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.*

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2018656/amp/Raquel-Nelson-sentenced-12-months-probation-death-son-jaywalking.html

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#CarCluture

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.

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https://www.npr.org/2020/07/05/887386869/how-transportation-racism-shaped-america

#RobertMoses #HighModernism

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.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11746085/amp/Remote-work-costing-Manhattan-12-4-BILLION-year.html

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#RemoteWork #BackToTheOffice

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.

https://futurism.com/public-toilet-requires-qr-code-tracks-cleanliness-score

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#PublicSanitation #BoringDystopia

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.

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https://uxplanet.org/planned-obsolescence-dark-truth-of-the-smartphone-industry-c9131c5ff7c4

#PlannedObsolescence #ProductCrippling #IndustrialSabotage #ThorsteinVeblen