What the Cyclospora outbreak and Amazon returns have in common

Consumer confidence and social symbioses

In 2008, I was a college student, living in a small town in Western Massachusetts. I needed shoes. The mall was 30 miles away, but there was this new thing, called Zappos. I could buy more shoes than I needed, have them shipped to me, and return the ones I didn’t want, for free.

I knew Zappos wasn’t doing this for my benefit. A free returns policy is a sales tactic. (Considering how many shoes I returned, they might have lost money on me specifically.)

I have no illusions about why Amazon recently let me return almost any item. Amazon is not doing this for me. They auction off the returned items as an opaque heap of goods called a “liquidation pallet,” at a substantial loss. They’re doing it for my consumer confidence, so that I will spend more money on Amazon.

Many things in our society that might seem like they are for “us” are in fact for our consumer confidence. You might think your credit card lets you contest charges because of the Fair Credit Billing Act of 1974. That is reductively true. It is also true that the Act was supported by the major credit companies. It is in the interest of large businesses, like Visa, to compel small businesses to play by rules that will benefit the whole industry. Visa reasoned that, if consumers know that credit cards are safe in general, then they will get more business than by trying to convince consumers that Visa cards in particular are safe.

The Manichean view —“bad corporation versus good government,” one trying to take your money, and one trying to protect you— is reductive. The two sides, in fact, work together.

I work in public health. The ethos of many public health practitioners is starkly axial. We, the good guys, are out to protect health, the most basic of good things. Those guys, like Taylor Farms, are out to get money. They don’t care if they make you sick.

The reality is more complicated. It may not be in the myopic, particular interest of Taylor Farms to recall many bags of lettuce. It is in their longer-term interest, and in the interest of the food industry more broadly, that most people, most of the time, don’t think twice about buying bags of lettuce. Local public health inspectors enable me to walk into any restaurant, announce “Civis Romanus sum!” and eat with little fear I will get sick. Public health people are happy I do not get sick, and businesses are happy that I am a confident consumer.

Symbioses are not conspiracies or contracts. The fungus and the bacteria that make up lichen don’t have an agreement. The fungus attaches to the grow and extracts minerals. Bacteria land inside the fungus, use the extracted minerals, and do photosynthesis. They excrete energy-rich sugars, which the fungus eat. The fungus and the bacteria don’t keep doing their “jobs” because the symbiosis works. The symbiosis works because they each keep doing what they are genetically coded to do.

At least four different types of lichen, each of which is a different combination of a fungus and another symbiont.

I previously wrote about how there is no such thing as corporate greed, or, more precisely, that “corporate greed” isn’t a useful concept for deciding how to regulate corporations.

It is easy to conceive of “a corporation” as an entity that makes decisions. A corporation gets some bad PR, so they decide to tithe some portion of their cashflow as corporate responsibility. But then the people who do corporate responsibility can truly believe that they are fighting the good fight.

A friend of mine worked at the EPA. His job was to regulate companies that manufacture appliances like refrigerators, to have them report how much ozone-layer-destroying gas they were emitting. The corporate people he worked with would hand over their reports and beam at him. “It feels so good to help protect the environment!” they would say. These people, environmentalists at heart, worked for a corporation that likely had other employees that were simultaneously skirting EPA regulations and lobbying against them. The corporation, the system, has parts that can operate essentially independently, synergistically producing a joint outcome, without overt conspiracy.

The selection of spokespeople is another example. My understanding is that DOGE operators believed that huge numbers of federal employees were useless at best and frauds at worst. Under that belief, firing people, even firing people indiscriminately, would be a net good. Now DOGE is out, but leaders at OPM (roughly speaking, the federal government’s HR department) say that reductions in force weren’t actually about federal workers but rather about giving federal agencies the freedom to reshape their missions and personnel budgets. It can be that (1) Elon Musk believed one thing, and (2) current leaders believe another thing, and (3) these beliefs interleave in a way that is beneficial to both of them.

If you want to change organizations, don’t think of them as coherent entities, controlled by a homunculus. Think of them as multiple organisms, each with their own DNA, pursuing their own projects, creating some emergent whole. If you want to help people, think about how you can co-opt your supposed enemies.