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.
That's the party line, but it's just some sub-cultures, teens and troubled personalities that "express themselves" through fashion (the most shallow thing you can do, a juvenile thing in any case), the "early adopters", and then a huge industry copying them at various levels and with various delays. On top of that, there are also top-level mandates "this year let's push yellow strayjackets" or whatever.
This results in a huge industry, selling junk people don't need, which are enviromentally harmful, with the ludicrous insistence that the clothes you bought last season are not good anymore because "fashion".
Fashion is basically part of a real world interface for the social groups you interact with, a way to tweak the first impression. It's only junk for you as an outsider not understanding the social groups of insiders dressing a certain way.
It's valuable and sells because social ladders are everywhere, we're all apes to a degree. It's not a suprise that the epic centers are urban melting pots with a higher population density and more "troubled people".
>Fashion is basically part of a real world interface for the social groups you interact with, a way to tweak the first impression.
Yes. But it's a shallow real world interface, for shallow groups and facile identities, mostly used to associate with teenagers and juvenile group forming.
I dont say it's not a thing, or don't have a use. I say the use is bad.
This is rediculous. Just a few years ago there was an article about silicon valley casual fashion being challenging for minorities who grew up outside the bubble and were taught to dress their best in a work suit or similar. The LGBT is huge on visual signals of allegiance. Popular brands are built 80% on what their brand signals and not on their build quality. There are countless examples of clothing being used to signal elements of personal identity but for some reason you seem to consider this 'fascile' because our wardrobes aren't full-on biographies of personality.
>> Fashion is basically part of a real world interface for the social groups you interact with, a way to tweak the first impression. It's only junk for you as an outsider not understanding the social groups of insiders dressing a certain way.
I've seen former peers and fellow students borrow and become indebted to become part of the group this way. Great if the subject can afford it, not so much if the subject is now enslaved to debt or is misallocating funds. Then, perhaps find more welcoming social groups?
Any culture group that expresses itself through expensive clothes will find another expensive way to show group membership if clothes aren't an option. Other subcultures (think grunge, or tech people) either use cheap mismatched charity-shop styles or use other signals (e.g. running Linux at home).
This is so true! If the definition of fashion is extended to also include the latest smartphones, laptops, or service memberships. I never thought of it this way, but makes a lot of sense.
> it's just some sub-cultures, teens and troubled personalities that "express themselves" through fashion (the most shallow thing you can do, a juvenile thing in any case)
Are you claiming that dressing to express yourself is shallow and juvenile?
Do you just...buy the first thing you see at Goodwill that fits you? I'm not sure how one could avoid dressing to express oneself, to at least some degree, unless you exclusively wear work uniforms or hand-me-downs.
> I'm not sure how one could avoid dressing to express oneself, to at least some degree, unless you exclusively wear work uniforms or hand-me-downs.
Exclusively wearing work uniforms (outside of work) or hand-me-downs is still, in its own way, expressing oneself. One way or another you make a personal decision on how to dress and whether to follow a particular style, trend, price point, etc. and that reflects something about you.
> but it's just some sub-cultures, teens and troubled personalities that "express themselves" through fashion
Like, really?
My dad mostly wears tough leather boots, flannel shirts and aged jeans. It's all old, proven, and tough. He's a heavy outdoors enthusiast, into kayaking motorbiking and camping, and his clothing style fits this perfectly.
My brother is a big rugby player. He prefers a much more casual look, with rugby shirts, trainers, shorts if the weather allows, and a baseball cap (not often seen in rural England!).
We all express ourselves through clothing, whether you do so consciously or not. Even picking clothes that say "I don't care about fashion" is expressing yourself. We're social creates, and there's no getting away from that.
It says a lot about parent posters close mindedness and lack of imagination, as well as their shallowness for judging people based on their fashion choices
There is surprisingly little unsold inventory, outlets are selling cheaper versions of clothes not unsold inventory. Of course not every design or brand succeeds, but the industry as a whole is reasonably efficient.
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.
> 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.
"Twice a year Pantone hosts, in a European capital, a secret meeting of representatives from various nations' color standards groups. After two days of presentations and debate, they choose a color for the following year."
"OVER 20 YEARS OF INFLUENCING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AND PURCHASING DECISIONS"
Not that I'm paying much attention to these things, but I've not seen much to support that "ultimate grey" and "Illuminating" yellow are the dominating colors this year? (https://www.pantone.com/color-of-the-year-2021)
It takes a few cycles to hit if you're not on the forefront of fashion. But perhaps you can see how the colors from a few years back have come and gone even among fashion 'normies'?
Cars in my neighborhood have started popping up that are painted it what appears to be primer with a coating.
I was kind of wondering why that was suddenly a thing. I don't know if that was somehow directly or indirectly motivated by pantone, but it certainly has been a headscratcher for me for some time and this could answer why that is happening.
Well since it's not a direct response advertising campaign, of course no one buys anything "in response to" it.
I did repaint my bedroom with an accent wall that's just about the exact shade of blue that is their 2020 color of the year. Not because Pantone told me to, but maybe because their selection of that color led it to be more prominently placed/advertised when I started picking new paint colors.
Tough to say, and your question is too oversimplistic to make sense as part of the discussion.
There was a great article years back, on oped by guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani about the death of Shred music.
In short: the way trends work is they get popular and then all the people already doing that thing get popular too.
There is during that time people who jump on the bandwagon. Once the popularity dies off, lots of people keep doing that thing, it just doesn't get the notoriety it did before: it returns to its niche.
I’d say this is a more nuanced and sophisticated explanation of the same dynamic the person you’re responding to is getting at. Yes there is no “cabal” as in a smoke-filled room where shadowy figures make the decision. But, in practice, the net effect is that of a large genetic algorithm settling on an approved trend that it then uses its market power to push people towards.
And, of course, the more the industry is consolidated the more “directed” it will seem.
Color Marketing Group's whole business is proposing new color palettes to embody the anticipated zeitgeist. Behold their dreamlike prose:
"Color Marketing Group’s North America 2022 Key Color, New Day, is the color response for a time still in transition.
New Day suggests confidence and familiarity to greet 2022 with a sense of comfort.
"A light, fresh blue with red influences, New Day is an inspiring color designed to convey the classic connotation of hope and new beginnings. …
"As calming as New Day may appear, its red undertone is a stimulation aspect of the color, making it ideal for practically any product application. From commercial to residential spaces, consumer goods to fashion, and graphic design, New Day is a color that stands for truth and hope."
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.
Eh, you can pick plain white or blue button-up shirts with one of a few normal collar types and you won't be trendy but you also won't be "out of style". There are also some approaches to fashion the point of which is (at least in part) that they change only very slowly ("prep", for instance, which is practically defined by that quality—certain very casual styles like country/cowboy might also qualify, they have trends but you can definitely avoid them and achieve a look that's as close to timeless as it gets, on human-lifespan timescales).
Suits are slowly evolving fewer buttons but you're probably still OK with a 3-button in most contexts, and a 2 or 3-roll-2 is probably future-safe for 15 years at least. Suits may well be almost gone by the time they're out of fashion, really, and will only remain in contexts that don't really evolve (the 3-button is firmly OK in a legal, funeral, or wedding context, for instance, and likely to remain so pretty much indefinitely, provided, in the latter case, it's not an extremely formal wedding and/or you're not in the wedding party itself)
I'm kind of in the same boat. I never cared about fashion much. It always seemed hollow and vapid to me. Even as a kid/teen-ager/20s when it's supposed to matter the most.
Perhaps your circle of friends didn't care either.
For kids/teenagers/early-20s, what matters is belonging - observable patterns of behavior that follow are whatever gets amplified when everyone looks at everyone else in their vicinity for signals of approval.
FWIW, I also didn't care about fashion, and neither did my friends. I expect this to be the case with quite a lot of HNers - this comes from being a nerd and having nerd friends. We amplified each other on different patterns of behavior.
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.
Yeah, it’s a complex system like economics. It often has to do with things like immigration and cultural fusion in influential neighbourhoods. Musicians or break out visual artists chasing an career and bringing their style to London or NYC.
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...
>Looks kind of planned but it's not. It's just that some things fall out of fashion for whatever reasons...
"Not planned? Whatever reason?" There are huge billion dollar campaigns for what things "are in fashion" this season. For starters, the thousands of ads by fashion brands with the same "current fashion" messaging.
Without that, the majority of the population could not care less what some "small proportion" of idiots consider "experimental/cool/etc". Sub-culture fashion would stay with the subculture (like most of it does, unless it's picked up by the mass fashion industry and promoted to hell).
It's the endless branding, messaging, adverting, PR, articles, etc, that get Joe/Jane Average buying into this season's fasion.
The people chasing "this season's fashion" are rather niche. People care less and less about this stuff as they get older. We also work in an industry where free conference t-shirts and khaki shorts are perfectly acceptable work attire. It's been over 100 years since blue jeans were invented and they're still quite popular.
And if some people get enjoyment out of trying out new fashion styles, who am I to judge? No different than me buying the latest video game or checking out the newest programming language or listening to new releases of music.
>The people chasing "this season's fashion" are rather niche.
The people who consciously chace "this season's fashion" are niche [1].
But even more so, people who are bombarded with messages to buy new clothes, and that this style is now obsolete, get this instead, are pretty much everybody though.
[1] Though not that small of a niche: a big percentage of women do it quite a lot (as evident by the success of that side of the fashion industry and peripheral industries like accessories, perfumes, cosmetics, and such), and men have increasingly being doing it ever since the 80s too, especially if we include things like sneakers and so on).
As someone wrote, it's not like 250 million Americans, men and women, each individually by themselves, decided bell-bottoms are a good idea some year in the 70s...
You could say that of rock and roll too couldn't you? Or disco? Or 80s rap? Or hipster coffee shops? Or Atari video games?
Like, of course we have waves and trends of various things that take hold of popular imagination for some time. Trends start as some niche then people see it taking off and jump on the bandwagon. Sometimes it sweeps the whole country or an entire culture. But it's fun and people get enjoyment from it. And it gives us a common cultural framework to relate to each other with even across vast distances.
Was there no trend you ever participated in that you look back on today and smile about?
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.
I've gone through probably 300 slide decks from various industries that explicitly state that 'consumers in x demographic sector will need to be re-educated about the value of [something they didn't want]'.
I've seen it in regards to premium breads, in-app purchases, crude oil solvent levels, public infrastructure features, clothing, etc. This isn't a new thing. Sometimes you just spend money to fabricate culture when it isn't on your side.
>There isn't one person deciding what gets produced.
Is this really an appropriate standard for examining whether or not an organization can push culture rather than merely adapt to it?
Well sure every company is trying to convince customers their thing is best. That's just marketing.
But different companies can be trying to convince things that are totally opposed to each other too. It's still not monolithic. (Regardless of whether it's "one person" or not, it was just an illustration.)
At the end of the day it's still customers buying what they like from a range of companies that are all competing with each other, some succeeding and some failing.
Not really. All companies that make bags may be pulling consumers in different directions with respect to which style of bags they should purchase, but all will pull in the direction of "purchase bags".
You can zoom out from bags to fashion, and the same idea repeats itself.
Consumer consumption itself is the unified cultural zeitgeist. That's the issue - in some areas it'll spur innovation, but in others it is an obviously wasteful use of limited resources and time.
I was arguing that fashion trends are ultimately driven by consumers, not by companies (as GP was arguing). Consumers aren't blindly buying whatever's for sale.
Whether people are purchasing more than they need, or whether that's wasteful, is a totally orthogonal conversation.
But pretty sure most women need bags. And a lot of guys use backpacks too. They're not some artificial need invented by companies.
> Consumers aren't blindly buying whatever's for sale.
But of course they are. This is the case not just in fashion, but pretty much everywhere (and particularly visible wrt. hardware and software). Consumers are given a bit of a choice to get completely confused by it, but ultimately they pick something from what's for sale. They can't just go and say, "I want these trousers, except cut like these other ones, and with the color from that dress" - much like they can't go and say "I want a phone like this new iPhone, but with my damn headphone jack back". Not without spending 1-2 orders of magnitude more money.
What this means for our discussion is, it's vendors who set the trends, because they choose what is available for purchase at scale.
You're missing the point which is that vendors are making the products they think people will buy.
Vendors aren't arbitrarily setting "trends", they aren't inventing things in a vacuum.
They literally do market research, interview consumers, figure out what people want, and then try to give that to them.
Of course any single individual doesn't always get exactly what they want (the pair of pants, the phone but with a headphone jack), but collectively we do trend strongly towards that. Manufacturers aren't perfect, they don't always get it maximally correct, but they're generally trying their best, because, you know, competition.
You're right in that trends aren't arbitrary, but you've jumped from that idea to the idea that consumer needs are the reason. That's not the case. A large proportion of the time the reason why a particular trend is set isn't 'consumers want this'. It's 'the commodities to make this product are going to be particularly cheap this season - so margins should be healthy'. The McRib is a great example.
As a crystal clear example, do you think any consumer in their right mind wants their products shrinkflated? Do you think misleading packaging is based on satisfying consumer desires, or manipulating them?
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
A Malthusian crisis has been “imminent” since the 19th century. I think that you should try writing down what facts you think support the a priori assumption that our sinful ways are leading us to a future, sudden disaster. I don’t think you will find much evidence that isn’t traceable to popular opinion. Sorry, fam, it’s just Puritanism for the modern age.
It's a factual argument. Our civilization has been peaking in agricultural productivity decade after decade for 200 years. Your hypothetical argument is not statistically likely. Sure, on a long enough time frame some natural disaster will occur that causes a crisis, but the fundamental mechanics of photosynthesis and ag science aren't going anywhere.
No, it doesn't. It still levels off way above what was the carrying capacity of Earth before the "Green Revolution" - and the systems maintaining our food production are unsustainable. We extract surplus food from the ground by destroying the ability to grow more food in the future.
It was, and it was postponed several times through technological means, at the cost of widespread environmental degradation. The underlying logic of the prediction is still sound.
It's like someone is warning you that, with your current spending patterns, you'll go broke in a year. You come to them five years later, showing off your fancy new car and talking about vacations, defying their "alarmist predictions", conveniently omitting the fact that in those five years, you've maxed out on all your credit cards and every possible loan anyone would give you.
No, the crisis is still ahead, and will hit us that much harder unless we work quickly to make our economy sustainable.
When I say fair I mean 'accepted' by people, they know people are selling them stuff, probably useless, but they still choose to go and buy some. It's fair to most people's brain inner workings IMO.
Also I had various western countries in mind in my comment, including those where healthcare is paid for, it doesn't change the overall lifestyle that much (high rent, long hours, dumb jobs)
> Oh lord, being “forced” to provide work in order to receive the work of others
I didn't write the comment you responded to, but I don't think its author was advocating for the mythical "free lunch." I read their comment as a statement decrying the seemingly artificial constraints built into modern (American, I presume) society that force workers to make an essentially binary choice between a stable, secure life and one of, potentially, poverty and marginalization.
To be more explicit - most people can't simply provide (even valuable, in-demand) work on their own terms, so they're forced (by various intentional and unintentional social/economic/legal/etc. barriers) to work according to terms that may not make sense to a rational third-party. This is (probably) why the commenter you responded to mentions the binary distinction between financial stability and physical insecurity - there's hardly any middle ground between the two categories when it comes to most fields of employment. Although "tech" is probably the most flexible industry in this regard, it's still difficult to find positions that allow part-time employment with health insurance benefits (even at lower-than-average pay rates), for example.
In most industries, the prospect of being able to work to provide only enough "value" to comfortably sustain oneself, as opposed to "being forced" to fully commit to the lifestyle (i.e. 40+ hours/week, car for commuting, lodging within commuting distance, childcare, general cost of paying for convenience in food/housework/etc. due to having less free time, etc.) is laughable. I believe this is what the commenter you reference was referring to - having the freedom to live cheaply without becoming financially insecure or socially marginalized, not some desire to have others pay for their lives.
This is a false dichotomy. Parties do not have to have binary, 1 and 0 values for how much power they have in a given transaction, and remarking that employees having little power places them in the same place as ancient hunter-gatherers is... perhaps somewhat dishonest?
If we're experiencing what it is to have an employer have 8:2 relative power to an employee, that doesn't mean that a ratio of 6:4, while still favoring the employer, is no different.
It's not the work that's the problem, it's that most people are forced to work in an arrangement that's stacked against them.
> I think the US has serious progress to make on safety nets, but this type of statement doesn’t really help move the discussion forwards
This type of statement is nothing new. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass had this to say on the subject[1]:
> [E]xperience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other
According to Wikipedia[1]:
> Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market: "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper"
There was a comment that is provably true and has been downvoted:
--
I think the comparison of carbon footprints between the average westerner and the global south seems to indicate these issues aren’t about the raw number of people and absolutely to do with lifestyle.
>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.
Pseudoscientific is the default state of the mind.
Propaganda research became behavioral economics, advertising, marketing, and various psychology programs, but surely that’s not been used socially to titillate biology and insert desired talking points in that excited state from childhood forward.
It can’t simply be we were easily mesmerized by what are really banal statistics extrapolated from speculating on the movement of political scrip in an era of imperialism that’s now faded. Humans have never succumb to nonsense group think before!
Believing one has transcended their biology is not limited to kooks who think they can live on light alone.
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.
That's the ideal conception of it, but practically, power also plays a very large role. Firms don't get to "try things" without lots of resources already, any novel startups may simply be acquired and assimilated or even shut down, large existing organizations are capable of sustaining failures despite market conditions, extra-market rules may be implemented by firms with political access, and if enough of the supply enforces a choice, consumer interest doesn't matter and may even adapt to what is available.
I agree with you, but in evolution there are also power differentials due to organism size/features or population leading to some organisms/species having an advantage at a certain point in time. I think this could be considered analagous (not exact mapping) to corporation power at a given time.
sure, but if you're going to admit that classical evolutionary pressure is not present, and the market is designed by the players, you've conceded it's a planned economy.
These appeals to power are disconnected from the selection pressure given in the original proposition though, which was based solely on consumer choice, and which would have been more relevant to the original idea of lifestyles being designed vs spontaneous.
>It's more akin to evolution operating on culture rather than genes.
Only there's no evolution. It's just "buy this" and "now buy that", because if you continued to buy the previous (or a perennial) model, they'd be out of sales. That's not some cultural evolution.
Before 19th-20th century marketing and mass advertising societies could do decades without changing fashions.
Maybe among peasants, but the upper classes were very fashion conscious and things changed, maybe not quite as rapidly as today, but still. For example, in America we picture our founding fathers as wearing powdered wigs, as that was the style around the time of the Revolution. But that was a comparatively brief fad, and a decade later had fallen out of fashion.
Markets are distorted by subsidies, lobbying, credit lines and old-boy networks to (a) remain solvent beyond their actual consumer revenue, and (b) act on information or distort the flow of information in a way that's independent from consumer choice, and in fact frames consumer choices.
Large corporations also act anti-competitively through acquisitions without market development, which in the evolutionary metaphor is like an invasive species suffocating the diversity of ecosystem by digesting other species only for what they need and excreting nothing valuable back into the whole.
So you're articulating an idealization that's only true in free markets, and we are not, and almost never, in a free market.
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.
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.