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HeavenlyPossum

Much of what we purchase, use, dispose, and replace is not the result of neutral preference, but in response to incentives, disincentives, and outright command imposed on us by people with power over our lives.

In much of the world, for example, the physical built environment was designed by people in power to require the purchase, regular refueling, and maintenance of personal automobiles to complete trips of anything more than a few kilometers (and often even less than that).

In Georgia in 2011, for example, a mother tried crossing a street from a bus stop to her home. Using the nearest crosswalk would have added a mile to their journey across the street. They were struck by a man driving a van—a habitual criminal driver—who killed her son and injured the rest.

That physical environment was physically constructed in such a way that the simple act of transiting a few dozen feet of public space requires the purchase and ownership of a car *at the risk of death.*

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2

2/

#CarCluture

2 Aug 2023 at 8:44 | Open on kolektiva.social
16 comments
Skuppr

@HeavenlyPossum been thinking a lot lately about "radical households" that have rules, explicit or otherwise, about what residents can consume/buy/use (veg*an, only ethically sourced, no amazon, must recycle, etc etc), and how that obviously keeps out the sick, the poor, the racialised, the queer... And like, how these houses are so often little oases of people who don't have to work long hours, aren't constantly angry and stressed, get on really well, know how to use therapy words to solve conflict well, peaceful little places of kind gentle calm people who think those traits are the results of their values and character...

what if the ethical consumption policy IS how you have a place like that. Not because it attracts/selects for good people, but because it selects for people who aren't "difficult" (oppressed, struggling), who don't create "drama" (complicating your privileged stories about how the world works), aren't "unethical" (making visible the ways that your "kindness and gentleness" are conditional on pushing out desperate people). What if the insistence on ethical consumption is the point? The whole point? It's nothing to do with how that consumption changes the world, but with the fact that people who cannot ethically consume, or who are too busy resisting evil to bother with ethical consumption, need to be made absent/invisible to the liberal in order to maintain the fiction that the good feelings they have about/in their home are the result of their virtue and not their privilege.

@HeavenlyPossum been thinking a lot lately about "radical households" that have rules, explicit or otherwise, about what residents can consume/buy/use (veg*an, only ethically sourced, no amazon, must recycle, etc etc), and how that obviously keeps out the sick, the poor, the racialised, the queer... And like, how these houses are so often little oases of people who don't have to work long hours, aren't constantly angry and stressed, get on really well, know how to use therapy words to solve conflict...

2 Aug 2023 at 9:06 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

@skuppr

Yeah, a lot of “ethical consumption” requires resources—time, money, patience, energy—that many people have been robbed of.

2 Aug 2023 at 9:36 | Open on kolektiva.social
Skuppr

@HeavenlyPossum I guess what i'm getting at is, I wonder how many liberals are resistant to arguments against the importance of ethical consumption not because they disagree intellectually, but because they NEED ethical consumption to be treated as important because it is part of how they maintain soft power over the oppressed. I think their reasoning might be motivated such that no "ethical consumption isn't important/is a bad priority/perspective because..." argument will ever be convincing for them, because whether or not it's true doesn't change the fact that it's USEFUL

@HeavenlyPossum I guess what i'm getting at is, I wonder how many liberals are resistant to arguments against the importance of ethical consumption not because they disagree intellectually, but because they NEED ethical consumption to be treated as important because it is part of how they maintain soft power over the oppressed. I think their reasoning might be motivated such that no "ethical consumption isn't important/is a bad priority/perspective because..." argument will ever be convincing for...

2 Aug 2023 at 9:46 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

The other classic example is that of Robert Moses, who amassed enough government power in the 1930s to 1960s that he was able to personally implement his anti-human urban planning agenda of replacing cities with exurbs and highways.

Moses was also deeply racist and designed bridges that were too low to accommodate buses to ensure that poor people of color, who might have lacked personal cars at the time, could not take public transportation to the beach.

Or that other monstrosity of High Modernism, Brasilia, Brazil’s planned capital city. It was designed without sidewalks or crosswalks, because its designers expected (and therefore commanded, by way of infrastructure) that everyone would just drive everywhere all the time.

3/

npr.org/2020/07/05/887386869/h

#RobertMoses #HighModernism

The other classic example is that of Robert Moses, who amassed enough government power in the 1930s to 1960s that he was able to personally implement his anti-human urban planning agenda of replacing cities with exurbs and highways.

Moses was also deeply racist and designed bridges that were too low to accommodate buses to ensure that poor people of color, who might have lacked personal cars at the time, could not take public transportation to the beach.

2 Aug 2023 at 9:08 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

When the physical environment isn’t enough to compel us to buy things, the state and capital class often just order us to behave in ways that compel us to spend money.

Roads are public spaces, theoretically owned by everyone. When the state encloses them by criminalizing certain public uses—such as the American crime of “jaywalking”—the state subsidizes the car firms that sell us the cars that are legal requirements to use public spaces.

Our bosses do this too when they command us to work in offices—not because office work is efficient, but because ordering us from our homes into their built environment increases our spending on amenities that are difficult or impossible to access there.

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1

4/

#RemoteWork #BackToTheOffice

When the physical environment isn’t enough to compel us to buy things, the state and capital class often just order us to behave in ways that compel us to spend money.

Roads are public spaces, theoretically owned by everyone. When the state encloses them by criminalizing certain public uses—such as the American crime of “jaywalking”—the state subsidizes the car firms that sell us the cars that are legal requirements to use public spaces.

2 Aug 2023 at 9:13 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

While it’s certainly possible to evade some of that spending, it’s not easy, and not possible for everyone all the time. After I have commuted, worked all day, and then commuted again, I sometimes must make a trade-off between preparing a meal for the next day—and sacrificing sleep or time with my children—or just buying it from a restaurant.

And, to the greatest extent possible, our rentier capital class is trying to make even those small possibilities of evasion impossible. In many places, your ability to engage in the basic human functions of urination and defecation are contingent on making purchases—“toilets are for customers only.”

In our ever-darkening dystopia, we’re now given the choice to relieve ourselves “for free” in public toilets, as long as we first pay the sellers of smartphones for access.

futurism.com/public-toilet-req

5/

#PublicSanitation #BoringDystopia

While it’s certainly possible to evade some of that spending, it’s not easy, and not possible for everyone all the time. After I have commuted, worked all day, and then commuted again, I sometimes must make a trade-off between preparing a meal for the next day—and sacrificing sleep or time with my children—or just buying it from a restaurant.

2 Aug 2023 at 9:20 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

Someone else recently claimed that the climate catastrophe is actually the result of “consumerism.” People always want the newest phone, they complained.

But when you need a smartphone to access services as basic as “not peeing yourself in public,” it’s easier to see how thin this claim is.

Not only do people need to purchase phones to survive daily life, but they need to frequently replace them—precisely because phones (and most every other product in our lives) are intentionally designed to wear our quickly, or otherwise stop working, to force us to frequently replace them.

I’ve written another thread on product crippling and planned obsolescence as examples of Veblen’s concept of “industrial sabotage,” so I won’t belabor the point here again. But suffice it to say: this is not a personal choice or preference. When our phones stop working, when our clothes fall apart, we have to buy new ones, and capitalists profit.

6/

uxplanet.org/planned-obsolesce

#PlannedObsolescence #ProductCrippling #IndustrialSabotage #ThorsteinVeblen

Someone else recently claimed that the climate catastrophe is actually the result of “consumerism.” People always want the newest phone, they complained.

But when you need a smartphone to access services as basic as “not peeing yourself in public,” it’s easier to see how thin this claim is.

Not only do people need to purchase phones to survive daily life, but they need to frequently replace them—precisely because phones (and most every other product in our lives) are intentionally designed to wear...

2 Aug 2023 at 9:26 | Open on kolektiva.social
Skuppr

@HeavenlyPossum also often missed in the planned obsolescence of phones conversation: who can afford to keep using a phone past the point where google/apple release security updates for it (usually only 3-5 years)? Who can afford an identity theft, leaked political actions, leaked dating app profile? Rich people, liberals, straight people.

2 Aug 2023 at 9:30 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

These same firms have also designed their products in order to stymie repair by their purchasers, to ensure that they’ll either need to be replaced or repaired only by the seller, to the seller’s additional profit.

There are countless other ways that our purchases are compelled and shaped by people more powerful than us, from the ways in which creditors issue loans to the nearly $1 trillion firms spend each year on advertising to manipulate our decisionmaking to the careful tweaking of algorithms on social media to subtly influence our choices.

The point is—many, probably most, of our decisions to spend money to purchase, use, and discard products are not really ours to make, but are made by people who profit. We cannot, and never will, personal responsibility our way out of the present crisis.

7/end

nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion

#RightToRepair

These same firms have also designed their products in order to stymie repair by their purchasers, to ensure that they’ll either need to be replaced or repaired only by the seller, to the seller’s additional profit.

There are countless other ways that our purchases are compelled and shaped by people more powerful than us, from the ways in which creditors issue loans to the nearly $1 trillion firms spend each year on advertising to manipulate our decisionmaking to the careful tweaking of algorithms...

2 Aug 2023 at 9:35 | Open on kolektiva.social
foresterr

@HeavenlyPossum what is really insane, is that when you dissect the "growth" which under capitalism is the justification to end all justifications, you get all those things. The gatekeeping, the anti-human design, everything. Basically, more waste=more growth. That might be obvious to everyone in this conversation, but it still blows my mind how *stupid* that is. It's the broken window fallacy writ large.

2 Aug 2023 at 9:46 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

@foresterr

If we chopped down every tree in the world and processed them into single-use toothpicks, think of the GDP growth!

2 Aug 2023 at 9:49 | Open on kolektiva.social
foresterr

@HeavenlyPossum exactly. You know, it's funny, I'm a big time science fiction fan, and I have only just realized that capitalism is a paperclip maximizer (the insane nanotechnology/AI combo which wants to convert everything into paperclips), only instead of paperclips, it wants to convert the planet and us into a number going up. Which, if anything, is even dumber. At least paperclips are real.

2 Aug 2023 at 9:57 | Open on kolektiva.social
kim_harding ✅

@HeavenlyPossum The close links between the oil industry and the motor industry go way back. The term “jaywalking” came out of the "Share the roads" campaign, which, I thought, had been started by a car manufacture, but then found that it had been started by Shell Oil. The oil industry would be much smaller without mass motoring (its major market).

2 Aug 2023 at 9:54 | Open on mastodon.scot
malkavon (he/him)

@HeavenlyPossum to quote Brennan Lee Mulligan, as evil lich Robert Moses, "People think they make choices. They think they're gonna steer right, or steer left, but they didn't build the roads. The big choices already got made for them a long time ago."

It's true of transit choices - if there isn't a route to get somewhere, you really can't choose to go there regardless of how much you may want to - and it's just as true of most "choices" consumers make. We get to choose *from* whatever is available on the store shelves, but we don't get to choose *what* is available on the store shelves.

@HeavenlyPossum to quote Brennan Lee Mulligan, as evil lich Robert Moses, "People think they make choices. They think they're gonna steer right, or steer left, but they didn't build the roads. The big choices already got made for them a long time ago."

It's true of transit choices - if there isn't a route to get somewhere, you really can't choose to go there regardless of how much you may want to - and it's just as true of most "choices" consumers make. We get to choose *from* whatever is available...

2 Aug 2023 at 9:26 | Open on kolektiva.social
HeavenlyPossum

@malkavon

We also don’t get to choose whether there are “stores,” or whether we’ll need to acquire things from them, or how those stores will part with things. Even something as self-evidently “obvious” as the hierarchical, profit-seeking firm is the result of violence.

2 Aug 2023 at 9:29 | Open on kolektiva.social
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