The Post Crisis Consumer

Acholi Beads: The New Luxury

I just posted some thoughts over at the Acholi Beads blog about The New Luxury.  A quick excerpt is below; go here for the full post.

The New Luxury acknowledges that value cannot be bought, but that we can buy based on values.  It asserts that meaning is broader than a slogan, more attractive than a photo, and deeper than any pockets.  It assures us that beauty created in a studio pales when compared to the faintest reflection of real love.  And the new luxury insists that we will not be blinded by advertisements or manipulated by marketing; we are too smart and passionate to allow our dollars to be tempted away by false promises of happiness.

TOMORROW: an experiment

A Past Quickly Gone

For thousands of years people farmed as much land as they and their families could acquire and manage. Acres and acres, but small by today's standards of industrial farms. They plowed, planted, tended and harvested. Over and over. Every season. Perhaps they had livestock as well, and knew which part of the year their herds would mate, and when the young would be born. Every year.

Before that they hunted for their food and found wild, edible plants. Food was a daily struggle and a daily accomplishment. Each day brought new hunger and new satisfaction. Perhaps some plants would last a week, maybe two, but planning ahead was of little use. Those that survived had to focus on their present.

Those days were simple. Minimal planning, some hard work, and your family would eat. And that was, for the vast majority, the best that could be done. For thousands upon thousands of years the human species has lived this simple, predictable life. But today something new is happening. It started with the Industrial Revolution and was accelerated by World War II. Suddenly we could do better than eating. Suddenly we could have comfort, even luxury. And we got them through a manufacturing boom.

Coal and oil provided cheap power, and technology improved upon itself at a surprising rate. Long distance freight leveraged these two advances and suddenly the whole world's resources were at the fingertips of those with the aptitude to take them. And the resources proved more abundant than we could have hoped. Manufacturing soared.

Like Grabbing a Passing Rocket

Fast forward to today.

In the last sixty years we have used more of the earth's resources than in all of human history before that. If you can spare a moment, please read that again. Things are so different now that we use in one year what used to take thousands of years to deplete. And the pace of our resource consumption is increasing.

Our lives look very different now, and nowhere more different then in how we interact with the planet. We are separated from the earth in every way possible. We pave it over and dam it up. We filter it and gate it off. We don't grow, hunt, harvest, or gather anything from the earth. We get it from the store.

But for the first time in the history of our species we are having a lasting impact on the earth as a whole, and it's not a good one. Deforestation, strip mining, species extinction, and polluted air and water are some of the signs of our impact. Other more controversial consequences of our collective lifestyle like global warming seem more probable each day. And most of these have become serious problems in the same 60 years during which we've drained our world's resources.

As we pull back and see this picture as a whole - the long, steady ascent through stone, bronze, and iron ages, all conducted with relatively little impact on the planet as a whole; then the short, frenetic burst of the last 200 years, and the staggering trajectory of the last 60 years - we start to see a compelling picture. The pace of change is like going for a long jog and then grabbing hold of a passing rocket.

If that long, steady ascent was a line the length of a football field, whose height represents the use of resources, it would slowly, from one goal line to the other, rise to about a foot off the ground. The last sixty years is so small in comparison to human history that it would not reach a single inch into the end zone, but our resource consumption is so rapid it would soar a mile into the sky! Being able to visualize history in this way, and to see the staggering ways we're changing our own lives and the environments around us in such a short time, leads me to a rather unnerving conclusion.

A Triple Blind Experiment

In the scope of history, our current way of life is no more than an experiment - one that might succeed, but might fail. The unnerving part is that almost no one is thinking about it this way. Instead we are reshaping the world and our interaction with it such that we depend on the success of the experiment for our survival. It seems that we are all running as rats in the maze and no one has stood up to act as scientist.

There is, I believe, reason for such myopia. Humans are not built for the long view. The many millennia of seasonal and annual repetition selected for those people who were able to focus their attention best on the short term. Hunt today, plant tomorrow, harvest in the summer. There was little thought of next year, none of next century.

But now as a race of hunters, gatherers and farmers we are facing problems of centuries. Resource depletion, environmental destruction, even national debts are not problems that the changing of the seasons will solve, but we seem to keep waiting for them to just go away, like the snow in spring.

I am not suggesting the imminent doom of mankind. I believe as much as anyone in our ability to learn and adapt. What I am suggesting is that this is a new epoch in which a more focused vision for what we must learn and how we must adapt is needed, because the world is changing a thousand times faster than it ever has.

We are building Western society on a hypothesis. That hypothesis is that all of this cataclysmic change in the ways we live and how we use the precious resources we have will be sustainable: for the next generation, for their children, and beyond. We seem to assume that since it has worked for the last sixty years, it will work for the next thousand. But there are precious few if any voices that are able to tell us if our gamble is paying off, if the experiment is working. Or not.

The 10,000 Year Clock

Two days ago I watched a TEDtalk by Stewart Brand. He showed a project that he and some friends are working on: a clock that will run for 10,000 years. The clock is a project of The Long Now Foundation, a non-profit designed to encourage long-term thinking, and when it is done it will ring a different tune with its 10 bells every day for 10,000 years.

They chose 10,000 years because it's "about how long humans have had a stable climate and technological progression." They start by looking to the past because we can see it - there are books and pictures and artifacts. But then they did the brave and difficult thing of engaging with the future. They dared to ask what the world might be like in 10,000 years, and if they could build something to survive the interim. And now they are building it.

The execution of the project is astounding; it captured my imagination for the last two days. They are building a monument-sized clock that uses only bronze-age materials - the world's largest binary computer - and embedding it inside a mountain in Nevada. They are making it into a site of pilgrimage, trying to inspire people to think 10,000 years ahead, or at least a couple hundred. In shaping the experience, one of the designers outlined the "7 Stages of a Mythic Journey" and they are creating the journey with myth in mind. It's a broad, synthetic, creative, idealistic endeavor, and I'm all for it.

Voices from 29,000 ft, and Beyond

The 10,000 year clock and The Long Now Foundation reminded me of something I've been thinking about for the last year or so. We need someone, a number of people, to monitor the experiment that is modern Western society. The difficulty is that the experiment is not happening in one university, or one field of study, or on one continent. The experiment is messy amalgamation of millions of different players and ideas, building upon each other in real time on all sides of the globe.

What we need is a new field of study that is purely synthetic - a discipline that is a mixing pot for all other disciplines, so that they might be stirred together and the temperature of the whole can be taken. This is the one that must guide us.

Bristish Economist E. F. Schumacher, in his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, argues that society has become far too dependent on Economics for guidance, bowing before the almighty dollar in hopes that if everyone acts selfishly, everyone will gain and eventually find comfort, and then, peace. But he states rather intuitively that no system built upon greed will ever lead to peace, for where is the rich man who says, 'I have enough'?

Schumacher also critiques education, stating that we have built institutions that teach us the tools to create anything, but fail to teach the values that ought to guide creation. This, I think, gets to the point. There is no vision for societal progress, only a thousands mashups of technological innovations, all drawing from and competing for the limited resources of the world.

With our newfound ability to affect the world as a whole, there must be some attempt at synthetic vision and guidance. It must take into account human need and equality, enviornmental sustainability, resource renewability, economics, politics, faith and religion, even, as the 10,000-year clock shows, storytelling and myth. It's practitioners must take a higher, broader view of the world, standing as if on Everest's 29,000 ft. peak, looking out across the whole of the world. And they must look at the long-term, understanding that we do care about the longevity of our planet and its eventual sustenance of our children and their children and beyond, though often we don't think, act, or even vote that way.

In Herman Hesse's Demian the title character talks about the changing of the age, saying that most people will not be ready for the tumult. But that some will step forward, selected by the chance of nature, "Not as leaders and lawgivers - we won't be there to see the new laws - but rather as those who are willing, as men who are ready to go forth and stand prepared wherever fate may need them."

The age is certainly changing, and we need those few that nature has endowed with the unique ability to see the long view. These voices must be cultivated and amplified, speaking from their lofty perspective to guide us in this grand experiment.

Anyone care to make a short film?

Idea for a very short film to promote WikiChoice.com (like Radiohead's "All I Need" video)

A movie theater is packed full of Americans. On the screen plays a series of powerful ads - for shoes, for clothes, for electronics. The audience is in awe.

Cut to a dim, noisy sweatshop. Asian children are making shoes, clothes, electronics. An American man in a suit stands over them, barking orders, dolling out punishment.

Back to the theater. The same man in a suit stands at the front of the theater, surrounded by stacks of boxes of new products, and smiling as he jots down orders and sends smiling, uniformed American youth to take the boxes up into the audience and collect money.

Back to the sweat shop. The American man in the suit is angry, shouting that the kids aren't making enough products, that he's going to sell out too quickly.

Back to the theater, the stacks of boxes are almost gone. The American man smiles sheepishly and ducks behind the screen as the ads continue to play. We follow him and find that the sweatshop is right there behind the screen. The man in the suit cocks his harm to hit a child, who screams in fear, but --

Back to the theater. The scream from behind the screen is drowned out by the beginning of the next ad.

Cut to black, and the text: "What will you choose when you know? WikiChoice.com"

There is no information on earth whose accessibility will improve the world more than this.

Recently Google staged the beginning of a contest. They call it "10 to the 100th." They accepted submissions for ideas that would "change the world by helping as many people as possible," and they've put up $10,000,000 to make the winning ideas a reality. I submitted one.

I'm finding it hard to get around the notion that the force shaping today's world more than any other is the rich, Western consumer market. That is, when you or I run to the local Target, we are exercising our share of the world's most powerful aggregate force. Think about it - we're busy making money to buy things, and the rest of the world is busy making those things. More lives are shaped by our collective purchasing decisions than by any other identifiable factor.

The problem is, this power is not recognized by the public, the consumers, us, and so not used intentionally. Those who have recognized it are large multinational corporations, who realize that they can drive down costs by forcing poor people to work in poor conditions, and reap huge profits by advertising their cheaper products to rich people as cool, new, expensive.

And corporations are far more flexible than the governments that regulate them. They can work in many countries at once, while any one government may only govern one. The drive for profits in this void of accountability has led companies to despicable business practices, taking advantage of workers and the environment in countries where the government is unable or unwilling to effectively regulate them.

So now an American mother buying back-to-school clothes for her daughter might be buying clothes made by a little girl who will never go to school. And when a little boy pulls a Christmas chocolate out of his stocking, there's a good chance a little boy in West Africa was enslaved to make that chocolate. And yet still we buy.

We base our purchasing decisions on what will benefit us and our families - what will look good, taste good, feel good, etc. Our main source of information on new products is the litany of commercial advertisments we are subjected to.

But this barrage of ads is a slight of hand, a painting over, a curtain falling between us and the reality of the products we are buying. The truth is that they came from somewhere, they were made by someone, and this history matters far more than whatever version of hip the advertiser wants us to associate his product with. And it's only if we care about and act on this history that we can harness the power of our own purchases and make the changes we'd like to see in the world.

After all, the ultimate power lies with us. We have the money. And if we won't buy it, companies won't make it. Collectively we have the power to improve millions, if not billions of lives, simply by making more informed, more intentional purchases.

So what has kept people from doing that so far? At first I thought it was lack of information, that no one knows where and how products are made, or who makes them. But I have come to learn that it's not that the information isn't out there, it's that it's not accessible. It's spread out across 100 books and 1,000 websites. Many don't know how to go about learning all that would be necessary to make proactive purchases. So what do we do?

This is what I proposed to Google. Create a wiki-based website, like Wikipedia.com, that collects all the information about the ethical practices of all the companies that we buy from. So if all you want is to buy an ethical toothbrush, just do a search on the site for 'toothbrush,' and the five most ethical options will pop-up. If you want to go deeper you can type a company name and read through the collective knowledge of its ethical practices, good and bad. And you can search for an industry, like chocolate, and find out what is happening in the chocolate industry that you might want to consider before buying chocolate.

I call it WikiChoice.com. If Google likes it as much as I do then it will be entered into a round of voting in January, and I will need your help to make sure that this idea is chosen.

Truly, there is no information on earth whose accessibility will improve the world more than this.