Howard Rheingold shares an anecdote about what happens when you combine a bar code reader with Google. He picked up two products at random off the shelf and then googled to find out more about them and got some interesting results.
Of course he could just have pulled the name of the products and their manufacturers off the boxes in plaintext somewhere, but this was a kind of “v. 1.0” thought experiment.
If people had bar code readers attached to smart devices wirelessly connected in future (or more likely were reading the radio tags that will be provided in future products) the process of checking your consumption against ethical (or dietary or environmental) criteria could be very much speeded up. You could just swipe an item and have it checked against your choice of “blacklist” – ie “Don’t buy that pineapple – the growers are being drastically underpaid by that company”.
