What are ethical companies like Patagonia and some digital counterparts?

Have a look at B-corps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification) I see Patagonia is in the list, too. https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/find-a-b-corp/ has a filter by industry, for example raidboxes.io for Wordpress hosting.

With all respect to the intention, this is a dead end.

There are many ways to argue the Basecamp decision. Framework themselves had a nice recent email to customers titled "We are not sustainable" that summarizes the conundrum.

It's worth reading MacAskill "Doing Good Better" and following the Ethical Altruism thread and the 80,000 hours stuff but with the awareness that the FTX fraud grew in that primordial soup. B-Corps are similarly non-useful as a signal of actual organization behavior. Some useful metrics are produced from corporate governance ESG/CER work but those have also to be read without the rose tinted glasses.

There is in some US states a binding corporate structure called something like Public Benefit Corp. They are as often as not used as the shell for a quasi government entity (and whether those are ultimately bound to ethical and sustainable practices is a question probably answered best with another question- "on what timeframe.")

I don't know if this is what you're looking exactly but the worker owned cooperative Mondragon might qualify: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

It's become a federation of cooperatives so some members are better or worse but generally being owned by the people in the communities it operates in tends to lead to more ethical behavior.

I’m also curious to see some examples – I used to work at a well known software company in the outdoor recreation / fitness space that made a really big deal about social justice both internally and externally. You would think they’d also be strong on the environment given the market they operated in but the minute you brought up conservation or environmental justice in an all-hands q&a they would immediately shut the line of discussion down hard.

I’m guessing it’s a much more significant hit to the bottom line to take a hard stance on environmental stuff vs DEI/social justice etc, which kind of surprised me but I can’t think of another explanation. It’s not like they were afraid of alienating market segments due to political alignment, since their (good imho!) stance on antiracisim was definitely just as politically charged as taking a strong stance on sustainability would have been…

There's a few companies aimed to guide consumer buying decisions. Some are online marketplaces like www.grove.co, and there have been a lot of attempts at apps for this -- one still alive is https://www.thecommons.earth.

Most of the ethical-themed alternatives to a mass-market product don't seem to succeed at displacing the mass-market, but there are ethical alternatives in most every category for the cohort of people that will pay a premium for it. Note -- premium is not just higher price; spending more time, dealing with a less polished user experience, are also costs associated with prioritizing ethical alternatives.

https://www.bellacanvas.com/usa-strong is WRAP Certificated and is good. The Free Software Foundation endorsed vendors like Think Penguin etc. are ethical too.

I work at Transit app (https://manifesto.transitapp.com) and I think we fit the mould.

We build a navigation app that (1) helps drive down CO2 emissions and (2) encourages good urbanism, by helping people in urban areas make optimal use of their public transit and bikeshare systems.

In dense urban areas like NYC and Paris, where most of our users live, proposing a “most environmentally-friendly car trip”, like most consumer navigation apps do, is entirely beside the point. Carbon neutral transport options are just as fast or marginally slower than cars in these locales, especially when combining bikeshare and transit trips to eliminate long walks, and timing those trips with real-time transit data to eliminate waits at the stop. We believe in the compounding effects of good public transit and work with a few hundred transit agencies to make their service more accessible and accountable to riders.

Besides having a worthwhile mission, we also know that it’s only defensible in the long term with a sustainable business model, which we’ve managed by partnering with major transit agencies (like LA Metro, Muni, the MNTA, STM, OC Transpo, etc.) and having a soft paywall to encourage user subscriptions, which nullifies any incentive to monetize via impertinent ads and all those other unsavoury business practices regularly pursued by other companies in the consumer nav space.

Relatedly, we’re always on the lookout for bright, ethical, city-loving engineers — especially ones whose passions are machine learning, data compression, mapping, and mobile development. If that’s you: https://jobs.transitapp.com

https://www.fairphone.com/en/impact/

I'm trying to do something along these lines with my company, Contraption Company (https://contraption.co).

"Ethical" is an ambiguous word - so I've focused on the idea of "Dependability", which I've broken down focus on "Sustainability", "Transparency", and "Craftsmanship" that I outline on the homepage.

I built a couple VC-backed companies and didn't like that the products only lasted a couple of years, so this company structure allows me to focus on building products that I won't shut down, and it lets me leave money on the table with pricing.

Technically this is a "Personal holding company" (PHC) - I'm a one-person business with no investors. I think you'll see more companies like this in the future. And, I think that the PHC model allows businesses to focus more on customers than investors, because they don't need to transition to a "value extraction" phase in the future.

Better World Shopper (https://betterworldshopper.org/) is an effort worth checking out. It attempts to score companies in various domains along a number of ethics-related axes ("human rights", "the environment", "animal protection", "community involvement", "social justice")

It has some major limitations and is certain to be incomplete/inaccurate in many ways (I think it is basically the result of one person's PhD work and a continuation of that effort afterwards), but, it's still a great starting point to at least understand the broad strokes of which companies have the best/worst track records, and I think something similar scaled up and with a more transparent code/database could do a lot of good in helping to keep track of how organizations are behaving over longer the long run.

Hey! Coincidentially at Submer we help data centers (rack servers, cloud, HPC, colos, miners, supercomputers…) become more sustainable, efficient and scalable thanks to our sustainable active immersion cooling technology.

Apart from the ‘Submerge’ meaning, Submer is also the acronym of our company values, the first being ‘Sustainable’. We are also backed by impact investors like Norrsken VC and PlanetFirst.

If interested in learning more you can check our website (https://submer.com) and some of our job openings here: https://careers.submer.com/

I work in the tech side of Humanitix [0]. We’re a self-sustaining not-for-profit software business.

https://humanitix.com/au/reports/nov2023

Companies like Patagonia and Thankyou (https://thankyou.co) have been role models for us, but it’s been pretty lonely in the tech sector!

… AMA?

I've come across the tech pages of these two ethical consumer guides :

https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/technology

https://guide.ethical.org.au/guide/browse/guide/?cat=600&sub...

There’s a job board for companies that share certain values with respect to how they treat their employees that comes to mind: https://peoplefirstjobs.com/

But I’m not sure if this fits what you are asking for exactly.

Perhaps Standard Notes? They aspire to be sustainable in the sense of planning their paid tiers to sustain their product over the long term and design the product to be consistent over the long term too.

Nowhere near the scale of Patagonia, but ZenBusiness operates as a PBC.

[1] https://www.zenbusiness.com/pbc/

Hetzner for hosting.

If you're looking for ethics and sustainability in software, https://www.fsf.org/ is a good jumping off point. The Microsoft-pioneered approach of ruthlessly destroying the endeavor you're involved with but then giving away some of the ill-gotten gains to worthy causes in other areas is utterly disingenuous and dishonest. Touting a deployment of needlessly centralized servers as being somehow better for the environment is just basic greenwashing. The ethical thing would have been to not create that type of user-disenfranchising system to begin with.

You should embrace capitalism and accept that there’s no such thing as an ethical company. ESG is just a score that says how much the company is aligned with the goals of people powerful enough to care about ESG scores. The most ethical thing you can do is stop buying things that you don’t need.

Stop trying to make secular indulgences a thing. You can’t buy pay your way into being an ethical person. Why not spend your time instead of your money?

Patagonia still makes their garbage with slave labor in the third world.

Environmentally, a lot of this in the digital realm is just greenwashing, where they buy CO2 offsets of debatable usefulness (a whole different discussion). And moving things from the cloud to on-premise is likely to be climate negative, depending on where you want to draw the particular boundaries (like is it some secondhand server sitting in an office that's already being cooled for regular use anyway? do we exclude that from an analysis?). Here's one sample lifecycle analysis from a Stanford test: https://sustainable.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj26701/f...

Patagonia is pretty legit (especially once they became a nonprofit, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62906853) (edit: on the environmental side, I mean. Labor-wise, they're still not great. See sibling comments discussing this), but I'd say they're the exception more than the norm.

B-corps are a good starting point (see mtmail's comment), but even then they should still be individually evaluated.

On the labor side, tech co-ops are a (small) movement: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops

In general tech companies are too capitalist/VC-driven to be truly concerned about labor matters. And devs are so highly paid compared to most fields of work that there's not a strong drive towards collective organizing and unionization, but that's slowly changing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionization_in_the_tech_secto... (Kickstarter, Activision, Alphabet, etc.)

For physical products, there are certifications like USDA Organic, Fair Trade Certified, FSC (for wood/paper products), but none of those are as powerful as their proponents would like them to be. They're still generally better than nothing, but depending on what you're trying to optimize for, you can find flaws in each of them.

In general I would say well-intentioned efforts at ethical sourcing and manufacturing cannot overcome the drastic differences in labor and costs of living between countries; for you to be able to buy a can of coffee at $10 with organic, fair trade, shade grown etc. certifications, that means something has to give. That usually means some farmer is growing and harvesting them for pennies a day. Fair trade pays more than non-fair trade, but it's still not much. Direct Trade is an attempt to improve that further (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_trade), but AFAIK there's not a third-party certification for it, so you're pretty much taking companies at their word. There is rarely transparency about just how much different parts of the supply chain are getting paid, and how each part of the chain handles their environmental practices. It's a tragedy of globalized capitalism -- and arguably its backbone, cheaper sourcing == higher profits -- so inherently at odds. I suppose you can get entirely US-grown-and-roasted coffee (Hawaii?) but there's not much transparency in the labor chain there either, i.e. are they just importing ag labor below a livable wage.

There are small tech orgs actually dedicated to on-the-ground local sustainability, like https://www.appropedia.org or https://www.opensourceecology.org/. These are pretty legit but tiny in scale.

If you ever really want to evaluate the whole supply chain of something, there is an ISO standard for "lifecycle analysis" https://www.iso.org/standard/37456.html and you can usually find reports on Google Scholar for whatever product/service you're curious about. It usually won't be pretty, and the answer almost always boils down to "we don't have enough data about how country X makes thing Y, and how much of what they report is truthful vs greenwashing, so we're going to assume Z"... but it's a starting place.

-----------

The above are my opinions as a web dev primarily working in renewables, with an undergrad in Environmental Science. I'm not an expert (in anything), just sharing my thoughts.

.. just about horfed when reading Patagonia as ethical. Cognitive dissonance at an all time high. scour any legit investigative journalism team and you'll get it.

"What can I buy to feel better about myself and better then people who can't afford it."

Ethical companies are companies that offer products cheaply so that everyone can afford them, like Ryanair, Xiaomi, Google, Meta ...