you don’t know where anything comes from

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an excellent investigation exposing how the United States Mint buys its gold from Colombian drug cartels, despite a law that it should only purchase legally mined American gold.

The main thing that struck me about the scheme was how everything superficially looked great on paper. Each cartel miner has an official license, so the middlemen buy their gold without asking any questions. Then they legally sell it to American refineries, who melt it down and resell to the U.S. Mint, which doesn’t inquire where the original metal came from.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this article, because we all take shortcuts that seem too good to be true. It’s so easy to order a wool sweater on Amazon, wait for a box to materialize on your doorstep, and call it a day. But unless you know the sheep, and you know who knitted the sweater, and you know who sold it, and you know who transported it, you can’t guarantee that you didn’t just contribute to animal cruelty or child labor.

Sure, you can walk to the local store and pay extra for that “fair trade” label, but you’re only really paying for your own peace of mind. Just like “American legal gold,” the certification probably covers up a litany of worker abuses you’d rather not know about. At the end of the day, you still have no clue where your fair trade alpaca wool cardigan actually came from.

This is a problem that will only worsen as our society continues globalizing and our supply chains grow more mediated. You order your avocado toast in a Brooklyn cafe, the waiter brings it out, and maybe you think about how the chef prepared it. You’re probably not thinking about the refrigerated semi-truck that brought it to the wholesaler, or the packaging plant that prepared it for transportation, or—oops—the fact that avocado farming is also heavily tied to Mexican drug cartels. The further we get from the source, the easier it is to ignore this inconvenient fact.

As someone who researches the online information ecosystem, I’m similarly concerned that we don’t know where our memes come from. Something starts trending, it gets chalked up to an innocent joke that’s “not that deep,” and then we don’t question it further. In reality, the meme probably spawned from some depraved imageboard full of misogynistic incel Nazis. Then it was amplified by a string of content creators trying to cash in on the shock value for their own benefit.

Other times, a meme is trending because someone is actively trying to manipulate your reality. Most new musical artists seem like they appear out of nowhere nowadays—but that’s because they’re all paying for AI accounts to artificially inflate their content. Governments are openly conducting memetic warfare against their own citizens. Gambling degenerates are mainstreaming ideas just to make a quick buck. You think a trend is popular because it’s popular, but it’s avocado toast gold bars.

We are in a crisis of taking things at face value, which simultaneously makes us civically negligent and less present in our own lives. It feels great to knit your own sweater or pick your own fruits, not only because it’s ethical, but because you’ve earned it. In the same way, nothing compares to the satisfying rush of truly grasping an idea for yourself.

The more we understand our surroundings, the better citizens we are, and the more grounded we are in our own lives. And yet our hypermediated reality makes this harder than ever, which is why I think we have to examine everything around us. Don’t just eat or wear or say something without peeling back the layers to question where it came from. Once you’ve earned it, you’ll be happier to accept it as your own.