From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Tue Jul 06 1999 - 02:36:33 MDT
On Mon, Jul 05, 1999 at 12:03:35PM -0700, Ralph Lewis wrote:
>
> Food, shelter, cars... how much more do we need? Except for demand created
> by advertising we are at our limits of consumption of traditional products.
So we redefine the desirable targets. For the past forty years, the
developed world hasn't been obsessed with what people need (food, shelter,
antibiotics, transport) but with what they want (holidays in Thailand,
cheap restaurant meals, home computers).
One problem I can see, though, is that some of the possible options for
a consumer society just don't work. Mass media, for example -- I'm pretty
sure we're in the early stages of a massive upheaval in our entire idea
of what constitutes intellectual property and how intellectual property
rights should be enforced. (Data points: the free software movement,
MP3's, do-it-yourself web portals like Slashdot.) If you linearly
extrapolate the media of 1990 into the future, you have a million channels
of TV, lots of jobs in music video production, tabloid newspapers, and
Microsoft. By 2000, however, the future of the media will be radically --
and obviously -- different. Even its money making potential will have
changed (and with it the degree to which it can be viewed as an economic
engine of production).
Times change, and the metrics you can use to analyse the standard of
living change too. Here in the UK, per-capita coal consumption
is probably as low as it has been since 1790 -- but that doesn't mean
we're as poor as we were in the eighteenth century. (It just means
that coal, a substance the wealth of the nation was based on, has
become irrelevant.) It's quite possible that in a few decades the west's
raw materials and energy consumption will resemble that of the third
world in the 1960's ... except that those figures will be deceptive,
concealing smart materials and high-efficiency propulsion technology
that let us do an order of magnitude more with an order of magnitude
less.
And who knows? Maybe defining our identities in terms of what we consume
will itself go out of fashion eventually, once the lesson that we can
afford more than we can physically consume sinks in.
-- Charlie
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