Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending.
Calculated, like in planned-economy, directive-from-the-top? I disagree. A lot of the "fluff," as the author describes it, is excess capital finding its way to things people find pleasurable, whether it be dope, travel, beauty, or rock and roll. Purveyors of such pleasures have proved to be remarkably adept at creating & providing these opportunities.
Counterpoint: What do you think "fashion" is? I used to think there were some very cool, fashion-adept people, who have the ability to predict what will considered modern next year.
The reality is, the clothing industry decides what to produce at least 6-12 months in advance. It's not like they produce everything and public opinion decides in the end what is "cool". Granted, the industry tries to predict what will be in demand. But by and large, fashion is not predicting what will be cool, but specifing what will be produced.
When they say "blue will be in fashion next year", then it means you'll be able to buy a lot of blue clothes (and some people will be able to deduce that you have not recently bought clothes, which is a bonus to encourage more buying).
I only realized this a I got older, when certain items were missing in every shop, that were there the previous and following years. Be it a certain cut of jeans or a certain colored shirt. (And it's not just clothes, I noticed it in interior design, PC cases, salad sauces, and just about any product category.)
>The reality is, the clothing industry decides what to produce at least 6-12 months in advance.
It's more the mainstream you're referring to, late adopters basically. of course they can produce in advance as the styles are already validated on urban streets and within subcultures who really set the trends.
There are inventors, early adopters and late adopters, quite similar to SaaS.
Fashion is an industry where hundreds of individual designers, some with the backing of megacorps and some without, try to meet popular interest (or to lead it), with production times measured in weeks to months, and with seasonal variation.
There is no "fashion cabal" where designers get together for drinks and to anoint "cerulean blue" as the color of 2023 and then pull their customers by the nose ring into purchasing.
(Yes, there is a media-favorite color survey that gets printed every year, and there are some downstream effects of that).
The music industry works similarly. Bands toil for years (or months), doing their thing, and A&R reps from major labels try to predict what they can promote that will be popular enough this year (based on the choices of other promoters in the industry), or next year, to sell in the near term, and yet differentiated enough to have lasting value.
I've been wearing the exact same jeans cut for 30 years now. When they get holes, I just push a button on Amazon for more. My dress shirts are 20-30 years old. They're not out of style.
Fashion trends are created in the same way art, architecture, and music trends are. By people who are talented and come to be influential.
The fashion “industry” is the very last stop in the process. The trends are determined by the “cool kids” for the most part.
If you don’t have exposure to the communities that actually drive trends it might feel the way you describe but if you live in a place like New York or pay attention to certain media the dynamic is obvious. If you’re basing your read on what you see in the local shop you’re fully a year or more behind the curve.
Which is fine. You don’t have to care about it at all really. But the your description of the dynamic isn’t correct.
More subtly a smaller but far more interested proportion of the population tries more experimental things and the big shops just copy that. That's both cheaper for the buyer and the producer.
It's the same for tech, various gadgets or technologies that are hyped right now have been gathering traction since years but have been picked up by the big brands only very recently. Best example is the trend of using non-x86 Computers, a few desktop/laptop projects have been there including Chrome books. Now Apple picked it up and it's a completely normal thing to buy an ARM laptop.
Looks kind of planned but it's not. It's just that some things fall out of fashion for whatever reasons...
There are cool people with the seemingly uncanny ability to predict fashion, but it's a bit of a trick. They do something that's different and can be monetized, and the industry grabs on to that and tries to push it as The Next Big Thing, through advertising, magazine contacts and social media influencers. Meanwhile, the production lines are running full-tilt so they can have the clothes in stores for when the right level of desire/FOMO has been built up.
At that point, the cutting edge fashionable people are already on to the next thing, and the cycle continues.
Since it's impossible for ordinary people without industry contacts to be ahead of the curve, do you try to follow the fashion trends, knowing that you'll always be at least a half step behind?
Or do you stick with tried and true stalwarts, such as slim-to-regular cut dark denim jeans, Oxford shirts, sports jackets and so on, never being super fashionable, but also certainly not sartorially hopeless?
Trends are almost always pushed or at least encouraged by financial interests.
> It's not like they produce everything and public opinion decides in the end what is "cool".
To the contrary, public opinion does decide. Brands are trying to guess what will sell and be in fashion, and produce that. But they get it wrong all the time, as sales plummet for a particular season collection because consumers don't like it but really like another designer who guessed better.
The fashion industry isn't monolithic. There isn't one person deciding what gets produced. Ultimately it is all consumer-led as brands compete to try to produce what people will buy -- and they know fashion-conscious people don't want to buy what was for sale the previous year. But individual brands get tastes wrong all the time -- even well-known brands have seasons where they just totally mess up.
Imo the real fashion trendsetters don’t think about it in terms of what might become trending to surf it like q wave but are focussed on ideas&concepts which are relevant for society in that year/age.
Marcuse argues that we only think we're choosing to pursue certain things (pop music, sex, cars, food, etc). Actually, society has been transformed by certain parties to push these "false desires" on us.
I think there's something creepy about telling people their desires are false. This is an example of what Isaiah Berlin called the abuse of positive liberty: telling people what they should rationally want, which amounts to a kind of paternalism.
I suspect you're right, this stuff isn't top-down. To the extent that taste-makers and corporate boards determine what we want (which I suppose they partially do), they are participating in the same economies as us and are acting for the same reasons as we are. There's no domination going on here as far as I can tell, though there are certainly undesirable outcomes (from my perspective).
> I suspect you're right, this stuff isn't top-down.
But it is, thats where Bernays enters on the picture with Manufacture of Desire and Manufacture of Consent through Propaganda and Mass Media imprints
> “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
- Edward Bernays, Propaganda 1927
> “No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.”
- Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda 1927
> “Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.”
- Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda 1927
In the post he seems to only being talking about corporations (as far as I can tell). His point about corporations pushing products that people don't actually need, and in fact often make people less happy, seems fairly on point. The entire advertising industries that exist to be a conduit for advertisements (most of the media) are based on trying to get people to spend their money on things they wouldn't naturally spend them on.
His argument that the 40 hour work week is a deliberate way to force people to be consumers is extremely unlikely.
You're point about excess and un-directed capital, though, probably hits at the larger issue. It also can be used to explain things like administrative bloat and inflating tuition at higher education institutions, as well as a host of parasitic industries that go beyond mere consumption.
It seems like we hit the singularity years ago, but the majority of the new capacity mostly went into waste, unhealthy addictions and borderline scams that have taken up an increasingly large part of the economy. One wonders if more direct involvement from society (perhaps a robust industrial policy) could have lead us in a more prosperous direction.
In consumerist societies "pleasurable" is very much stretched, when your life is dull, you'll find spending money on whatever cool guy is trying to sell you. People with big pockets know all about your flaws, social behavior in the large, fads and followers, and they sure play with it like an orchestra conductor.
unlike russian communism you're not forced to do anything but you're seduced out of your mind, I guess it's fair
>Calculated, like in planned-economy, directive-from-the-top?
Doesn't matter. You don't need to give "directive-from-the-top" is your interests as an industry with the interests of other industries are more or less the same, and you can all push individually in the same direction.
>A lot of the "fluff," as the author describes it, is excess capital finding its way to things people find pleasurable, whether it be dope, travel, beauty, or rock and roll.
Some things yes. Most things, people find it pleasurable because they are in a state where they take pleasure from buying shit.
In fact, they only find them pleasurable before they buy them, afterwards there's a small rush for a few days, and they could not care less for them again, they're back into the lookout for buying the next "pleasurable" thing.
This is not accidental, it's the result of many changes, including what the post describes, but also a century of efforts from advertising and industry leads which have been well documented and with the overt intention of bringing up consumption and reducing self-reliance.
This was my exact thought, and was wondering if they were using ‘designed’ and ‘built’ in that sense of being planned and directed.
I’m with you and agree that it’s an unforeseen side effect.
I’d even take it a step further and suggest that along with being unexpected, that the majority of our leaders in the world are oblivious that this is even occurring since they are typically so far detached from most peoples lives.
I agree, and find it funny how many responses blame the government, corporations, etc. We are born with free will. Most of the time we act mindlessly, and try to blame someone else for it. Being happy with little possessions is a virtue that takes a lot of work. The benefits are beyond monetary.
Yes. The planned directive is a fiduciary duty to maximize profit for shareholders in combination with a lack of protection for those who face the externalities of these incorporated entities. We are maximizing for capital growth rather than happiness, and undervalue life.
There are job postings for mobile app/game developer positions requiring x years of designing slot machine casino games as a prerequisite. Calculated addiction and whale hunting is a major part of the economy right now
Yeah, I think we got here by evolution not revolution.It's a local minimum until the next upheaval. Lots of people are comfortable. As can be seen by comments on HN of "how can anyone possibly live on $100k?" . I think we may be at a local max of change as a certain level of comfortableness has allowed a false sense of revolution/being deprived as well as POC taking on more political power in the country. This has reached a critical mass in the form of the current republican party headed by Trump, I think unfortunately the violence from them will get much worse before it gets better.
> Purveyors of such pleasures have proved to be remarkably adept at creating & providing these opportunities.
It feels like this was also the central point the author was making, although they made it more forcefully.
.. these purveyors aren't necessarily 'providing these opportunities'; they are actually the inventors of many of the pleasures in the first instance.
It's not a calculated directive from the top. It's a crystallised consensus from those in a position of influence. Incentive based capitalism, at it's worst (or best, depending on your point of view).
Markets and government interact in ways which mix and transcend the top-down/bottom-up dichotomy. Consider freeways.
Freeways are government projects, commissioned federally, given to private contractors, which setup cities, which enact a policy of sprawl reified by a small committee, of which only one member was elected, and for which in order for people to live in the city, they must purchase cars for themselves, appearing to the free market responding to the problem of getting around.
So at all levels, there is a mix of group-agency vs individual-agency: different concentrations of power.
Ultimately the chain of causality to create freeways and thus create demand for cars is started by a few people at the top.
But from the consumer's perspective, buying a car is a need combined with other luxury requirements to differentiate the car-driving experience to their tastes, and the market provides it. They don't always ask if there are alternative urban models that policy-makers could have tried.
See also lobbyists, that distort this process near the top as a bid to artificially create demand, or to stay solvent as economic actors without revenue from the free market. This also creates the illusion that the market is merely responding to consumer needs, when in fact it is constrained in ways that encourage specific consumer responses.
So disappointingly predictable that you're being downvoted. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it, and all that.
If interest rates were up at 8%, there would be a lot fewer bets of the type of "litter the sidewalk with scooters and hope some money falls into them". The entirety of Surveillance Valley is basically a play to parlay overabundant monetary capital of the present into surveillance capital of the future.
The "continual growth" mindset was only worthwhile when it produced productive investment. The mass malinvestment we see today indicates that it has gone way too far. If you care about sustainability and global warming, you should be concerned with monetary policy - it's the main lever controlling the amount of production/consumption.
Furthermore, higher interest rates would allow technological deflation to actually occur, making it so the surpluses of technology get widely distributed in the form of lower prices. As it stands right now, the feedback cycle from the mandate of "full employment" guarantees that everyone on average will need to keep working the same amount, making technological gains accrue centrally to where new money is created.
Debt is >60% of the economy, and it's price fixed. It's interesting that people seem to think fixing the price of bananas has more consequence than fixing the price of debt.
It's just a planned economy not by government men but by mega corporations. Then they put up some facade to pretend that you have the freedom of choice.
It's more akin to evolution operating on culture rather than genes. Corporations are trying various things to differentiate themselves and be profitable. The ones that consumers like either due to real interest or due to marketing keep getting made/refined, the rest die off. And the process repeats from there.
You may be being unrealistic about the role of spontaneous personal choice in this.
To a surprising extent, people find things pleasurable because they're told to find them pleasurable.
No one sane would inhale burning carcinogenic leaves to damage their own health, but people do - because they're encouraged to.
People buy new phones because they're somehow "cool". No one is really sure why, but it's something that happens.
There used to be an element of spontaneous creativity in trends. Traditionally industry noted the trends and sold them back to customers.
But it's easier and cheaper to skip the organic and spontaneous part and sell trends top-down by linking them to perceptions of social status.
This is done by key players inside the relevant industries instead of by a Politburo of fat elderly men. But it's still heavily bureaucratic and centralised. Just in a cool way.
It also creates economies of scale, which is both convenient and useful.
Certainly advertising makes people want to start smoking or maybe continue. But people smoke because it gives them a high from the nicotine. Why do you think people were smoking in 1700? Because the nicotine made them feel relaxed, good and they became addicted.
> No one sane would inhale burning carcinogenic leaves to damage their own health, but people do - because they're encouraged to.
That's a bit naive. The carcinogenic leaves have mental effects, a buzz, pleasurable even before and despite addiction and carcinogenic qualities.
New phones have new features, speed and sizes / resolution.
None of these things are free of influence, peer pressure, advertising, and 'needing to feel in' the group. Sure. But to remove personal choice too strongly is a False way to look at the world. But this - this, call it systemic, way to look at the world - is popular and trending - ironically.
"Unnecessary" is such an odd category: humans could live in caves, for example. Who determines what is necessary? Is art necessary? Music? Nice food? This seems often tangled in some odd moral/theological origin, i.e. possessions are frowned upon.
I like to be shown new things to try, for example. So some advertising I actually like. Is my life planned by large corporations? From my work there I would say not, as most campaigns tend to fail even in the short term.
The author seems to indicate that what makes something "unnecessary" in this context is when it very temporarily scratches an itch but does nothing to meaningfully improve your quality of life in the longterm. What would really improve your life is less money, fewer purchases, and more free time.
Again, why is short-term pleasure wrong? My life would not be improved by less money, by the way. More free time, yes, fewer purchases, not necessarily.
> The ultimate tool for corporations to sustain a culture of this sort is to develop the 40-hour workweek as the normal lifestyle. Under these working conditions people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends.
I slightly disagree with this point. The 40 hour work week is a rather recent development; in the past, people had to work a lot longer with no or only one day of. The trend actually goes in the direction of reducing it further (at least here in Germany), where 35 or 32 hour weeks are getting more common (depending on the job, of course). Plus, there are alternative models, such as 4x 10h days + 3 days off.
Sure, the current model serves corporations, but it is by no means their invention. And while they are a big part of why it still is so large, the reason is most likely that they need the labor hours, not the specific consumption behavior.
Longer work weeks we’re mostly confined to Industrial Age city populations that didn’t have access to land to farm. Few laborers working in early industrial mills was doing so because it was easier then farming.
Agfa, Foraging and hunter-gatherer populations, work about 20 hours per week and transitioning to farming increased working hours.
And you’re skipping a few thousands of years of civilization between hunter gatherers and the industrial revolution. I can guarantee a Roman or medieval farmer worked pretty much every hour of sunlight
I've noticed an interesting congruity - people in the FIRE community tend to target saving two-thirds of a modern western income, with most finding that living on less than one-third begins to have serious impacts on quality of life. From some studies I came across while studying sustainable energy it also seems as though a well-designed community in which residents make certain lifestyle choices can reduce resource requirements by around two-thirds.
Most people in the FIRE community of course work more than the minimum long enough to save money and then join the investor class, without doing paid work at all from that point - but it's fascinating to think that we could all reduce work and lifestyles by two-thirds in a sustainable, ongoing way.
If “we could all” is constrained to households earning 6-figures, I tend to agree. I doubt a household making $30K/yr could realistically live on $10K/yr.
(Further, if everyone FIRE’d, growth would slow to the point where you’d need to save more to generate the same income from investments. We’re so far from that being any kind of practical worry, that it can be safely ignored I think, but would be a concern if it became more than vanishingly uncommon almost-fringe behavior.)
Isn't the FIRE person just delaying it's consumption? At some point the saved up money will be spent, therefore I wouldn't expect it to have a huge negative impact on economic growth
Objectively, a lot of the consumption of modern Western life is unnecessary. We don't have to drive out to dinner, there's edible food at home. We could skip those bucket-list vacation trips, purchasing new items instead of making-do with old, we could live in more modest housing for our income levels.
It's kind of trippy to imagine what the large-scale effects would be. If everyone cut their consumption by 1/3, our economy would contract a lot, but long-term it'd be healthier, right? Less waste, more efficiency, less environmental degradation overall, though I'll admit we need new technology to replace old dirty technology in energy. Overall, it's a very interesting subset of Westerners, the FIRE group.
Probably an argument that a forty hour workweek makes that kind of unnecessary consumption possible. People with time and groceries would probably make dinner rather than go out
Ironically I think things like a regular cooking + cleaning regime and staying very close to home are most palatable when they’re essentially forced by a 9-5 job. With time on my hands I’d have much more pressing desire to explore, sample, and generally spend on what the world has to offer.
I like the concept. There are even young people experimenting with retirement but for typically one year, also known as a 'gap year' where they don't work/study - they just explore.
A big part of FIRE is putting your income i to index funds that get profit from mindless consumption, unlimited growth and capital extraction. I think if everyone would do that there wouldn't be any return on the investments.
It’s kind of an interesting thought experiment. Think for a second how much many of our incomes depend on ad revenue. Certainly if a large contingent of consumers massively cut their spending we have to work harder and longer for the same pay. And so on across all jobs producing discretionary goods and services.
>Think for a second how much many of our incomes depend on ad revenue.
I don't think advertising makes that much difference. Most people spend all their earnings. The only thing advertising does is direct where it is spent.
>Certainly if a large contingent of consumers massively cut their spending we have to work harder and longer for the same pay.
If we all did it then we wouldn't be working longer and harder for the same pay.
I liked the post and I'm afraid that the author is right on so many points.
Lots of persons seem to be "uninterested in serious personal development", is this by some design or just natural evolution of modern society? I guess it was always like this, but I can also imagine that there are entities (ie, companies, governments, people) that are doing some thing or the other trying to keep the status quo: keep the people in the right state to consume as much as possible...
It's a consequence of our unprecedented prosperity that we can fret about such things as "personal development." See how much you worry about personal development when you're trying to bring in enough of a harvest to meet your caloric needs.
>Lots of persons seem to be "uninterested in serious personal development"
I don't think being uninterested in disengaging from consumer capitalism is akin to being uninterested in personal development. Being pro-mindfullness and anti-consumer is valid, but so is being pro-consumer and uninterested in mindfullness (because they are chasing other goals, which could be considered part of personal development). The mistake the author makes is assuming their goals are the best way to go, and then prescribing solutions for that.
The author's point of view is actually just fairly narrow. There is nothing wrong with their view, or the ideas they suggest for improving one's life if you share his perspective. But a lot of people simply don't share that view. As a counterpoint, some people (not mine) think the highest goal in life is to work as much as possible. They will do so, and probably consume a lot in order to maximise their time working. That goal and lifestyle might seem unsavoury to me or you, but it is another way to personal development: that you can, personally, be a really good worker.
As a 30-something tech worker, time is definitely the scarcest and most valuable thing I possess. Even more so now that my wife and I have a dog.
This statement gets orders of magnitude truer once you factor in the scarce overlapping time I have with my friends, all of whom are like me: 30-somethings with tech careers and young families.
Whether the shortage of time is by corporate design or no, I'm in a phase of my life where the shortage is very apparent. And it's hard for me to deal with. I feel a bit like I've been robbed of the space to have meaningful personal experiences outside of the corporate space or my immediate famy.
I wouldn’t say “paradise” of freedom. Definitely more flexibility without kids, but kids bring so much joy and meaning to life. For most people it’s a very worthwhile trade.
I disagree that the authors return to wastefulness/consumption is a result of systemic forces. I think it’s more likely the case that when you have a higher rate of income you spend money to convenience yourself and save time/energy because you value your time/energy at that higher rate of income.
> you spend money to convenience yourself and save time/energy because you value your time/energy at that higher rate of income.
Agreed, but the way I put it is that the higher consumption is done to compensate for the stresses that come with the work life(style). I have a lot less patience and mental energy to do impulse control or to judiciously weigh the pros and cons of this versus that purchase when in a stressful work environment compared to when I'm not. I'd say that counts as "a result of systemic forces".
I am a man and I own 13 pairs of shoes. They're mostly specialized--water shoes, snow boots, steel toe, fancy shoes, flip flops, running shoes, and several pairs of dress shoes. But when I was backpacking in Europe, I only carried one pair of black Timberland boots with me, which took me from the nightclub to the top of the Tatras to the catacombs of Paris. It's amazing how effortlessly I accumulate junk and how every item seems so important and necessary, until I go traveling with only a 30L backpack and I seem to have everything I need.
I have 1 dresser. In my mind, 1 is a nice small number of dressers to have. But in physical spacetime, one dresser takes up a hell of a lot of volume. I wonder if many of our possessions are like this: they occupy little space in our mind, even as they occupy evermore physical volume in our homes.
I've found that moving house can really make you take an extra look at all the stuff you have, and is a great opportunity to get rid of some of the accumulated junk. I've been living in this apartment for 13 years now, so I feel it's about time :-)
One thing that I think everyone should do once a year is take out all of their clothes, sort it into types and then go through it piece by piece. Identify everything that doesn't fit anymore, anything you haven't worn in a long time or maybe ever, anything you just don't like/love. Give it away to charity, or if it's something really nice, put it up for sale.
Sounds super simple but I've literally never done this in 30 years. Will be moving homes in a month (if all goes to plan), and I'll certainly do this before I move!
The trend towards larger homes and storage probably contributes to accumulation.
I’m in a ~450 sq ft studio and having to consciously think about where a new purchase will go cuts down on buying “junk” and makes me a lot quicker to sell or dispose of things that are just taking up space.
Similarly, when I moved to a city with hideously expensive parking, I sold my car when I wasn’t using it enough to justify the expense.
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Calculated, like in planned-economy, directive-from-the-top? I disagree. A lot of the "fluff," as the author describes it, is excess capital finding its way to things people find pleasurable, whether it be dope, travel, beauty, or rock and roll. Purveyors of such pleasures have proved to be remarkably adept at creating & providing these opportunities.
The reality is, the clothing industry decides what to produce at least 6-12 months in advance. It's not like they produce everything and public opinion decides in the end what is "cool". Granted, the industry tries to predict what will be in demand. But by and large, fashion is not predicting what will be cool, but specifing what will be produced.
When they say "blue will be in fashion next year", then it means you'll be able to buy a lot of blue clothes (and some people will be able to deduce that you have not recently bought clothes, which is a bonus to encourage more buying).
I only realized this a I got older, when certain items were missing in every shop, that were there the previous and following years. Be it a certain cut of jeans or a certain colored shirt. (And it's not just clothes, I noticed it in interior design, PC cases, salad sauces, and just about any product category.)
It's more the mainstream you're referring to, late adopters basically. of course they can produce in advance as the styles are already validated on urban streets and within subcultures who really set the trends.
There are inventors, early adopters and late adopters, quite similar to SaaS.
And they guess wrong all the time. If they could actually control things, they wouldn't have so much unsold inventory.
They're making predictions based on heuristics, not magically controlling the masses.
Fashion is an industry where hundreds of individual designers, some with the backing of megacorps and some without, try to meet popular interest (or to lead it), with production times measured in weeks to months, and with seasonal variation.
There is no "fashion cabal" where designers get together for drinks and to anoint "cerulean blue" as the color of 2023 and then pull their customers by the nose ring into purchasing.
(Yes, there is a media-favorite color survey that gets printed every year, and there are some downstream effects of that).
The music industry works similarly. Bands toil for years (or months), doing their thing, and A&R reps from major labels try to predict what they can promote that will be popular enough this year (based on the choices of other promoters in the industry), or next year, to sell in the near term, and yet differentiated enough to have lasting value.
The snack food industry works similarly.
The software industry works similarly.
The political industry works similarly.
"They" being the Color Association of the United States.[1] Which had a lot more clout when the US made its own textiles.
They also used to manage the consumer electronics color cycle, from grey to black to white to colors to putty and back to grey again.
[1] https://www.colorassociation.com/
Of course, I've never been cool, so there's that.
Fashion trends are created in the same way art, architecture, and music trends are. By people who are talented and come to be influential.
The fashion “industry” is the very last stop in the process. The trends are determined by the “cool kids” for the most part.
If you don’t have exposure to the communities that actually drive trends it might feel the way you describe but if you live in a place like New York or pay attention to certain media the dynamic is obvious. If you’re basing your read on what you see in the local shop you’re fully a year or more behind the curve.
Which is fine. You don’t have to care about it at all really. But the your description of the dynamic isn’t correct.
It's the same for tech, various gadgets or technologies that are hyped right now have been gathering traction since years but have been picked up by the big brands only very recently. Best example is the trend of using non-x86 Computers, a few desktop/laptop projects have been there including Chrome books. Now Apple picked it up and it's a completely normal thing to buy an ARM laptop.
Looks kind of planned but it's not. It's just that some things fall out of fashion for whatever reasons...
That's fast fashion. It's neither elegant not particularly valued by people who are into fashion.
At that point, the cutting edge fashionable people are already on to the next thing, and the cycle continues.
Since it's impossible for ordinary people without industry contacts to be ahead of the curve, do you try to follow the fashion trends, knowing that you'll always be at least a half step behind?
Or do you stick with tried and true stalwarts, such as slim-to-regular cut dark denim jeans, Oxford shirts, sports jackets and so on, never being super fashionable, but also certainly not sartorially hopeless?
Trends are almost always pushed or at least encouraged by financial interests.
To the contrary, public opinion does decide. Brands are trying to guess what will sell and be in fashion, and produce that. But they get it wrong all the time, as sales plummet for a particular season collection because consumers don't like it but really like another designer who guessed better.
The fashion industry isn't monolithic. There isn't one person deciding what gets produced. Ultimately it is all consumer-led as brands compete to try to produce what people will buy -- and they know fashion-conscious people don't want to buy what was for sale the previous year. But individual brands get tastes wrong all the time -- even well-known brands have seasons where they just totally mess up.
Also you should look up Zara and fast fashion.
Marcuse argues that we only think we're choosing to pursue certain things (pop music, sex, cars, food, etc). Actually, society has been transformed by certain parties to push these "false desires" on us.
I think there's something creepy about telling people their desires are false. This is an example of what Isaiah Berlin called the abuse of positive liberty: telling people what they should rationally want, which amounts to a kind of paternalism.
I suspect you're right, this stuff isn't top-down. To the extent that taste-makers and corporate boards determine what we want (which I suppose they partially do), they are participating in the same economies as us and are acting for the same reasons as we are. There's no domination going on here as far as I can tell, though there are certainly undesirable outcomes (from my perspective).
But it is, thats where Bernays enters on the picture with Manufacture of Desire and Manufacture of Consent through Propaganda and Mass Media imprints
> “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” - Edward Bernays, Propaganda 1927
> “No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.” - Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda 1927
> “Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.” - Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda 1927
Maybe they dont determine what we want but they certainly define the options available.
His argument that the 40 hour work week is a deliberate way to force people to be consumers is extremely unlikely.
You're point about excess and un-directed capital, though, probably hits at the larger issue. It also can be used to explain things like administrative bloat and inflating tuition at higher education institutions, as well as a host of parasitic industries that go beyond mere consumption.
It seems like we hit the singularity years ago, but the majority of the new capacity mostly went into waste, unhealthy addictions and borderline scams that have taken up an increasingly large part of the economy. One wonders if more direct involvement from society (perhaps a robust industrial policy) could have lead us in a more prosperous direction.
unlike russian communism you're not forced to do anything but you're seduced out of your mind, I guess it's fair
You are forced to choose between working to pay rent and health insurance or go hungry, homeless and ill or in prison.
In various developed societies there is free healthcare, social safety nets, or some forms of UBI or other help.
> but you're seduced out of your mind, I guess it's fair
Fair? Consumerism is threatening all ife on the planet. Humanity can do so much better.
Doesn't matter. You don't need to give "directive-from-the-top" is your interests as an industry with the interests of other industries are more or less the same, and you can all push individually in the same direction.
>A lot of the "fluff," as the author describes it, is excess capital finding its way to things people find pleasurable, whether it be dope, travel, beauty, or rock and roll.
Some things yes. Most things, people find it pleasurable because they are in a state where they take pleasure from buying shit.
In fact, they only find them pleasurable before they buy them, afterwards there's a small rush for a few days, and they could not care less for them again, they're back into the lookout for buying the next "pleasurable" thing.
This is not accidental, it's the result of many changes, including what the post describes, but also a century of efforts from advertising and industry leads which have been well documented and with the overt intention of bringing up consumption and reducing self-reliance.
Dead Comment
I’m with you and agree that it’s an unforeseen side effect.
I’d even take it a step further and suggest that along with being unexpected, that the majority of our leaders in the world are oblivious that this is even occurring since they are typically so far detached from most peoples lives.
That's not to say you shouldn't try and understand and criticise it and opt out where necessary but there is no big conspiracy going on.
Does the money flow to that which is pleasurable, or does the pleasurable get created to attract the money?
Ask people which of these two is not possible.
It feels like this was also the central point the author was making, although they made it more forcefully.
.. these purveyors aren't necessarily 'providing these opportunities'; they are actually the inventors of many of the pleasures in the first instance.
It's not a calculated directive from the top. It's a crystallised consensus from those in a position of influence. Incentive based capitalism, at it's worst (or best, depending on your point of view).
Freeways are government projects, commissioned federally, given to private contractors, which setup cities, which enact a policy of sprawl reified by a small committee, of which only one member was elected, and for which in order for people to live in the city, they must purchase cars for themselves, appearing to the free market responding to the problem of getting around.
So at all levels, there is a mix of group-agency vs individual-agency: different concentrations of power.
Ultimately the chain of causality to create freeways and thus create demand for cars is started by a few people at the top.
But from the consumer's perspective, buying a car is a need combined with other luxury requirements to differentiate the car-driving experience to their tastes, and the market provides it. They don't always ask if there are alternative urban models that policy-makers could have tried.
See also lobbyists, that distort this process near the top as a bid to artificially create demand, or to stay solvent as economic actors without revenue from the free market. This also creates the illusion that the market is merely responding to consumer needs, when in fact it is constrained in ways that encourage specific consumer responses.
So, yeah, calculated from the top. Handed to those closest to the tap.
Look into our transfer payment system, our system of political budgets, and apportionment.
Before it gets to workers, how money is carved up is very much monitored and managed.
Just because one is ignorant of how the system functions does not mean there is a free market.
If interest rates were up at 8%, there would be a lot fewer bets of the type of "litter the sidewalk with scooters and hope some money falls into them". The entirety of Surveillance Valley is basically a play to parlay overabundant monetary capital of the present into surveillance capital of the future.
The "continual growth" mindset was only worthwhile when it produced productive investment. The mass malinvestment we see today indicates that it has gone way too far. If you care about sustainability and global warming, you should be concerned with monetary policy - it's the main lever controlling the amount of production/consumption.
Furthermore, higher interest rates would allow technological deflation to actually occur, making it so the surpluses of technology get widely distributed in the form of lower prices. As it stands right now, the feedback cycle from the mandate of "full employment" guarantees that everyone on average will need to keep working the same amount, making technological gains accrue centrally to where new money is created.
To a surprising extent, people find things pleasurable because they're told to find them pleasurable.
No one sane would inhale burning carcinogenic leaves to damage their own health, but people do - because they're encouraged to.
People buy new phones because they're somehow "cool". No one is really sure why, but it's something that happens.
There used to be an element of spontaneous creativity in trends. Traditionally industry noted the trends and sold them back to customers.
But it's easier and cheaper to skip the organic and spontaneous part and sell trends top-down by linking them to perceptions of social status.
This is done by key players inside the relevant industries instead of by a Politburo of fat elderly men. But it's still heavily bureaucratic and centralised. Just in a cool way.
It also creates economies of scale, which is both convenient and useful.
That's a bit naive. The carcinogenic leaves have mental effects, a buzz, pleasurable even before and despite addiction and carcinogenic qualities.
New phones have new features, speed and sizes / resolution.
None of these things are free of influence, peer pressure, advertising, and 'needing to feel in' the group. Sure. But to remove personal choice too strongly is a False way to look at the world. But this - this, call it systemic, way to look at the world - is popular and trending - ironically.
This is a ridiculous take. You think indigenous communities in pre-Colombian America were using tobacco because of media influence?
It’s a pleasurable and highly addictive drug.
Smoking dates back to tribal society thousands of years back. People chose to do it without any corporate influence.
I like to be shown new things to try, for example. So some advertising I actually like. Is my life planned by large corporations? From my work there I would say not, as most campaigns tend to fail even in the short term.
In the longterm quality of life decreases until life is over. Quality of life after death is 0.
I slightly disagree with this point. The 40 hour work week is a rather recent development; in the past, people had to work a lot longer with no or only one day of. The trend actually goes in the direction of reducing it further (at least here in Germany), where 35 or 32 hour weeks are getting more common (depending on the job, of course). Plus, there are alternative models, such as 4x 10h days + 3 days off.
Sure, the current model serves corporations, but it is by no means their invention. And while they are a big part of why it still is so large, the reason is most likely that they need the labor hours, not the specific consumption behavior.
Agfa, Foraging and hunter-gatherer populations, work about 20 hours per week and transitioning to farming increased working hours.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190520115646.h...
!Kung spend 40 to 45 hours on food gathering and prep between women and men.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/fistfulofscience.wordpress.com/...
And you’re skipping a few thousands of years of civilization between hunter gatherers and the industrial revolution. I can guarantee a Roman or medieval farmer worked pretty much every hour of sunlight
At a point in time, hours worked where often lower in pre-industrial times.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...
Here’s a relevant 3min podcast on the topic (also transcribed).
https://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we...
[1] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...
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Most people in the FIRE community of course work more than the minimum long enough to save money and then join the investor class, without doing paid work at all from that point - but it's fascinating to think that we could all reduce work and lifestyles by two-thirds in a sustainable, ongoing way.
(Further, if everyone FIRE’d, growth would slow to the point where you’d need to save more to generate the same income from investments. We’re so far from that being any kind of practical worry, that it can be safely ignored I think, but would be a concern if it became more than vanishingly uncommon almost-fringe behavior.)
It's kind of trippy to imagine what the large-scale effects would be. If everyone cut their consumption by 1/3, our economy would contract a lot, but long-term it'd be healthier, right? Less waste, more efficiency, less environmental degradation overall, though I'll admit we need new technology to replace old dirty technology in energy. Overall, it's a very interesting subset of Westerners, the FIRE group.
I don't think advertising makes that much difference. Most people spend all their earnings. The only thing advertising does is direct where it is spent.
>Certainly if a large contingent of consumers massively cut their spending we have to work harder and longer for the same pay.
If we all did it then we wouldn't be working longer and harder for the same pay.
Lots of persons seem to be "uninterested in serious personal development", is this by some design or just natural evolution of modern society? I guess it was always like this, but I can also imagine that there are entities (ie, companies, governments, people) that are doing some thing or the other trying to keep the status quo: keep the people in the right state to consume as much as possible...
I don't think being uninterested in disengaging from consumer capitalism is akin to being uninterested in personal development. Being pro-mindfullness and anti-consumer is valid, but so is being pro-consumer and uninterested in mindfullness (because they are chasing other goals, which could be considered part of personal development). The mistake the author makes is assuming their goals are the best way to go, and then prescribing solutions for that.
The author's point of view is actually just fairly narrow. There is nothing wrong with their view, or the ideas they suggest for improving one's life if you share his perspective. But a lot of people simply don't share that view. As a counterpoint, some people (not mine) think the highest goal in life is to work as much as possible. They will do so, and probably consume a lot in order to maximise their time working. That goal and lifestyle might seem unsavoury to me or you, but it is another way to personal development: that you can, personally, be a really good worker.
This statement gets orders of magnitude truer once you factor in the scarce overlapping time I have with my friends, all of whom are like me: 30-somethings with tech careers and young families.
Whether the shortage of time is by corporate design or no, I'm in a phase of my life where the shortage is very apparent. And it's hard for me to deal with. I feel a bit like I've been robbed of the space to have meaningful personal experiences outside of the corporate space or my immediate famy.
Let's replace "until" with "if".
Otherwise that's a pretty ironic comment, given we are discussing an article titled "Your lifestyle has already been designed"
Living for others, at the end of the day, is vastly better than living for yourself.
Agreed, but the way I put it is that the higher consumption is done to compensate for the stresses that come with the work life(style). I have a lot less patience and mental energy to do impulse control or to judiciously weigh the pros and cons of this versus that purchase when in a stressful work environment compared to when I'm not. I'd say that counts as "a result of systemic forces".
I have 1 dresser. In my mind, 1 is a nice small number of dressers to have. But in physical spacetime, one dresser takes up a hell of a lot of volume. I wonder if many of our possessions are like this: they occupy little space in our mind, even as they occupy evermore physical volume in our homes.
One thing that I think everyone should do once a year is take out all of their clothes, sort it into types and then go through it piece by piece. Identify everything that doesn't fit anymore, anything you haven't worn in a long time or maybe ever, anything you just don't like/love. Give it away to charity, or if it's something really nice, put it up for sale.
Clothes you never wear are of absolutely no use.
I’m in a ~450 sq ft studio and having to consciously think about where a new purchase will go cuts down on buying “junk” and makes me a lot quicker to sell or dispose of things that are just taking up space.
Similarly, when I moved to a city with hideously expensive parking, I sold my car when I wasn’t using it enough to justify the expense.