We are not consumers | Hacker News Reader

We are not consumers

mnmlist.com

51 pointsv4us34 comments

> that we can grow our own food, make and trade and share everything we need

Grow our own food? I don't want to be a farmer. It's hard. Division of labor is awesome.

As for sharing, how do you rationally decide who to give something to? The idea of "whoever needs X should have it" sounds nice, but the tricky part is figuring out who needs X. Prices have information about that, and we need information to make a rational decision. Also prices have information about when you shouldn't use X (because it's too hard to make) and should substitute Y instead.

And as for trade, it's basically the same thing as buying except if you take away money you have to find someone who wants your stuff, and has stuff you want, instead of only one or the other, so it's harder to trade.

You miss the point. I am a person, then a customer if I buy from you, a client if subscribe to your service. This is not an argument about economics, but instead the framing of who we are in the economic system.

How is this not an argument about economics? The author makes specific arguments for growing one's own food, and returning to a barter economy. He makes a slight jab at the notion of not merely being consumers, but also creators, but it seems like the crux of his argument is that we should be disconnecting ourselves from corporations in their current form.

Note: I think this idea overall is pretty dumb. A rejection of corporations in favor of cottage industries and barter economies? I'm pretty sure there is free love and tie-dye shirts in his future.

Personally, I'd settle for a rejection of the notion of "wealth" as the key indicator of success to something like, "long term sustained production capacity", where production capacity includes knowledge production and long term is on the scale of multiple human lifetimes.

Long term sustained production capacity and knowledge are types of wealth. How could they not be? They are valuable.

In the long run, they are the most valuable types of wealth. If you think people are too short sighted, you may be right, but that isn't a fault of wealth itself.

Actually, increased knowledge reduces shortsightedness. And BTW so does increased material wealth: people take a more long term view when they aren't starving.

George Gilder wrote some weird stuff later, but his "Wealth and Poverty" presented some really good ideas. One of the best was his distinction between "wealth" and "riches". "Riches" are resources used for pleasure and consumption; "wealth" is anything used to increase or improve future production. As he pointed out many things can be either depending on how it is used, but the distinction is very useful when thinking about the future and how to use your current resources.

You really need to re-read the story. Its only towards the bottom, in a couple of sentences, where the author even talks about how people got by for tens of thousands of years without "buying" things in the modern sense. Its even stated very plainly that the author does not promote a return to tribalism.

This is very simply about changing the terminology we to describe our relationship as people to corporations.

100 years ago, "consumption" was the name for tuberculosis. As a person, I find being defined as a "consumer" offensive. It brings to mind images of sickness and pigs gorging from slop troughs. That imagery, when applied to the couple billion people that make today's industrial society, is meant to demean.

Exactly!

Here's another nice indictment of the term "consumer" as it is applied to humans / citizens / creative people.

So the customers who once looked you in the eye while hefting your wares in the market were transformed into consumers. In the words of industry analyst Jerry Michalski, a consumer was no more than "a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash." Power swung so decisively to the supply side that "market" became a verb: something you do to customers.

http://www.cluetrain.com/book/markets.html

I think the main thesis is that we are being conditioned to consume, and if we happen to produce anything, it's supposed to be as an employee for a big corporation. Clearly the HN audience is not his audience b/c most people here are definitely producers.

The problem is that, as a consumer, and only a highly specialized producer who is dependent on so many up-stream and down-stream players, you lose a lot of freedom, and you risk becoming a pawn for the people who... control the means of production. Aw crap! We've gotten all Marx now, but Marx wasn't the one who ground up and discarded so much Russian humanity, that was Lenin and Stalin. Marx might have made some good points.

I think the whole proposition requires a delicate balance b/w taking advantage of the division of labor, but not letting it take advantage of you, or if you have a bleeding heart, trying to not let it take advantage of others too.

A good start is to just be handy around the home: Know how to cook, repair your car, do plumbing.

If you value your time, then it really pays to investigate the ways in which you spend money, and the system that is in place to encourage that spending and even make it seem normal.

There are questions you can ask, for instance, if you are an employee of someone else:

How much do I get paid per hour?

How much money do I need to sustain my lifestyle?

How many hours per week do I need to work to sustain my lifestyle?

What if it's only 25 hours?

Are there full-time professional jobs out there which only require 25 hours of work per week?

Why not?

Is it because we're supposed to spend the money earned in the other 15 hours on stuff we don't need?

When did I make the decision to work 15 more hours to buy stuff I don't really need, and could I be enjoying my life more by having those 15 hours instead of the stuff?

Are there full-time professional jobs out there which only require 25 hours of work per week? Why not?

Because by definition, 25 hours/week is part time.

Incidentally, if you wish to work little, you can do so. 80% of the poor don't work at all, and nevertheless live a lifestyle which a few decades ago would have been called "middle class". I don't see much reason you can't do the same, unless of course you actually want some of the stuff that extra 15 hours/week can buy.

If you do skilled labor, you can almost certainly consult less than 40 hours/week (on average, over a year).

Do you have data to support the statement that 80% of poor people don't work? How do you define poor? How do you define middle class? I have a hard time believing someone poor enough to receive food stamps for example is living a life anything like what my parents were living when they were my age (30 years ago).

Poor is defined by the US poverty line.

The actual number of poor people who don't work (and aren't looking for work) is 78% as of 2008. http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2008.pdf

Lifestyles of the poor, in terms of consumer goods and services. http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2004/01/Understandi...

Thanks for the info. The BLS paper is useful, but I have to question anything from Heritage. To grossly paraphrase Groucho Marx, "I don't want to be a member of a club that counts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity as members."

"How many hours per week do I need to work to sustain my lifestyle?"

I was reading a biography of William Godwin who made this calculation in the 18th century:

"In 'a state of equal property,' the amount of labor required to produce necessities, being shared among the community, would be so slight that few men would shrink from it. Godwin anticipates Kropotkin and other later political thinkers in an elaborate discussion of the quantity of labor necessary each day if the production of luxuries were suspended. He estimates it at half an hour per day."

page 92. http://books.google.com/books?id=8GMqJEznW8gC&pg=PR10...

Thanks! I wonder how many hours the Amish put in?

"Consumer" is a role. Roles are not exclusive. A role makes sense in a particular context, e.g. where there is a producer of a particular thing and a consumer.

I am absolutely a Consumer. And I am a Producer, or a Creator, which provides my income for my consumer lifestyle.

What's so wrong with buying? What was so great about the tribal lifestyle? Trading and bartering are just raw forms of buying: You work, grow potatoes, then trade those potatoes for something you need. Why is that better than working, earning money, and trading that money for something you need?

I'd be more inclined to indulge the author's suggestion that we stop being consumers if he actually provided some supporting arguments.

Exactly. Would people a thousand years ago still have bartered if they had a stable currency to use instead? I doubt it. They bartered because a currency the king offered might be gone next week if he died in the latest city siege.

A good point and a valid concern. I didnt read this as a return to barter nor tribalism but instead a comment of the reduced subject.

Late Modernist and Postmodernist debates on subjectivity tend to see the Enlightenment idea of a coherent subject as being completely fragmented to the point of collapse.

It is a double-edged issue. The 'death' of the subject means on the one hand we are free to imagine and invent new relationships. But on the other hand because our notions of freedom derive from notions of subjectivity there is danger of losing freedom.

Consumerist culture exploits this exact split - as consumers, we are told how free and unique we are as an advertising ploy and then end up all wearing the same thing... We are also easily manipulated by mass media distracted by nonissues while serious threats to freedom remain relatively ignored.

If we 'buy' too much into this identity, what is left are relationships in which subjectivity is inverted. Subjectivity in this case lies more in the corporation than in the human subject. (As reflected in that bizarre Supreme Court decision of the last year.)

We do need to fight this. And it is not a right nor a left issue. Both sides decry the erosion of freedom but see different causes.

What is generally lacking in us today is what Kant referred to as 'Speculative Reason' or more colloquially the ability to think - creatively, imaginatively,actively and constructively.

Consumers dont do that - nor do constituents nor employees, etc.

"Hackers and Painters" do. Makers do.

That is a key - we (as consumers) forget that we can make, create. And if we as humans have any purpose, that is it. In fact we are only knowable in what we create (Vico "verum factum")

I had a long rambling talk in the dogrun last night with an intelligent and non-technical lawyer who reads Popular Mechanics for fun.

So I babbled on for awhile about makezine, OReilly press, Linux, Arduino stuff he did not know about. And it made me think of how exciting this field can be at times - not because of the technical advance but of the remarkable creativity.

So I dont think the point is for 'tiedyes' and subsistence farming but to become very conscious of the breakdown of subjectivity and the potential danger in the greatly reduces roles that are left in its fragmentation.

I've always preferred the term "citizen", myself.

James Kunstler said it best:

“Please, please, stop referring to yourselves as ‘Consumers.’ OK? Consumers are different than citizens. Consumers do not have obligations, rights, responsibilities and duties to their fellow human beings.”

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/james_howard_kunstler_diss...

Kunstler's demeanor rubs me the wrong way a lot of the time, but he makes very good points. That TED talk changed the way I look at a lot of things in life after I saw it years ago.

Use of "consumer" as the default for a human being in our society is emblematic of everything that is wrong with it. Consumption is a natural part of normal life; it is not who we are. Every time I hear that word -- which is whenever I listen to media, approximately -- I think of pigs at the trough.

Lacks depth: in order to be innovative we need focus, in order to have focus we need to be specialized, in order to be specialized we need to not focus on growing food when we program (or do brain surgery or rocket science). These support structures are necessary for competitive innovation (though I completely feel your pain).

So if you want to make this argument, you need to figure out a way that it doesn't matter if the US competes globally anymore. That's the only way this works. Otherwise you just make us non competitive in the global market. When everyone else stops growing we can too, but unfortunately until then it's going to be pretty hard to convince people to stop consuming.

I think he was trying to get us to focus on not being called consumers first. Personally, I agree, it's an assumption that puts too much power in corporate hands. I agree with you as well, though, that it would require quite a large change for us to stop being consumers.

I think he has conflated two words: "consumer" and "buyer" - he doesn't seem too concerned with consumption as he is with buying things.

We are all consumers - I eat 3 square meals a day, I burn some amount of fuel to keep myself warm, and I breathe an awfully large amount of air. The author here doesn't seem too concerned with whether this consumption is excessive, though.

Whether or not we start producing more of what we consume, or we go back to a barter economy (which, if you'd pardon the bluntness, is one of the dumbest ideas I've heard recently) doesn't change our level of consumption, so his real problem is with buying crap.

So let's not confuse the two terms.

But we are also producers; most of us have to be in order to acquire money with which to purchase goods to consume. His point, initially at least, was that choosing to label ourselves as consumers leads to a discussion framed in terms of that behavior, at the expense of really evaluating all our options.

Well it's probably not good to not call us consumers if that's what we are doing. I'm a big believer in being honest and trying to be happy with your lifestyle, not repressing the truth to find happiness.

As for the comment about us being producers, while partially true the ratio between what you produce and what you consume is much more arbitrary than it should be. So we all sort of have to produce, but few do it in sync with the amount they consume (not pointing fingers or saying I do - I definitely don't).

I'm poor so I don't buy a lot of things, books from charity shops, refurbished computers, so I feel like big corporations are after me because I'm a bad consumer. Am I a bad person?

At times it seems like an undeniable conclusion. Notsure exactly why but your pithy post reminded me of the Ginsberg poem "America"

The things you own, end up owning you (Tyler Durden)

You are a Citizen, not a consumer.

This is naive. Creation is just the new form of consumerism!

Think about how much money changes hands today based on work of millions of creators all trying to be the latest YouTube star. To cope with the meaningless and alienation of modern life, they're buying attention instead of commodities, using what they create as currency. In that sense, it is a barter economy, except the middle man takes his cut by selling ads on top of the content. And, oh yeah, don't forget about all the actual consumption you have to do in order to be a creator: a nice computer, a video camera, some video editing software, fast internet connection, etc. I guess that doesn't count as consumption if you're a "creator".

It's weird how profitable all this "anti-consumption" is! Is this really liberation? It's certainly marketed that way by the people who profit most from it. What if it's really just exploitation marketed as liberation?

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