers, who survive the labour market as forced-to-be entrepreneurs.
While Israel and its representatives occasionally are bluntly honest and transparent about their genocidal intent, ethics washing is one of their rhetoric strategies.15 The weaponisation of an aesthetics of victimhood, innocence, democracy and LGBT+ inclusion plays a large role in Israel’s cultural warfare, with Israeli-Russian singer Eden Golan’s Eurovision performance as a prime example.16 “Aged 18 on her return to her homeland, Eden has since received her call up to the Israeli Defence Forces and will enter the army after Eurovision. She is ready to serve her country, but singing will remain a priority and, if it weren’t for rehearsals, she would be composing and producing in her home studio now. “I will never stop,” she says. “Music is the reason I’m on this earth. I was born for this and it’s all I want to do.”17
The pleasantry of music is one of the best ways to obfuscate war criminality. It is often perceived as sincere and honest, and can strongly help in creating a nationalist propaganda. It is also seen as an innocent way of bringing people together, which in its “non-racial” and “connecting” way of making meaning, functions as a great propaganda. Golan Says: “Music has its own language and it connects people on a different frequency. And any person from any country or any race can feel something together. And I feel like that’s what’s happening.”18
This naturally means literally nothing.
15. The war machine is laced with ‘moral armies’ and ‘humane missions’: buzzwords to wash inherent wrongs with preemptive and protective disclaimers.
16. Despite her sweet voice, Golan seamlessly switches between glossy microphones and glossy guns.
18. ibid
Far-right and supposedly “centrist” organisations effectively convince large parts of the general audience that their political project and intentions are counter-cultural, rebellious and marginalised, creating a sense of victimhood in the supposed “suppression” of their dominant voices and positionalities19. In reality, the systems of white supremacy, heterosexism and eugenics that they enforce have hardly been affected but rather slightly modified over time:
“If one looks at the transformations of the CMP [Colonial Matrix of Power]20 since its formation in the sixteenth century, one sees mutations (rather than changes) within the continuity of the discursive or narrative orientation of Western modernity and Western civilisation.”21
White supremacy is not and has not been under threat, despite Trump’s sentiment to ‘Make America Great Again,’ Wilders cry for ‘freedom’ and Netanyahu’s demonisation of Arab bodies.
Political, conservative, colonial projects and capitalist, market-lead, growth-oriented practices employ narratives that tell us what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad:’ simplified rhetorics and seductive aesthetics intended to confuse, hype-up, distract, cover-up and form a public belief that BIG forms of power know what’s best and know what we need. We’ve seen that in BIG practises the construction of an ethics is used to pre-emptively protect the company and not the users. BIG Tech and government structures cannot self-regulate their ethics - this clearly isn’t working when we still witness the likes of ongoing investments in war and war technology. But why are ethics22 formulated in the first place?23
In many deep commoning, collective and care-oriented practices, ethical workings are co-authored24 and valuable to the health of the context. They are shaped horizontally and are open for deliberation, they focus on iterations of questions rather than static checklists with no accountability intentions. They ask rather than assign.
19. Social locations and social constructs, such as race, gender, class
20. “[...] a structure of management (composed of domains, levels and flows) that controls and touches upon all aspects and trajectories of our lives.”
21. Walter D. Mignolo, Coloniality Is Far from Over, and So Must Be Decoloniality, 2017
22. Small reminder of its ‘verb’ nature
23. This is a question we need to ask in order to understand and contest malpractices
24. Tyson Yunkaporta of the Apalech tribe in far north Queensland describes the “temporary hierarchies” (as opposed to top-down hierarchy or the more conceptual idea of ‘non-hierarchical’) employed by the community in order to ensure that power is always shared and that decision-making remains horizontal.
We are drawn to a questions-based approach of doing ethics to start scraping away that juicy ethics paint-wash. We leave both you and ourselves with the following:
How can we recognise, dissect and pierce through false images of innocent25 goodness?26
Who should and shouldn’t be designing ethical frameworks?27
Are we understanding values as personal principles or collective acts?
How can we reflect on and learn from our positionality, our social identities, our biases and privileges?28
25. See Gloria Wekker, White Innocence, 2016, Duke University
26. increasingly produced by megacorporates, ethnostates, politicians and celebrities
27. What type of collaborative approaches between academic-experts and context-experientialists can be set up in this process?
28. How could peer-regulation and critical dialogue play a part in this?