Washing is common in politics (photo by Nick Kenrick, CC BY 2.0)
“You must wash your mouth with soap“, so goes an old Finnish saying telling children not to swear. Whether it is folklore; I do not know. Whether it worked; I do not want to know. But after reading a recent blog post about sane washing, I started wondering: what else is being washed? We wash laundry, sure, but what else are we washing; what else is being cleaned? These questions warrant a brief dive into the online record. By a dive, I mean a non-systematic presentation of information tidbits, some of which is research literature.
We have all probably heard about green washing, which seems to be a subclass of more general policy washing. Indeed, different washings seem to be predominantly about political phenomena. They are used to tell, assert, or allege some inconvenient truth, practice, or phenomenon that is being concealed by cleaning.
In fact, I have washed myself with a colleague; we used a term participatory washing from the existing literature for referring to potential dangers involved in using deliberative democracy technologies for hiding existing problems in democracies.
But there is more; washing seems to cover all levels of politics. At the level of individuals and their rights, a notion of rainbow washing has been used. At the other end of the spectrum: washing extends even to geopolitics; some have used a concept of sovereignty washing to describe recent technology policy rhetoric.
However, also businesses wash. In fact, washing is a common marketing tactic. For instance, AI washing has been used to describe claims about using sophisticated AI technologies when in fact conventional computing is used. AI washing also often involves other washing. For instance, ethics washing has been a common technique for AI washing.
What to make out of all this washing? In the face of the environmental crisis and other global problems, at least the world has not become much cleaner. Therefore, perhaps all the washings are merely a reiteration of the famous 1837 fable.