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

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

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/right-to-repair-elizabeth-warren-antitrust.html

#RightToRepair

Addendum to my “consumer choice” thread:

I would be remiss if I did not address the most important factor in our patterns of purchase, use, and disposal: enclosure.

There was a time when most people, in what are now capitalist countries, tended to self-provision. They would produce what they needed for themselves, usually at the family level, and engage in reciprocal exchange with members of their community to satisfy other wants.

People like this are much harder to control through economic exchange, so one of the paramount drivers behind the enclosure movement—the forcible transformation of common property into private property—was depriving the public of self-sustenance. People who are denied the means to provide for themselves are dependent on the suppliers of those provisions.

From Michael Perelman’s “The Invention of Capitalism”

“In most accounts of the world of the Highlanders, people displayed more reluctance to engage in wage labor. For example, Samuel Johnson observed that a pair of traditional Scottish brogues could be made at home in one hour. Commercially produced shoes sold for one-half crown per pair. According to Adam Smith’s estimates of wage rates for labor in the vicinity of Edinburgh, where workers were undoubtedly paid more than in the countryside, a citizen of that city would have to work for three full days to earn enough money to purchase a pair of shoes. Commercially produced shoes would need to have a great deal of appeal to induce people to work for almost three days to purchase them instead of making their own brogues in an hour, assuming that they could obtain the leather cheaply.

Given the unfavorable exchange between wages and purchased com- modities, people in the Highlands generally preferred self-provisioning to wage labor. Seeing this as a problem, Pennant approved of whatever re- stricted people’s opportunity for self-provisioning.”

@PaulDavisTheFirst

Whew! Good thing Scotland was enclosed and the Highlands cleared so that these people could be saved from their own backwards poverty.