I buy clothing in sudden bursts of need. I do this because I wear things past the point where I probably should not, and then rush to address the gap so I don’t look strange on a Zoom call or at the grocery store.

This is to say that quarantine has melted my brain.

Speaking of melted brains, I recently succumbed to the siren call of an Instagram dropshipped jeans advertisement. What can I say? I was in a bad place and vulnerable, doomscrolling, and needed a few new pairs of pants.

The jeans are—as you could have guessed—not of great quality. I’ll still wear them until I can’t. I also took the time to check their label, and in doing so further solidified my feelings on how much working in tech has also contributed to melting my brain.

I’ll spare you a photo of the area where my undercarriage is placed for eight plus hours a day. Here is an illustration of said label instead:

The jeans’ label included the following information:

• The brand name,
• The waist and leg sizing,
• The percentage of what materials make up the fabric,
• Where it was made,
• Washing and care instructions,
• Some control numbers that probably make sense to the factory that produced the jeans, and
• A website base URL.

This is metadata, information about information. And its inclusion is a totally normal and helpful thing! The clothing you are currently wearing most likely also has a label with this sort of information on it.

Gateway

What I’m surprised about is that you don’t need to do anything past buying the pair of jeans to have access to their care information. This surprise, in turn, communicated to me exactly how much tech has irrevocably damaged how I think.

Unlike the tech industry, some opportunistic, profit-maximalizing process has yet to insert itself in the garment-producing industry to intercept this aspect of it.

Similarly, some growth-hacking, hustle-grinding, maximalizing-for-the-sake-of-maximalizing, unintentional Goodheart’s law-manifesting dingus has yet to come along. It’s a numbers game until someone places a gateway to get between me and learning how to take care of my clothing as a way to generate metrics, harvest my personal information, and sell me more things.

Surprise specifically manifested as expecting to see a QR code with no other information on the label. If your brain has not been broken by working in tech the way mine has, allow me to explain this.

Using the QR code would enable the company that sold me the jeans to be able to capture data about:

• The number of people visiting the embedded URL,
• What time they are visiting,
• An approximate location of where they are visiting from,
• Their browser, operating system, and other device info,
• How long they’re visiting the embedded URL,
• Where they go from the URL,
• Extrapolate the previous bullet points into generating demographic information about potential income level and purchasing power