Is Recognition of Human Empathy the Solution to our Environmental Problems?

according to Jeremy Rifkin, we’re on the verge of a massive revolution

Posted Feb 19, 11:36 am in biology, consumerism, culture, economics, environment, human nature, improvements, marketing, politics, sustainability


There’s a fascinating interview with writer Jeremy Rifkin over at the New Scientist website. In it, he lays out why he thinks there is going to a be a massive shift in human consciousness as a result of new forms of information accessibility combining with the human ability for expressing empathy. This revolution, in his estimation, will solve the energy and environmental problems our world is facing. Borrowing from evolutionary biology, philosophy, marketing, and many other fields, Rifkin sees hope in the current turmoil where others don’t.

Incidentally, Rifkin’s vision of changing human behavior runs completely contrary to that of Steven Levitt (of Superfreakanomics fame), who as I stated in a previous entry is stuck in neutral with his “solve problems created by technology with more technology” rut.

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Personal Control and the Existential Salve

an autonomic perspective on the implications of purpose through purchase

Posted Jan 21, 01:55 pm in biology, consumerism, culture, economics, human nature, marketing, religion, unanswered questions


We have moved far from the sort of ‘subsistence’ mental existence that our prehistoric ancestors may have experienced. To make a simple example, as a society, we’re tending to spend less time and energy thinking about where our next meal is coming from and more time worrying about whether we’re ‘accomplishing’ things and whether we are ‘optimizing’ our life experiences. I realize that this may seem like an odd point on my part; wouldn’t anyone rather worry about something relatively frivolous like their status than the fear of starvation? After all, the benefits and penalties are at extreme odds with each other. If you’re worrying about your status and your goal is to make more money than the guy next door, the worst that will happen if you fail is that you feel bad about yourself. If you’re worrying about whether you’re going to be able to eat and you fail at your goal, the worst that could happen is that you actually die of starvation. In this context, most rationalists would probably say that if you had the choice, it’s clearly better to have your fundamentals neatly secured and spend your energy focused on the non-fundamentals— the stuff that’s higher up on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.1

However, there may be other dimensions of this choice whose repercussions perhaps aren’t so obvious, and perhaps touch on the very central tenets of life fulfillment, happiness, and transcendence. If you spend all your daily energies and time on searching for food, water, and shelter, these tasks will form the basis for meaning and fulfillment in your life; for example, note that ancient mythologies revolve around things like weather and harvests, while modern mythologies revolve around things like entertainers and populist worlds attained through consumer goods (for example, the keys to the Wild West lay in a pack of Marlboro cigarettes). If your daily energies and time are spent on building your company’s profits so you can have a nicer car or go on vacation or enjoy recreational activities, then these external fruits will form the basis of your goals and your meanings in life. The question is, which of these will ultimately prove more psychologically rewarding and meaningful in the long run?

Further, if your life is defined by the search for food and your reward is the food you find in your search, there is a relatively small chain between your actions and the consequences of your actions. The act (i.e. the search) leads directly to the outcome variable (i.e. food). This inherently implies a simplicity and control in daily life activities, and a greater attachment of meaning to fewer things. As the chain between your acts and the outcome variables becomes more convoluted and unclear, there becomes increased complexity in daily existence, and a more uncertain relationship between effort and results. What does this mean? At the very least, it almost certainly introduces a longer lag time between action and outcome, which means you have to spend more time and effort thinking about and preparing for the future. It also means that you are more likely to be reliant on others (as producers and consumers) to relay desired outcomes to you, since your actions do not directly lead to the outcomes (working in an office for 40 hours a week does not magically produce money that appears on your desk; your work goes into some action that leads to some other action and another, which eventually leads to your company getting paid by someone, and then a portion of that money is given to you). The chain is much longer, more uncertain, there are more things that could go wrong, and less of a direct causal relationship between action and outcome.

This has a lot of implications. If you are searching for food, the amount of time you spend searching will most likely be directly proportional to the amount of food you find. If you are working in an office, the amount of work you do may or may not be directly proportional to your pay; some secretaries do as much or more work than the head executive, but get paid way less. You might work 100 hours weeks to find that you are going to be promoted to a higher paying job— or, as many people are currently finding out, you may do the same only to find that your company is doing very poorly and you’re going to get laid off. You have little direct control over how your actions will manifest in an outcome; the ultimate goals of modern work situations are not typically the direct result of actions, but rather the result of multiple concurrent and mutually dependent processes.

The nature of the uncertainty is different because of the different number of linkages in the chain. The search for food has one link: the search for food leads to food. A job, on the other hand, has many links, and each link has many horizontal and vertical links associated with it, which amounts to a mess of related events of varying causation (e.g. single causation, multiple causation, conjunctural causation, mediated causation, and probabilistic causation). In other words, the relationship between the input and the output is much more complex, and depends on a lot more factors (each of which depends on a lot of other factors). This chain of events is inherently less predictable, and the actions you take have little direct relation to the goals you reach towards.

You might counter at this point that surely there’s a generally positive correlation between how hard you work and how well you are rewarded. Maybe, but note that this is not an unmediated chain of events. There are many linkages that depend on the successful occurrence of other events for the desired outcome of wealth to come to you after a lifetime of hard work. Wealthy people have a habit of saying that their hard work got them where they are, and it is perhaps true that if you looked at data regarding this, you would find some correlation between levels of effort and wealth among an already selectively chosen group (an example of the problematic survivorship bias). But looking over the entire population, it would also not be hard to find people who worked hard their whole lives and got nowhere due to, for example, always working for horrible companies, personal problems, and just bad luck. How would this exact same situation differ amongst individuals searching for food? Logically, it would be very hard to argue that with individuals starting in similar circumstances, the guy who spent less time searching for food over a longer period would end up in better circumstances. I would suggest that this is because the greater the number of linkages in the chain between action and ultimate goal, the less predictable or certain the outcome of the action; therefore, in a situation in which the action leads directly to the goal, the individual who works harder at that action is in greater control of the outcome.

Another point to consider: there are a lot of people involved in these longer chains, which means you (as an actor within the chain) have to spend much more energy considering what others think about you, because you have to engender their trust and respect to enhance the probability of your goals being met; this means you have to be more cognizant of social and power structures for your survival. Such concerns create a fertile soil for existential angst borne from the constant need for validation from others. I would also argue that it creates a disincentive to focus on securing only your fundamentals in favor of procuring such things as status and comfort since there is a greater importance placed on your position in a social structure— in network theory terms, one’s centrality. The stronger and more connections one has, the more central an individual is. The more connections you have with others who are central, the more power you have over the whole network and people in it. Network centrality means that you control resources and people; people look to you for instruction and they listen to you if you are central. Rupert Murdoch and Warren Buffet, for example, have high centrality. They can get things done because they know other powerful and central people in networks. They also have a lot of money, which also means power (money and centrality correlate heavily), even among people outside of their networks. I, on the other hand, have very low network centrality. I know no powerful people and have little control over any resources.

For better or for worse, people who are looking only for their next meal don’t have time (or need) to worry about such things as their network centrality. They just don’t want to die of starvation. And though they need to think about that, they don’t have an immediate need to think about how others in the network might think of them (though in the long run, they may want to consider that they may be able to leverage network connections for future security). Of course, people with near unlimited financial resources also don’t need to consider what others think of them either— unless a mass exodus of network connections could lead to that financial reservoir being unceremoniously drained. Then they do. But for the average person, we have to think about this a lot, because what others think about us dictates our network centrality. The more central we are, the easier it is for us to achieve the goals we seek, and the higher the likelihood that actions we take will actually achieve the goals we want them to— because, again, the long chain between action and outcome involves a lot of people, and if the people in this chain know that you’re trying to get something done and you’re a central figure, they’ll work harder to make it happen (because they themselves are trying to raise their network centrality, and repeatedly following the orders of someone who is more central than them is a good way of doing that). Therefore network centrality grants an individual control, because doing something and knowing it will have a certain effect is the very definition of control, and being able to command the obeisance of others is tantamount to being able to shorten the chain of events.

The entire world is built on our ability to get to this point of predictability and “no surprises” as often and as reliably as we possibly can. It is this foundation-level quality that we work constantly for and which we sell to others. Without this unyielding human desire to gain control, the world as we know it would cease turning. We earn money to gain control of our environment because we believe that having the money will buy us security. People hire us for jobs because they believe our skills can confer control onto their businesses. Pharmacies sell us medications to give us control over our health. Construction workers build roads to give us control over our transport. Television gives us control over our boredom. We pay deeply (at times in financial terms, at other times in other ways) to gain that control, and there is little that surrounds us, either physical, institutional, or conceptual, that did not arise in some way to present us in some way with the promise of control.

In my view, materialism is a by-product of the angst produced by a lack of control. Things can provide us a sense of stability. Things, we think, don’t go away or betray us. They ground us. When we feel insecure, we can cling to them and they will not abandon us. We feel secure in our homes, with our things. When we have jobs, we aren’t filled with fear about losing things we’re accustomed to, like our lifestyles. But it is not just this “negative” quality of materialism that is fueled by this apparent dark side of humanity. Altruism, too, is a response to the lack of control in the world, and an effort to counter it (see related: Just-world hypothesis).

Marketers know well that we are on a constant hunt to quell our existential anxieties. And yes, they do wish very much to exploit this of you, but it is not with malice that they do this, for they, as humans, are subject to it as well. They know that the search for transcendence is a universal human experience. And they know well, implicitly, that our society is on a search for transcendence— not through inward searching or contemplation as perhaps the people of the distant past have (and by virtue of the non-industrial nature of their societies, were forced to), but through material goods.

Without putting a judgment on it, it is hard to deny that our world increasingly looks to consumables to act as existential salves, if not vehicles to transcendence and meaning. It is a matter of conditioning; our economic and cultural systems increasingly push us in this direction (for example, the common definition of success has little to do with personal fulfillment and everything to do with financial and/or social capital, a definition that nearly everyone has blindly embossed on their roadmap to personal success). Our cultural values tell us that the houses we buy give us our sense of security and well-being. Our cars and vacations transport us to places we think will offer us moments of joy and escape. Our televisions and media will confer us with the sorts of meaning and realities that we cannot find alone. For better or for worse, our modern search for transcendence is one littered with consumer purchase and consumer desire; part of this is because of the increased availability of consumer goods. The other side of it is that there has been a mainstream psychological shift towards it as a by-product of industrialization and economic growth. More than being a deliberate shift of societal priorities, it is the result of a rapid change in technology, expansion in marketing communications, and an across-the-board raising of the bar of what constitutes the bare necessities of existence in the modern world.

I think most people walk towards this consumer salvation without the slightest conscious awareness of their fundamental underlying purposes; for many, this constant search for new things is simply a lifestyle that they were born into and have integrated into their psyches as the result of a process of reproduction of societal values— a concept referred to by Bourdieu as habitus. For these people, the search for the latest-and-the-greatest and for personal comfort is all there is, because in a climate where this ideology is the norm, they have never been challenged to think otherwise.

As with anything, there are good aspects and bad aspects of this. On the plus side, this mentality opens us to a breadth of experiences, and a wider mindset that can facilitate a deeper array of thoughts and understandings about our world. Because of the advent of advanced economic systems, complex experiences can be bought and sold, and there’s a wide range of experiences available to modern societies that we might not otherwise have been privy to. You wouldn’t expect, for example, tribal peoples of Papua New Guinea to pack their bags, board a plane, and vacation in the Virgin Islands, nor would you expect Australian Aborigines to go out on a Sunday evening to sip on a Tom Yum Gai soup at a Thai restaurant).

Certainly such experiences can be and often are valuable both in the developmental sense and in the sense that it opens our eyes to new opportunities and ways of thinking. As members of advanced societies, we are privy to such benefits, and we tend to think of them as normal experiences that are not all that remarkable or out-of-reach. In fact, we expect, within reason, to be able to purchase pretty much any experience we want provided we have the money for it, and usually there’s someone willing to make the exchange with us to make it happen. Knowing this, our brains develop the not unrealistic notion that we can externally procure any experience we may want to have; thus, we may be simultaneously, and unwittingly, developing an increasing reliance on salable external phenomena to confer meaning and substance onto our lives.

The question remains, however: can there be fulfillment in this? Is fulfillment in purchase any different than fulfillment in being a hunter-gatherer? This is a question that deserves serious inquiry.

1 A model that I find flawed in certain respects, but one that is instructive for the purposes of this discussion

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On Nuance and Intellectual Honesty

the importance of thinking in complex terms about subjects that are often denied it

Posted Nov 10, 02:35 pm in consumerism, culture, economics, human nature, marketing, research, unanswered questions


It’s so hard to be nuanced these days. Every time you make an assertion that—wait— maybe Wal-Mart isn’t working hand in hand with Satan, or that materialism might not cause the downfall of civilization, you get dirty looks from people. It’s not that I believe that Wal-Mart is the greatest company ever or that I believe we should all be more materialistic. It’s that these are nuanced points of view that attempt to not be reductivist. By this I don’t mean to imply some wishy-washy sense of moral relativism that sidesteps taking hardlined stances on topics of public interest. It’s about being complete in an assessment before passing judgment. But in the modern world, we not only expect reductivist views that are partially based on political ideology, but we view non-reductivist views suspiciously, as if they are coming from someone with an ulterior and opposing motive.

Case in point: last night, I was engaged in conversation with some fellow graduate students, faculty, and area intellectuals. We were talking about Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational, in preparation for his visit to this campus. The topic of conversation weaved a path around a number of subjects, but I found myself interjecting numerous times to offer a little bit of push-back towards unquestioned, ideologically driven assertions. I realize that doing this often makes me appear argumentative and contrarian, particularly in settings where I don’t know the people I’m talking to, but my goal is to elicit some level of thought in people who have strong, but largely unsupported, points of view.

Being nuanced means that people will interpret a political argument even where there isn’t one. Some topics are simply so ideologically loaded that you can’t talk about them in a complex and thoughtful way without people instinctively taking the side that most conforms to the talking points of their political ideology, and getting defensive when a statement impinges on it. Viewpoints that I often come in conflict with, and for which my rebuttals ruffle feathers, almost certainly cause people to form negative judgments about me (“obviously, this is a marketer talking” or “he’s clearly a member of such-and-such political party”); these impromptu acts of belief-formation on their parts are able to account for what otherwise may seem like— but aren’t!— needless and attention-seeking subversions of expectations on my part. The problem is that on hot-button issues, people assume that their conversation partners have political agendas that they want to push.

But in order to have a real dialogue, we have to abandon that way of thinking. We can no longer afford to have conversations that consist entirely of liberal/conservative/capitalist/socialist/pro-business/anti-corporation talking points. These talking points mean nothing because they are contextually bereft, and are selective ways of interpreting large amounts of complex information. But the real world is complicated. In my view, extreme points of view are common from people who haven’t done research on opposing views, and have not considered the aggregated knowledge in a meaningful way.

Perhaps you are wondering about the types of complex thoughts I’m talking about. Here are some points that I brought up last night, and which probably didn’t go over too well:

So, to the few of you who actually read this blog, I have one desperate plea: Question your own belief system rigorously, and be willing to think in complex terms, even if that means you arrive at conclusions that are unpopular among those in your peer set and social networks. It’s the only way to have honest dialogues these days.

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The Trader Joe's Paradox Revisited

how the most progressive grocery store came in last for sustainability

Posted Sep 22, 09:18 pm in consumerism, environment, experiences, marketing, sustainability


Trader Joe’s, the much celebrated “progressive” grocery store is a favorite of those consumers who favor such adjectives as “green” and “eco-friendly.” Unfortunately, as I described in a previous article, the reality is that Trader Joe’s is nothing of the sort. Amazingly, they manage to maintain that undeserved image without promoting it or even living up to the standards that these values would suggest. Case in point: this article in the New York Times places Trader Joe’s dead last in a national survey of grocery store seafood sustainability. It really takes some doing to lose out to guys like Safeway and Kroger. But then, Trader Joe’s never claimed to be eco-friendly and green in the first place, so maybe it’s not that surprising.

As I mentioned in my previous article about TJ’s (see the update at bottom), I talked to a Trader Joe’s manager about this very issue about their fish last November when I noticed that almost all the fish they sell there were on the “AVOID” column of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide to sustainable fish). The manager told me that Trader Joe’s is a “democracy” and they stock things that people buy, and well, the people like unsustainable fish. I suppose he seemed somewhat apologetic about it, but at the same time he was able to take umbrage under this lofty ideology of populism.

Of course, by the same token we can view this democracy as a means by which we are able to use our buying power to promote our ideals through selective purchasing; that is, if we don’t believe a company is representing our values, we can avoid buying there. Being concerned about the state of our collapsing oceans, I did exactly that and stopped buying fish there. I also tried to share this information with friends, colleagues, and anyone who would listen. What I discovered about this is that it’s quite hard to gain credence with others regarding something when your statements directly contradict what others think they know; nearly everyone I told this to seemed to doubt my claims because of Trader Joe’s pervasive “progressive” reputation.

Earlier this year, I decided to write to Trader Joe’s headquarters about it. In my letter, I expressed that while I appreciated their apparent democratic ideals, Trader Joe’s could implement a “high road” approach on this, given the scientifically-validated reality that overfishing is destroying the world’s oceans. I attached a copy of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide to sustainable fish. Much to my surprise, soon after I sent it, they updated their website to add something about how they are now sourcing their fish based on the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide. I’m not sure if it was my letter that elicited this, but the timing was pretty remarkable, and I was pleased that maybe one customer’s opinion did matter!

Well, it’s been several months or so since that update on their website. Since then, I’ve gone back numerous times and have not seen any change in their inventory of fish. I’m disappointed, especially since so many people are convinced that they are a company with “principles” and “ideals” relating to environmentalism, and thus do all their shopping there with the implicit understanding that their shopping list has already been filtered for eco-friendliness. Of course, to be fair, TJ’s never claimed that they serve this function.

But boy, they’ve shown that they can really cash in on this misconception.

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The Youthful Search for Authenticity

in which we borrow images to ‘forge’ ourselves

Posted Jul 16, 11:57 am in consumerism, culture, experiences, human nature, postmodernism, semiotics, unfinished thoughts


People of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they’re all so envious of it.” – Chuck Klosterman, “Killing Yourself to Live”

The above passage is from a chapter of a book called “Killing Yourself to Live” in which music writer Chuck Klosterman discusses the Great White nightclub fire in Rhode Island a couple years ago, in which 100 people died due to a pyrotechnic mishap. Being that this was in a small, lower-middle-class town, the crowd was made up of blue-collar types who were actually (perhaps unbelievably) fans of the band. Klosterman was contrasting this audience profile with those of the many big city shows he’d been to where washed-up bands like Great White would play long after their primes to crowds half full of hipsters who were just there “ironically” so they could mock the music and scoff at those who were genuinely into it. Klosterman suggests that these hipsters scoff at these true-blue fans because they want to express being above liking things, because they can’t stand to be genuine.

The sentiment expressed in the quote is an interesting one, but I’d make a slight, but significant alteration; the word “despise” should really be “crave.” This, of course, renders the phrase a considerably more obvious one. Yet, for the most part, Klosterman’s observations resonate with me; I’ve noticed that people of our generation often have weirdly amorphous personalities and images, shifting wildly based on social circumstances and how those circumstances can be manipulated for social capital. Our generation seems fixated on self-awareness as its own virtue, and is highly obsessed with carefully controlling and crafting our images in the eyes of others through symbols whose meanings likely did not carry so much symbolic weight in identity construction just a few generations ago (clothes, vehicles, online personalities, musical taste, etc.).

Anyway, as I see it through Klosterman’s lens, the reason the indie kids of this generation can’t stand to be genuine is because they grew up entitled, in sheltered environments in which they never had to endure hardships. Their entire personas were cobbled together by borrowing images they liked, never borne organically from their own experiences. These images they adopt are never their own; they are fashion objects, constantly subject to the winds of change and shifting public opinion.

Because of the postmodern focus on image and its central import in identity, choosing images and consumer goods to be associated with are critically important decisions; no one wants to be associated with images that may turn out unfashionable or appear to suggest that a person is, in fact, a loser. Therefore, it’s easier to just reject them all (at least publicly), or to simply adopt them “ironically.” But clearly, we can’t be free of symbols entirely. The ubiquity of symbolism in nearly all consumer goods is an unavoidable byproduct of a post-modern era; everything we see forces us to think about “what kind of person would own that” and form schemas about these individuals.

Therefore, such individuals bitterly resent those whose life experiences are more “authentic” (read: difficult and uncomfortable) than their own, because such trying experiences are never unfashionable, and those who have endured them are never subjected to the plaguing self-aware scrutiny that everyone else has to deal with. Living through hardship engenders respect, never mockery. Thus, these entitled kids want nothing more than to have had some hardships— “grit” as Klosterman puts it— to confer them authenticity. There is nothing authentic, as these people see it, in their comfortable upbringings. Their lack of unmolded identity is a source of inner conflict because it forces them to constantly question their symbolic choices.

The ubiquity of multiplicities of divergent images, tropes, and cultures has given us license to treat our personalities like clothing that can be switched at will. On one hand, this allows a sense of psychological freedom to be whatever we want to be; but on the other hand, I think many people born into this postmodern world feel like they don’t have a “baseline” self that is grounded in anything that wasn’t calculatingly copied from something else they perceived as authentic or identity-conferring in a categorical sense (e.g. “punk”, “skater”, etc.).

There are some people who lead the way in cultural transformation, but they account only for a small fraction of individuals. Most of the rest are what academic and sociologist Doug Holt describes as “feeders”— basically, people who crave brushes with authenticity, and who just copy what the innovators are doing, often without the understanding of where those ideas came from. Since they can’t lay claim to the authenticity, having been deprived of the experiences that created them, they settle for the next best thing: adopting the symbols of it. And since the symbols are the easiest way for outsiders to categorize people (e.g. torn jeans and a mohawk means ‘punk’), that works out just fine for feeders.

This generation’s youth craves authenticity, but rarely one that they can have (that is, one they are genuinely entitled to through experience); it’s always someone else’s authenticity that they wish they could have.

But perhaps it’s not limited to youth; we engage in such activities largely as a means of arriving at a manufactured authenticity that constitutes our ‘image’ at any given point in time; the bevy of images we’ve been presented with for all our lives through media have, ironically, taught us not to want the real authentic with respect to ourselves, but instead to want something we can’t have, but which we can fake well enough to convince others. Our true self, it seems, can be manufactured through symbols.

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The New Wave of Advocacy of Financial Recklessness in Advertising

in which desperation about the economy starts to set in

Posted Jun 24, 01:17 am in business, business models, consumerism, economics, ethics, human nature


The poor economy has hit a lot of people very hard. As such, there’s been a glut of commercials on daytime television extolling the virtues of various cost-saving products. But one in particular that I’ve seen lately has been striking in its unbridled pomposity. This commercial features a nicely-dressed, middle-aged, middle-class couple talking tough about their finances. The wife reveals, in a rather distressed manner, that their monthly paycheck is “spent before we even get it.” Her husband adds that they decided that they needed to make serious cuts to their monthly expenses. “That’s why,” the woman says shortly before her husband sits in a nice leather chair opposite a a rather large, late-model flat panel television, “we switched from [a certain brand of satellite television network] to [another brand of satellite television network].” Huh?

Commercials like this trouble me. Obviously, the goal of some marketers is to get people to fork over money for things they don’t necessarily need. However, the mechanism employed by this commercial is to encourage financial recklessness by actively reinforcing the idea that certain luxuries are actually necessities. This demarcation of necessity/luxury is being increasingly blurred by advertisers, many of whom are now attempting to leverage latent consumer concerns about financial security to get them to actually spend more! By buying this [unnecessary] product, you’re actually demonstrating good financial judgment. Objectively, this assertion is not true; yet commercials like this one create an illusory social consensus about the wisdom of certain ill-advised consumer behaviors. After all, why would that nice couple on TV lie to us?

This trend is not limited to premium television channels. Many cell phone commercials seem to suggest something similar about “saving” money through consumption, as do many home internet services. No doubt, these services are extremely convenient, but for most people they are far from necessary, particularly if you are concerned about losing your house or climbing out from under a mountain of debt, both of which are probably much bigger concerns. The auto company Hyundai began running ads encouraging consumers to buy their cars, stating that they would allow a consumer to return the vehicle if their income stream was interrupted in any way. Ford and other car companies soon followed suit with similar programs. The question remains as to whether it is a wise idea for anyone who is concerned about the future of their income stream to purchase a car in the first place; after all, shouldn’t such people be trying to save money for future financial straits for when they potentially lose their jobs?

This brings us to rather salient questions about marketing ethics. Marketers are already considered pretty low on the food chain in terms of ethics, but in the midst of a global financial crisis, advocacy by companies of personal financial indiscretion is still a very ugly sight to behold. We should recall that lifestyles of excess were at the root of the sub-prime crisis, and we might be concerned by the idea of consumers being egged on by industry to continue doing it. We can’t legislate morality, but as consumers we can certainly question the ethical standards of companies whose competitive business model rely heavily on their customers’ bad judgment. But to be fair, we also can’t discount the role of the consumer either; surely consumers must take some responsibility for their own financial well-being.*

Troubling as it may be, I see this as simply a continuation of what has always been going on in marketing communications: companies try to promote certain beliefs, consumers hear it and form a dialogue with it. The ideas that consumers find convenient and/or believable stick; those that do not, fall by the wayside. It’s not perfect, but at least it’s somewhat democratic. But like democracies, sometimes it’s the stupid ideas that win out in the end.

* We tend to think of the U.S. economic system as being largely modeled on free market economics, which is in many ways built on the idea of consumers making informed choices, companies responding to market needs, and companies competing with each other to provide needed goods and services. Shift all the responsibility on any one party, and the equation starts to break down.

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Marketing Privacy

amidst consumer fears and self-consciousness, retailers should offer something that’s hard to get

Posted Jun 15, 01:06 pm in business, consumerism, culture, human nature, improvements, marketing


It’s not infrequent that you hear people lamenting about the loss of privacy in modern society. Grocery stores want us to get loyalty cards so they can monitor what we’re buying and change their marketing mixes to capitalize on it. Facebook wants to sell our user information so marketers can post up banner ads about things they think we might buy. Data mining software on our computers watch what we’re doing and send that information to various companies that sign us up for junk mail and email spam lists.

Some of us actively combat this trend by being secretive when companies try to get information from us, while many of us are just resigned to it; but it remains true that privacy is a highly-valued commodity in our society. Some people value privacy because they don’t want to deal with the irritation and annoyance of people constantly trying to sell them things. But there are also real concerns about things like identity theft and corporations mining information for purposes that many people don’t feel comfortable about. Then there’s the fear of humiliation; sometimes people simply don’t want others— friends, acquaintances, and even strangers— to know certain things about them. There are, for example, fears of looking pathetic or comical in the eyes of others, or fears that potentially embarrassing information might circulate.

This morning, I happened to be in the pharmacy buying some calamine lotion for a poison ivy problem, but I noticed that in the same aisle there were numerous products for problems of a more embarrassing nature, like the slew of products for jock itch. Some people would rather live with the jock itch (or buy a $5 product online and have it shipped out for $7) rather than take that to the counter and face the cashier, knowing that they’re probably snickering under their stoic fascade and laughing about it with co-workers later.

Two aisles away were the condoms, prophylactics, and lubricants. I bet that only a quarter of people looking to buy “male enhancement drugs” in a pharmacy actually have the nerve to take the product to the counter.

In bookstores, I wonder how much potential revenue from the sales of self-help books, health and medical literature, and erotica (or pornography) is lost due to the inability of consumers to work up the gall to look another human in the eye while the price scanner brings up the book title on the computerized cash register.

I mention all these things not because they are humorous and we may see the universal human emotions involved in them, but because there’s a real marketing problem involved here. Consumers want to purchase things but are thwarted by their inhibitions, insecurities, and retailers’ apparent inability to acknowledge these feelings. Retailers are damaged not only because of the lost revenue from salable products that people are actually willing to fork over money for (but won’t), but because these products are taking up shelf and warehouse space and aren’t getting the turnaround that they could. There are high inventory costs to products that don’t shift units.

Some grocery stores, to save on labor costs, have implemented self-checkout lines in which customers ring up their own sales and pay for them through a machine. A system such as this would be incredibly valuable at stores like a bookstore or pharmacy. It offers customers an outlet to pay for an item and retain their privacy. They don’t need to talk to anyone, they don’t need to feel embarrassed, and they don’t need to feel like they are being judged. Retailers benefit because it keeps customers focused on getting the things they need, rather than feeling uneasy about making the transactions. These machines are a little clumsy in the grocery stores, but they would work much better in these venues than they do in grocery stores because you’d typically have a lot fewer items, and all the items have UPC codes (unlike vegetables in the grocery store, which are a pain to ring up).

There’s no doubt that persons in positions of power at retail organizations have recognized this issue. Yet, short of grocery stores (which have ostensibly implemented them for different reasons), I have yet to see one brick-and-mortar store do anything to remedy this misalignment. There may be a number of reasons for this, including concerns about theft, space, bucking convention, and good ol’ status quo; but in my view, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks by a significant margin— and for consumers, it would be a welcome change from feeling like their every move is being watched. For bookstores, it has the added bonus of keeping them as anonymous as Amazon.com, who they’ve been claiming has a competitive advantage over them.

Comment [2]




The Last Days of "Stuff" and the New Age of Digital Pack-Ratism

if you never have to throw anything away, would you do it?

Posted Jun 11, 12:17 pm in consumerism, culture, economics, experiences, human nature, marketing


There was a time near the end of my undergraduate days— probably around a time that I was moving— where I realized that I hated stuff. And by stuff I mean all the trinkets, knickknacks, bric-a-brac, mementos, curios, and souvenirs that filled my house and my closets, and littered my floor and acned my walls. What is notable about this revelation was also the realization that even though I hated stuff, I had a weird, irrational attachment to stuff as well.

These were things that served no function, yet were impossible for me to get rid of, for a variety of reasons. Some of them had too much personal significance for me to just throw out, like the hilarious and baffling—but non-fitting— “God Loves Ukraine” t-shirt my friend had given me in high school. Other things seemed too substantial and useful to someone else to just throw into a garbage can just because I no longer wanted it in my presence, like books I no longer needed but which no one would buy. Yet others I felt like I had paid too much money for to just discard; these things needed to be sold— even though nobody would ever bother to come all the way to my house just to buy them.

Around this time, I took a very long trip to India that kept me away from my stuff for nearly half a year. I remember thinking as I gazed into the deep blue Indian Ocean that if my house burned down while I was away, I wouldn’t really miss any of my stuff except for a couple of things here and there, items that would easily have fit into a small box. In a perverse way, I wished that my house would burn down so I wouldn’t have to deal with the unpleasant and conflicting emotions that I had to confront when discarding stuff myself. Also while I was away in India, a new-agey book suggested to me that if you can’t bear to part with something, you no longer own it— it owns you. This I found rather unsettling. I decided that when I got back, I would just get rid of all my stuff somehow.

Much of it I was able to get rid of by packing into boxes and offering on Craigslist. Some I put in boxes and laid on the street, stating that they were free. Some stuff I was able to sell. It was a difficult process. Even the stuff I knew I would never miss, I still had a very hard time discarding. I would think 4-5 times before putting something in “the box,” for all the reasons I stated previously.

Yet, despite all this, getting rid of stuff actually had a surprisingly strong psychological effect on me. I felt lighter, like I had lost 20 pounds, and somehow a kind of psychic burden was lifted as well. It was weird; it was almost as if these things took up space not only in my house but on my person as well, and shedding them had the simultaneous effect of emptying my house and also decluttering my person.

But there was an interesting aspect to this decluttering process that I’m still trying to come to grips with. Since I was quite young, I had been obsessed with music. I collected many, many cassettes, compact discs, and records, and listened to them constantly. I enjoyed them, but they also took up a lot of space. While I was getting rid of all this stuff, I realized that I had some 150+ CDs that I was rather nervous about parting with. Some were rarities, some would be expensive to replace, and some just felt like an affront to good taste to even consider selling. But I was committed to this winnowing, and wanted to make every effort to get rid of anything I absolutely didn’t need to have (within reason). But instead of going to my favorite haunt Amoeba Records to sell them off without looking back, I did something else first, and it’s something that I’m trying to contemplate whether violates the very premise of my efforts in divestment. At this stage, the early 2000s, I was living well into the age of digital music, and I could simply copy all that music to my hard drive without much effort. Which I did. And I bought a new hard drive to house it all too. At the end of it, I had some 40 gigabytes of music on my hard drive, and made (well, more like recovered) $300 selling my records back to Amoeba.

My question is, are digital files also stuff or do they not count because they don’t literally take up any space? If I collect files on my hard drive, is it any different than collecting junk in my closet? As someone who wants to absolve myself of the sin of stuff, do I have to clear out my hard drives and delete music that I don’t listen to?

At first glance, clearly. Whether stuff is physical or digital media makes no difference. The concept of pack-ratism is about irrational attachment to possessions. It’s about an unwillingness to give up that which does not really serve you. It is about carrying stuff around for no other reason than because you are terrified to throw it out because you might need it.

So far so good.

But where it starts getting very convoluted is the idea of how much this stuff interferes with your life. We consider pack-ratism problematic because we believe that there are serious consequences to the neuroticism of never throwing anything out. People become unhealthily obsessed with their things; they develope debilitating fears of losing their possessions; their living conditions become defined by squalor and filth. The Collyer Brothers, who epitomize compulsive hoarding, were found dead amidst the 103 tons of garbage that literally flooded their entire Manhattan home (at least one of them ‘drowned’ when a pile of garbage fell on him). That’s a pretty strong cautionary tale. But chances are pretty slim that you’d experience anything similar with a few extra gigs of junk on your hard drive. In fact, if you are able to keep your files well organized, you’re unlikely to experience any problems related to clutter; and actually, with advances in search technology, you’re don’t even need to organize all that much. In other words, you can be a total, complete pack rat and never feel any particular consequences.

I believe that we’re all moving in the direction of digital pack-ratism. Short of wiping embarrassing pictures away, we don’t have much reason to delete things off our hard drives— except, of course, clearing up some free space. But this problem likely won’t be so prevalent in the future. Hard drive sizes are getting exponentially larger while prices are dropping dramatically; meanwhile, the sizes of MP3s, photos, and documents will likely not be exploding on the same scale as hard drive sizes. Therefore, hard drives will be getting much bigger while file sizes will stay relatively stationary; on average, each file will make up a smaller and smaller percentage of the total hard drive space. Concern over space and efforts towards space-saving will become increasingly irrelevant for the average computer user.

Also, as people move from computer to computer, they will likely just copy their entire old hard drive over to their new ones every time they switch; this is to avoid the risk of losing potentially important information by selectively copying certain files. There is not a large penalty for doing this, as hard drive sizes will be continuously growing. Thus, computers will serve as warehouses for peoples’ lives (which increasingly will revolve around their computers): their record collections, their writings, their emails and letters, their photos— everything. And they’ll have no urgent need to delete anything.

Does this mean we will all be digital pack rats? It could be, depending on how much industry pushes this idea, and how much they can manage to reframe the concept (e.g. “It’s not an obsessive and neurotic behavior; it’s just common sense that can protect you and the things that matter to you!”). Hardware manufacturers have the ability and motivation to promote this idea that people will never have to get rid of any of their files; and amazingly, they can even truthfully claim that there will be little to no consequence for engaging in this type of behavior, short of occasionally having to make a cheap upgrade to a bigger drive, which probably won’t be necessary very often for most people.

Of course, there will probably always be people who are neurotically fearful of running out of space, and will never become digital pack rats. For some of these people, this is a consequence of living in through a technological age where drives often did fill up, and at inopportune times. For others, it’s just a fundamental lack of understanding about what hard drive space means. My dad informed me yesterday that he deleted an important 20k Word document off his computer because he was afraid of filling up his 120Gb hard disk. His drive is not even 10% filled.

For the rest of us, there might be no stop to our obsessive data collecting, except for the dreaded hard drive failure, which may indeed serve as the new devastating house fire.

Comment [3]




Deconstructing the Hipster and Youth Culture Movements

just another youth movement or a revolutionary departure?

Posted May 4, 11:12 am in consumerism, culture, postmodernism


The following is a response to this article from Adbusters, which seeks to dissect the curious and ubiquitous hipster subculture. On the whole, it is a highly dismissive article that sees few redeeming qualities in this way of life. The author views the hipster as the culmination of a Western fixation with conspicuous consumption and self-absorption. In other words, it does not paint a pretty picture of hipsters. What follows is a two-part commentary about the article, which consists of my response to the article, followed by a response by an insightful friend who wants to be called “Derry.”

Response by Rahul
This article is as hilarious and ugly as the scene itself. While I find many of its observations incisive and funny, it’s hard to argue that the hipster scene is derivative and unoriginal as the author claims. In fact, he has given dozens of details about behaviors and artistic movements within hipsterdom that are essentially original— like fixations on fixed-gear bikes, odd mixes of disparate music, and obsessive photo-taking on old-school cameras. The author’s argument seems to suggest that these are not valid expressions in themselves, but instead are gross, consumerized actions in which identity is created through purchasing power. I find this a somewhat curious and circular argument to make, as the way he is identifying people within the movement is by looking at the products they carry with them (fixed-gear bikes, non-prescription glasses, keffiyahs); By his definition, someone who has certain possessions, looks a certain way, or attends certain parties is a hipster, so naturally the conclusion he’s going to come to is that hipsters base their identities on consumption patterns.

Still, it is probably true that through such unifying signals that scenes coalesce in the first place (of clothing, you could say that beats had those black shirts, grunge guys had flannel shirts, country guys have cowboy hats, hippies had tie-dye, etc.). Yet, the author seems to argue that hipsterdom is an outlier from other youth scenes throughout history. I would challenge the author to find a youth scene anywhere in history that cannot be criticized on the same terms that he criticizes hipsters on. I think it would be hard, because, like the author, we identify those scenes largely by their visual aesthetic, not by a collective ethos— if that term can even be reliably applied when discussing a scene. Sure, we have some vague ideas about what certain movements stood for, but ultimately, we call someone a hippie because they smoked dope and wore tie-dye, not because they were against the Vietnam war. Some guy who was against the war doesn’t automatically gain admission into the hippie movement on account of his political views; first and forement, he has to look the part. Even aside from that, is it even possible to ascribe a unified ethos to a movement (e.g. did all hippies embrace ‘free love’ or did some of them just want easy sex?; were they all against Vietnam, or were many of them indifferent to it?).

Admittedly, I do not particularly relish the hipster movement by any means, but that may be simply out of envy for those in it. Hipsters are young, having fun, they seem to have tons of friends, they’re fashionable, and are privy to a vibrant arts scene. Of course, there’s something that rubs me the wrong way about hipsters (vacuity and self-obsession come to mind)— but once I start thinking about it, it’s hard for me to put my finger on exactly why any of this might be problematic. Lots of people are vacuous and self-obsessed, and I don’t invest particular time in condemning them; such people seem to make up the bulk of Western society, and likely the world. Hipsters are having fun while they’re young, and they’re not really hurting anyone, so why should I care what they do? Rampant consumers they may be, but a scene that is divorced from commerce would actually be the exception, not the rule; groups forms largely due to similarity in consumption patterns (shared aesthetics in music, books, TV, clothes styles, etc.— indeed, defining lifestyles as being similar largely hinges on consumer consumption habits).

Besides, it’s hard to tell from this vantage point what cultural contributions hipsters might have in the long run. There’s too much data (fashion, music, etc.) for bystander to effectively parse at this stage; we need time to separate the wheat from the chaff. Maybe in 10-15 years it would be clear what hipsterdom has given modern society, but before that time comes, it seems like a pre-emptive dismissal to write off the whole movement as worthless and self-indulgent. Such criticisms have been leveled against every youth movement during its time.

Response by Derry
While I agree that most, if not all, youth subcultures could be justly criticized on the same terms as the author uses to criticize Hipsterdom, I believe that Hipsterdom is, in a sense, an “outlier” of youth subcultures. Past subcultures, such as the hippie, punk, and grunge cultures, seem to have been at least the partial result of philosophies of anti-establishment that stemmed from objectionable views of mainstream society. Hippies were identified, in part, by their shared opposition to the war in Vietnam. Sure, many “hippies” were simply along for the ride, looking for an easy way to get laid, but the initial catalyst of Hippiedom was, I believe, a result of genuine repulsion in regard to the Vietnam war and the American public’s widespread paranoia and fear regarding Communism. Without that societal catalyst, I don’t think hippies would have found the reason to band together. Grungers rebelled against the vapid materialism of the 80’s, creating and listening to music that was an abrasive rebuke of the antiseptic synth-pop of Phil Collins and of the extravagant lifestyles of coke-sniffing yuppies.

What is the unifying cause of Hipsterdom? Does it even have a cause? Unlike past subcultures, I don’t think its cause is rooted in anti-establishment philosophy or an opposition to mainstream society. Instead, I think (as does the author) that hipsters are simply a bunch of privileged white kids trying (in vain) to appear genuine; to escape the shame and guilt of leaving a consequence-free life, free of responsibility and without any true cause to support. Hipsters are even ashamed of their own hipsterhood, as most will deny that they are, in fact, hipsters and will get angry at the insinuation. I doubt the same was true of hippies, grungers, punks, or even Goths, who wore their labels proudly. Why the difference? I think hipsters, unlike past subcultures, don’t really have a reason to exist, a unifying struggle against mainstream society that defines them. They are the post-modern youth subculture; a subculture whose defining cause is their lack of cause and apathetic dismissal of anything that gains mass appeal (i.e. their dislike of good music because it becomes popular). I suppose this still counts as a “cause,” but I am arguing that this cause is dramatically different that the anti-establishment and reactionary causes that propelled past subcultures into existence.

Regarding the clothes and products that these subcultures display; every tribe needs a way to communicate, and the way members of a tribe dress and behave allow them to find each other. This is true for any tribe, not just youth subcultures, from religions (yamikas and crosses) to sports fans (jerseys). The fact that these tribes have identifiable clothing does not, by itself, make them shallow. Hipsters, on the other hand, do not seem to have a unifying cause and, as a consequence, I think their clothing and attachments to particular products appears to be shallow, representing nothing beyond itself. Hippies wore tie-die shirts, which identified them as hippies, but this identification meant something. It meant that they were affiliated with a group that espoused anti-war, free-love views. There were some hippies, as you point out, that just wore the tie-die shirts but didn’t share hippie ideals, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was a unifying set of views and causes that defined Hippiedom. When you see a hipster with non-prescription glasses and a torn vintage tee, you don’t think of the cause that the subculture represents, because there is no meaningful cause. WYSIWYG. There’s really nothing to it, at least nothing that I can put my finger on.

I suppose nothing is wrong with being a hipster. As you said, who am I to give a [expletive deleted] about what people do and how they dress? If they are having fun and feel a sense of community, good for them. But I think that hipsters do represent an outlier of youth culture for the reasons described above.

Brief Response by Rahul
One thought: you mention the inability or unwillingness of hipsters to self-identify. I believe the reason for this has everything to with the underlying ethos of the hipster movement: unyielding individuality and non-conformity. The entire movement celebrates idiosyncrasy, eclecticism, and a lack of adherence to what is perceived as societal norms. This is somewhat ironic in my view, since clearly there is some, perhaps large, level of uniformity in the symbols depicted within this group. Nevertheless, admitting to being a hipster is tacit acceptance of conformity to a group, which is anathema to the most important facets of hipster ideology, the uniqueness of the individual. In other words, acceptance of the “hipster” title paradoxically violates the very premise of the group’s collective ethos, and preservation of self-identity will disbar anyone from doing it. Weirdly, this means that hipsters as a group do not exist to hipsters, but only to outsiders!

Do you have any thoughts on the hipster movement? Post in the comments!

Comment [1]




"What Do I Buy?" vs. "Do I Buy?"

making sense of the ‘environmentalism-through-consumption’ movement

Posted Apr 23, 03:25 pm in consumerism, economics, environment, sustainability


Continuing on the Earth Day themes I’ve been thinking about for the past few days, I’d like to talk about one of the latest environmental trends I’ve seen lately: commercial reuse. Before I start, let me say that I’m all for reuse in the sense that I support the idea of using resources we already have rather than producing new ones. Clearly, reuse can be a good way of avoiding all sorts of needless waste. Why buy a new lamp when you can, as I found out, get a perfectly good used one free on Freecycle?*

That said, yesterday, I saw a program on the National Geographic Channel called Garbage Moguls that managed to perturb me despite its focus on reuse. The premise of this particular episode, according to the show’s webpage:

Recycling gets a makeover with a quirky group of young “eco-capitalists” at TerraCycle, Inc. Using only materials found in the trash, the team will transform cereal boxes into notebooks, newspaper into pencils and cookie wrappers into kites.

An interview with the company’s founder at the opening of the show had him making the following statement (paraphrased): “I want to prove to people that you can save the world and make a boatload of money doing it.”

In and of themselves, I have no problem with either the description of the company or the founder’s statement. However, what I am finding increasingly disturbing is the environmental movement’s seeming exclusionary focus on the What Do I Buy? piece of the retail value chain, and the total lack of acknowledgment of the preceding Do I Buy? piece. I understand that reuse is a valuable contribution to the environmental movement, but it is increasingly worrisome to me that companies like this simply market and sell the ideas of “environmentalism-through-consumption,” which is at best a tacit approach to a problem that requires active solutions. Note, for example, that the quote from the founder explicitly likens buying TerraCycle’s products to saving the world.

Again, I don’t disagree that buying a recycled notebook is better than buying a new one; it is almost definitely better (provided that the energy costs of producing the recycled notebook more than offsets the environmental and energy costs of making a new one). But it’s not so much Terracycle’s products themselves that are offputting to me so much as the ideological by-products, which reinforce myths like “recycling = environmentalism.” I am concerned this attitude may be almost as harmful as a lack of environmental awareness.

Why? Because when this attitude is promoted, it leads people to believe that along with recycling, buying Terracycle’s products (and products like them) is tantamount to saving the planet, and therefore a complete strategy to offset environmental damage. But this isn’t exactly true. What it does is alleviate some of the damages caused by consumption. The only way to avoid causing damage in the first place is to cease consumption entirely; this is because ceasing consumption causes manufacturers to stop producing. But I should reiterate that my argument is not that we shouldn’t buy at all; instead, I would argue that along with reusing and recycling, more emphasis needs to be placed on the Do I Buy? decision (in the purple “consumer” section of the above diagram). Exercising this discretion could make all the difference.


*I’ve used, and continue to use, Freecycle, a website that connects you with people who want to get rid of perfectly good stuff (and often less than perfect stuff as well) and lets you take that stuff for free, and that will also connect you with people who will take your weird, useless knick-knacks lying in your closet that are only taking up space. I think it’s a cool service that has great potential to save you money and clean up your house, while enjoying some positive social impacts. I strongly recommend it.

Comment [1]




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