Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Rampant consumerism doesn’t happen by itself: it is encouraged by an economic system that requires perpetual economic growth. When national economies show signs of slowing down, citizens are invariably called upon to increase their consumption
So much of modern culture insists that constant stimulation is the essence of living. In truth, constant stimulation is merely a tactic of advertisers, app makers, websites and myriad media outlets to hook you on their messages and their products. Leisure requires withdrawal from all that and—this is the key point—learning to derive pleasure from solitude, quiet observation of the world around us and introspection.
The truth is that Jim made a practical choice. He had bought something he could afford. He wasn’t a pretentious jerk, a privileged snob, a hyper-critical college know-it-all, or a buffoon with delusions of grandeur. He was a hard worker who needed reliable transportation to get to and from work.
Imagine a world where corporate charters were only granted if they adopted a triple bottom line, and where shareholder lawsuits threatened every time a company broke one of its own social and environmental standards. Until that happens, it may be that the “worst event in the history of our civilization” is not the future development of modern AI, but the decision by a group of 17thcentury politicians to unleash the power of the Corporation on an unsuspecting humanity.
My daughter, being sixteen, just got her driver’s license. I asked her a question a few days ago: ” If you had to choose one and give up the other, which would you choose: a personal vehicle or the internet (including social media, wifi, smart phones, etc.)?” She thought for a bit and said: “It’s a hard question but I would choose the internet. Nobody actually likes driving, it’s just something we have to do, but I really like having access to movies at home and all that other stuff.” She is just one young person, but the choice and the distinction that she made surprised me.
The automakers and IT giants are predicting that autonomous vehicles (AVs or “driverless cars”) will play a big role in reducing America’s currently extravagant emissions of greenhouse gases. In this claim (as in the assertion that flying cars will be more energy efficient than helicopters), climate mitigation is serving not as a goal but as a selling point for a lucrative new technology that society doesn’t need.
Post-purchase dissonance is an expression psychologists use to describe the disappointment we sometimes feel on realizing that our latest consumer purchase does not fulfil the promise we bought it on. At first sight it’s a curious anomaly. On deeper reflection, it turns out to be the structural basis for the entire edifice. The engine of consumer society is discontentment. This is more than a rhetorical claim.
By abandoning the duty of maintenance we owe to the objects in our lives, we are distancing ourselves from the physical world and essentially sending the entropy elsewhere for someone else to deal with, whether human or non-human.
Now, in addition to the products that magically appear on Western store shelves absolutely shorn of history and provenance, much of the hitherto distant pollution emitted in their production has also arrived. It has come home to roost. Globalization’s blowback.
In other words, the modern consumer culture was born – not as a response to innate human greed or customer demand, but to the needs of industrial capital.
We all have to consume; it’s a necessary reality of existence. However, in the ‘consumer society’ the most radical thing you can do is not to consume ‘as directed’ – by finding alternative options that meets your needs while enacting a set of principles in opposition to that overbearing and exploitative economic paradigm.
First of all, we are at a moment when we’re in political crisis, we’re in ecological crisis, and the ability to imagine a different world, to imagine different solutions to the world we’ve created, to imagine different ways of dealing with the problems we have has never been more pressing.
