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Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending. C

Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending. Calculated, like in planned-economy, directive-from-the-top? I disagree. A lot of the "fluff," as the author describes it, is excess capital finding its way to things people find pleasurable, whether it be dope, travel, beauty, or rock and roll. Purveyors of such pleasures have proved to be remarkably adept at creating & providing these opportunities.

markus_zhang 5y ago
It's just a planned economy not by government men but by mega corporations. Then they put up some facade to pretend that you have the freedom of choice.
- jeffreyrogers 5y ago
  It's more akin to evolution operating on culture rather than genes. Corporations are trying various things to differentiate themselves and be profitable. The ones that consumers like either due to real interest or due to marketing keep getting made/refined, the rest die off. And the process repeats from there.
  - bordercases 5y ago
    Markets are distorted by subsidies, lobbying, credit lines and old-boy networks to (a) remain solvent beyond their actual consumer revenue, and (b) act on information or distort the flow of information in a way that's independent from consumer choice, and in fact frames consumer choices. Large corporations also act anti-competitively through acquisitions without market development, which in the evolutionary metaphor is like an invasive species suffocating the diversity of ecosystem by digesting other species only for what they need and excreting nothing valuable back into the whole. So you're articulating an idealization that's only true in free markets, and we are not, and almost never, in a free market.
  - ruined 5y ago
    That's the ideal conception of it, but practically, power also plays a very large role. Firms don't get to "try things" without lots of resources already, any novel startups may simply be acquired and assimilated or even shut down, large existing organizations are capable of sustaining failures despite market conditions, extra-market rules may be implemented by firms with political access, and if enough of the supply enforces a choice, consumer interest doesn't matter and may even adapt to what is available.
    - postoak 5y ago
      I agree with you, but in evolution there are also power differentials due to organism size/features or population leading to some organisms/species having an advantage at a certain point in time. I think this could be considered analagous (not exact mapping) to corporation power at a given time.
      - bordercases 5y ago
        These appeals to power are disconnected from the selection pressure given in the original proposition though, which was based solely on consumer choice, and which would have been more relevant to the original idea of lifestyles being designed vs spontaneous.
      - ruined 5y ago
        sure, but if you're going to admit that classical evolutionary pressure is not present, and the market is designed by the players, you've conceded it's a planned economy.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >It's more akin to evolution operating on culture rather than genes. Only there's no evolution. It's just "buy this" and "now buy that", because if you continued to buy the previous (or a perennial) model, they'd be out of sales. That's not some cultural evolution. Before 19th-20th century marketing and mass advertising societies could do decades without changing fashions.
    - jhbadger 5y ago
      Maybe among peasants, but the upper classes were very fashion conscious and things changed, maybe not quite as rapidly as today, but still. For example, in America we picture our founding fathers as wearing powdered wigs, as that was the style around the time of the Revolution. But that was a comparatively brief fad, and a decade later had fallen out of fashion.
kktkti9 5y ago
Capital being money, the flow of which is managed by Fed policy and laws. So, yeah, calculated from the top. Handed to those closest to the tap. Look into our transfer payment system, our system of political budgets, and apportionment. Before it gets to workers, how money is carved up is very much monitored and managed. Just because one is ignorant of how the system functions does not mean there is a free market.
- mindslight 5y ago
  So disappointingly predictable that you're being downvoted. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it, and all that. If interest rates were up at 8%, there would be a lot fewer bets of the type of "litter the sidewalk with scooters and hope some money falls into them". The entirety of Surveillance Valley is basically a play to parlay overabundant monetary capital of the present into surveillance capital of the future. The "continual growth" mindset was only worthwhile when it produced productive investment. The mass malinvestment we see today indicates that it has gone way too far. If you care about sustainability and global warming, you should be concerned with monetary policy - it's the main lever controlling the amount of production/consumption. Furthermore, higher interest rates would allow technological deflation to actually occur, making it so the surpluses of technology get widely distributed in the form of lower prices. As it stands right now, the feedback cycle from the mandate of "full employment" guarantees that everyone on average will need to keep working the same amount, making technological gains accrue centrally to where new money is created.
  - kktkti9 5y ago
    Pseudoscientific is the default state of the mind. Propaganda research became behavioral economics, advertising, marketing, and various psychology programs, but surely that’s not been used socially to titillate biology and insert desired talking points in that excited state from childhood forward. It can’t simply be we were easily mesmerized by what are really banal statistics extrapolated from speculating on the movement of political scrip in an era of imperialism that’s now faded. Humans have never succumb to nonsense group think before! Believing one has transcended their biology is not limited to kooks who think they can live on light alone.
mathewsanders 5y ago
This was my exact thought, and was wondering if they were using ‘designed’ and ‘built’ in that sense of being planned and directed. I’m with you and agree that it’s an unforeseen side effect. I’d even take it a step further and suggest that along with being unexpected, that the majority of our leaders in the world are oblivious that this is even occurring since they are typically so far detached from most peoples lives.
bordercases 5y ago
Markets and government interact in ways which mix and transcend the top-down/bottom-up dichotomy. Consider freeways. Freeways are government projects, commissioned federally, given to private contractors, which setup cities, which enact a policy of sprawl reified by a small committee, of which only one member was elected, and for which in order for people to live in the city, they must purchase cars for themselves, appearing to the free market responding to the problem of getting around. So at all levels, there is a mix of group-agency vs individual-agency: different concentrations of power. Ultimately the chain of causality to create freeways and thus create demand for cars is started by a few people at the top. But from the consumer's perspective, buying a car is a need combined with other luxury requirements to differentiate the car-driving experience to their tastes, and the market provides it. They don't always ask if there are alternative urban models that policy-makers could have tried. See also lobbyists, that distort this process near the top as a bid to artificially create demand, or to stay solvent as economic actors without revenue from the free market. This also creates the illusion that the market is merely responding to consumer needs, when in fact it is constrained in ways that encourage specific consumer responses.
captainmuon 5y ago
Counterpoint: What do you think "fashion" is? I used to think there were some very cool, fashion-adept people, who have the ability to predict what will considered modern next year. The reality is, the clothing industry decides what to produce at least 6-12 months in advance. It's not like they produce everything and public opinion decides in the end what is "cool". Granted, the industry tries to predict what will be in demand. But by and large, fashion is not predicting what will be cool, but specifing what will be produced. When they say "blue will be in fashion next year", then it means you'll be able to buy a lot of blue clothes (and some people will be able to deduce that you have not recently bought clothes, which is a bonus to encourage more buying). I only realized this a I got older, when certain items were missing in every shop, that were there the previous and following years. Be it a certain cut of jeans or a certain colored shirt. (And it's not just clothes, I noticed it in interior design, PC cases, salad sauces, and just about any product category.)
- sjg007 5y ago
  Yes and no. People can pick out vintage and older stuff and mix it up. Also you should look up Zara and fast fashion.
- blablabla123 5y ago
  More subtly a smaller but far more interested proportion of the population tries more experimental things and the big shops just copy that. That's both cheaper for the buyer and the producer. It's the same for tech, various gadgets or technologies that are hyped right now have been gathering traction since years but have been picked up by the big brands only very recently. Best example is the trend of using non-x86 Computers, a few desktop/laptop projects have been there including Chrome books. Now Apple picked it up and it's a completely normal thing to buy an ARM laptop. Looks kind of planned but it's not. It's just that some things fall out of fashion for whatever reasons...
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >Looks kind of planned but it's not. It's just that some things fall out of fashion for whatever reasons... "Not planned? Whatever reason?" There are huge billion dollar campaigns for what things "are in fashion" this season. For starters, the thousands of ads by fashion brands with the same "current fashion" messaging. Without that, the majority of the population could not care less what some "small proportion" of idiots consider "experimental/cool/etc". Sub-culture fashion would stay with the subculture (like most of it does, unless it's picked up by the mass fashion industry and promoted to hell). It's the endless branding, messaging, adverting, PR, articles, etc, that get Joe/Jane Average buying into this season's fasion.
coldtea 5y ago
>Calculated, like in planned-economy, directive-from-the-top? Doesn't matter. You don't need to give "directive-from-the-top" is your interests as an industry with the interests of other industries are more or less the same, and you can all push individually in the same direction. >A lot of the "fluff," as the author describes it, is excess capital finding its way to things people find pleasurable, whether it be dope, travel, beauty, or rock and roll. Some things yes. Most things, people find it pleasurable because they are in a state where they take pleasure from buying shit. In fact, they only find them pleasurable before they buy them, afterwards there's a small rush for a few days, and they could not care less for them again, they're back into the lookout for buying the next "pleasurable" thing. This is not accidental, it's the result of many changes, including what the post describes, but also a century of efforts from advertising and industry leads which have been well documented and with the overt intention of bringing up consumption and reducing self-reliance.
- jbcdhn 5y ago
  Citation needed for every claim in this post. > Most things, people find it pleasurable because they are in a state where they take pleasure from buying shit. Counterpoint: my largest purchase ever was my house. I enjoy owning it much more than I enjoyed buying it.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
Yes, it seems far more likely that it is emergent rather than planned. That's not to say you shouldn't try and understand and criticise it and opt out where necessary but there is no big conspiracy going on.
agumonkey 5y ago
In consumerist societies "pleasurable" is very much stretched, when your life is dull, you'll find spending money on whatever cool guy is trying to sell you. People with big pockets know all about your flaws, social behavior in the large, fads and followers, and they sure play with it like an orchestra conductor. unlike russian communism you're not forced to do anything but you're seduced out of your mind, I guess it's fair
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > you're not forced to do anything You are forced to choose between working to pay rent and health insurance or go hungry, homeless and ill or in prison. In various developed societies there is free healthcare, social safety nets, or some forms of UBI or other help. > but you're seduced out of your mind, I guess it's fair Fair? Consumerism is threatening all ife on the planet. Humanity can do so much better.
  - namdnay 5y ago
    > You are forced to choose between working to pay rent and health insurance or go hungry, homeless and ill. Oh lord, being “forced” to provide work in order to receive the work of others I think the US has serious progress to make on safety nets, but this type of statement doesn’t really help move the discussion forwards
    - anemoiac 5y ago
      > Oh lord, being “forced” to provide work in order to receive the work of others I didn't write the comment you responded to, but I don't think its author was advocating for the mythical "free lunch." I read their comment as a statement decrying the seemingly artificial constraints built into modern (American, I presume) society that force workers to make an essentially binary choice between a stable, secure life and one of, potentially, poverty and marginalization. To be more explicit - most people can't simply provide (even valuable, in-demand) work on their own terms, so they're forced (by various intentional and unintentional social/economic/legal/etc. barriers) to work according to terms that may not make sense to a rational third-party. This is (probably) why the commenter you responded to mentions the binary distinction between financial stability and physical insecurity - there's hardly any middle ground between the two categories when it comes to most fields of employment. Although "tech" is probably the most flexible industry in this regard, it's still difficult to find positions that allow part-time employment with health insurance benefits (even at lower-than-average pay rates), for example. In most industries, the prospect of being able to work to provide only enough "value" to comfortably sustain oneself, as opposed to "being forced" to fully commit to the lifestyle (i.e. 40+ hours/week, car for commuting, lodging within commuting distance, childcare, general cost of paying for convenience in food/housework/etc. due to having less free time, etc.) is laughable. I believe this is what the commenter you reference was referring to - having the freedom to live cheaply without becoming financially insecure or socially marginalized, not some desire to have others pay for their lives.
bnralt 5y ago
In the post he seems to only being talking about corporations (as far as I can tell). His point about corporations pushing products that people don't actually need, and in fact often make people less happy, seems fairly on point. The entire advertising industries that exist to be a conduit for advertisements (most of the media) are based on trying to get people to spend their money on things they wouldn't naturally spend them on. His argument that the 40 hour work week is a deliberate way to force people to be consumers is extremely unlikely. You're point about excess and un-directed capital, though, probably hits at the larger issue. It also can be used to explain things like administrative bloat and inflating tuition at higher education institutions, as well as a host of parasitic industries that go beyond mere consumption. It seems like we hit the singularity years ago, but the majority of the new capacity mostly went into waste, unhealthy addictions and borderline scams that have taken up an increasingly large part of the economy. One wonders if more direct involvement from society (perhaps a robust industrial policy) could have lead us in a more prosperous direction.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
It's hard to believe western societies willingly and collectively wanted the fleshlight.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
You may be being unrealistic about the role of spontaneous personal choice in this. To a surprising extent, people find things pleasurable because they're told to find them pleasurable. No one sane would inhale burning carcinogenic leaves to damage their own health, but people do - because they're encouraged to. People buy new phones because they're somehow "cool". No one is really sure why, but it's something that happens. There used to be an element of spontaneous creativity in trends. Traditionally industry noted the trends and sold them back to customers. But it's easier and cheaper to skip the organic and spontaneous part and sell trends top-down by linking them to perceptions of social status. This is done by key players inside the relevant industries instead of by a Politburo of fat elderly men. But it's still heavily bureaucratic and centralised. Just in a cool way. It also creates economies of scale, which is both convenient and useful.
- NotSammyHagar 5y ago
  Certainly advertising makes people want to start smoking or maybe continue. But people smoke because it gives them a high from the nicotine. Why do you think people were smoking in 1700? Because the nicotine made them feel relaxed, good and they became addicted.
- CPLX 5y ago
  > No one sane would inhale burning carcinogenic leaves to damage their own health, but people do - because they're encouraged to. This is a ridiculous take. You think indigenous communities in pre-Colombian America were using tobacco because of media influence? It’s a pleasurable and highly addictive drug.
  - metabagel 5y ago
    The difference being that indigenous communities weren’t aware that they were inhaling a carcinogen.
- mancerayder 5y ago
  > No one sane would inhale burning carcinogenic leaves to damage their own health, but people do - because they're encouraged to. That's a bit naive. The carcinogenic leaves have mental effects, a buzz, pleasurable even before and despite addiction and carcinogenic qualities. New phones have new features, speed and sizes / resolution. None of these things are free of influence, peer pressure, advertising, and 'needing to feel in' the group. Sure. But to remove personal choice too strongly is a False way to look at the world. But this - this, call it systemic, way to look at the world - is popular and trending - ironically.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Yeah, I think we got here by evolution not revolution.It's a local minimum until the next upheaval. Lots of people are comfortable. As can be seen by comments on HN of "how can anyone possibly live on $100k?" . I think we may be at a local max of change as a certain level of comfortableness has allowed a false sense of revolution/being deprived as well as POC taking on more political power in the country. This has reached a critical mass in the form of the current republican party headed by Trump, I think unfortunately the violence from them will get much worse before it gets better.
slibhb 5y ago
That quote is right out of Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-Dimensional_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-Dimensional_Man). Marcuse argues that we only think we're choosing to pursue certain things (pop music, sex, cars, food, etc). Actually, society has been transformed by certain parties to push these "false desires" on us. I think there's something creepy about telling people their desires are false. This is an example of what Isaiah Berlin called the abuse of positive liberty: telling people what they should rationally want, which amounts to a kind of paternalism. I suspect you're right, this stuff isn't top-down. To the extent that taste-makers and corporate boards determine what we want (which I suppose they partially do), they are participating in the same economies as us and are acting for the same reasons as we are. There's no domination going on here as far as I can tell, though there are certainly undesirable outcomes (from my perspective).
- CyanBird 5y ago
  > I suspect you're right, this stuff isn't top-down. But it is, thats where Bernays enters on the picture with Manufacture of Desire and Manufacture of Consent through Propaganda and Mass Media imprints > “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” - Edward Bernays, Propaganda 1927 > “No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.” - Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda 1927 > “Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.” - Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda 1927
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Debt is >60% of the economy, and it's price fixed. It's interesting that people seem to think fixing the price of bananas has more consequence than fixing the price of debt.
- pharmakom 5y ago
  How is it price fixed? Interest rates go up and down, different lenders offer different terms, etc.
lwhi 5y ago
> Purveyors of such pleasures have proved to be remarkably adept at creating & providing these opportunities. It feels like this was also the central point the author was making, although they made it more forcefully. .. these purveyors aren't necessarily 'providing these opportunities'; they are actually the inventors of many of the pleasures in the first instance. It's not a calculated directive from the top. It's a crystallised consensus from those in a position of influence. Incentive based capitalism, at it's worst (or best, depending on your point of view).
gentleman11 5y ago
There are job postings for mobile app/game developer positions requiring x years of designing slot machine casino games as a prerequisite. Calculated addiction and whale hunting is a major part of the economy right now
momirlan 5y ago
I agree, and find it funny how many responses blame the government, corporations, etc. We are born with free will. Most of the time we act mindlessly, and try to blame someone else for it. Being happy with little possessions is a virtue that takes a lot of work. The benefits are beyond monetary.
motioncuty 5y ago
Yes. The planned directive is a fiduciary duty to maximize profit for shareholders in combination with a lack of protection for those who face the externalities of these incorporated entities. We are maximizing for capital growth rather than happiness, and undervalue life.
KoenDG 5y ago
Chicken and egg. Does the money flow to that which is pleasurable, or does the pleasurable get created to attract the money? Ask people which of these two is not possible.

markus_zhang 5y ago

It's just a planned economy not by government men but by mega corporations. Then they put up some facade to pretend that you have the freedom of choice.

jeffreyrogers 5y ago
It's more akin to evolution operating on culture rather than genes. Corporations are trying various things to differentiate themselves and be profitable. The ones that consumers like either due to real interest or due to marketing keep getting made/refined, the rest die off. And the process repeats from there.
- bordercases 5y ago
  Markets are distorted by subsidies, lobbying, credit lines and old-boy networks to (a) remain solvent beyond their actual consumer revenue, and (b) act on information or distort the flow of information in a way that's independent from consumer choice, and in fact frames consumer choices. Large corporations also act anti-competitively through acquisitions without market development, which in the evolutionary metaphor is like an invasive species suffocating the diversity of ecosystem by digesting other species only for what they need and excreting nothing valuable back into the whole. So you're articulating an idealization that's only true in free markets, and we are not, and almost never, in a free market.
- ruined 5y ago
  That's the ideal conception of it, but practically, power also plays a very large role. Firms don't get to "try things" without lots of resources already, any novel startups may simply be acquired and assimilated or even shut down, large existing organizations are capable of sustaining failures despite market conditions, extra-market rules may be implemented by firms with political access, and if enough of the supply enforces a choice, consumer interest doesn't matter and may even adapt to what is available.
  - postoak 5y ago
    I agree with you, but in evolution there are also power differentials due to organism size/features or population leading to some organisms/species having an advantage at a certain point in time. I think this could be considered analagous (not exact mapping) to corporation power at a given time.
    - bordercases 5y ago
      These appeals to power are disconnected from the selection pressure given in the original proposition though, which was based solely on consumer choice, and which would have been more relevant to the original idea of lifestyles being designed vs spontaneous.
    - ruined 5y ago
      sure, but if you're going to admit that classical evolutionary pressure is not present, and the market is designed by the players, you've conceded it's a planned economy.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >It's more akin to evolution operating on culture rather than genes. Only there's no evolution. It's just "buy this" and "now buy that", because if you continued to buy the previous (or a perennial) model, they'd be out of sales. That's not some cultural evolution. Before 19th-20th century marketing and mass advertising societies could do decades without changing fashions.
  - jhbadger 5y ago
    Maybe among peasants, but the upper classes were very fashion conscious and things changed, maybe not quite as rapidly as today, but still. For example, in America we picture our founding fathers as wearing powdered wigs, as that was the style around the time of the Revolution. But that was a comparatively brief fad, and a decade later had fallen out of fashion.

kktkti9 5y ago

Capital being money, the flow of which is managed by Fed policy and laws. So, yeah, calculated from the top. Handed to those closest to the tap. Look into our transfer payment system, our system of political budgets, and apportionment. Before it gets to workers, how money is carved up is very much monitored and managed. Just because one is ignorant of how the system functions does not mean there is a free market.

mindslight 5y ago
So disappointingly predictable that you're being downvoted. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it, and all that. If interest rates were up at 8%, there would be a lot fewer bets of the type of "litter the sidewalk with scooters and hope some money falls into them". The entirety of Surveillance Valley is basically a play to parlay overabundant monetary capital of the present into surveillance capital of the future. The "continual growth" mindset was only worthwhile when it produced productive investment. The mass malinvestment we see today indicates that it has gone way too far. If you care about sustainability and global warming, you should be concerned with monetary policy - it's the main lever controlling the amount of production/consumption. Furthermore, higher interest rates would allow technological deflation to actually occur, making it so the surpluses of technology get widely distributed in the form of lower prices. As it stands right now, the feedback cycle from the mandate of "full employment" guarantees that everyone on average will need to keep working the same amount, making technological gains accrue centrally to where new money is created.
- kktkti9 5y ago
  Pseudoscientific is the default state of the mind. Propaganda research became behavioral economics, advertising, marketing, and various psychology programs, but surely that’s not been used socially to titillate biology and insert desired talking points in that excited state from childhood forward. It can’t simply be we were easily mesmerized by what are really banal statistics extrapolated from speculating on the movement of political scrip in an era of imperialism that’s now faded. Humans have never succumb to nonsense group think before! Believing one has transcended their biology is not limited to kooks who think they can live on light alone.

mathewsanders 5y ago

This was my exact thought, and was wondering if they were using ‘designed’ and ‘built’ in that sense of being planned and directed. I’m with you and agree that it’s an unforeseen side effect. I’d even take it a step further and suggest that along with being unexpected, that the majority of our leaders in the world are oblivious that this is even occurring since they are typically so far detached from most peoples lives.

bordercases 5y ago

Markets and government interact in ways which mix and transcend the top-down/bottom-up dichotomy. Consider freeways. Freeways are government projects, commissioned federally, given to private contractors, which setup cities, which enact a policy of sprawl reified by a small committee, of which only one member was elected, and for which in order for people to live in the city, they must purchase cars for themselves, appearing to the free market responding to the problem of getting around. So at all levels, there is a mix of group-agency vs individual-agency: different concentrations of power. Ultimately the chain of causality to create freeways and thus create demand for cars is started by a few people at the top. But from the consumer's perspective, buying a car is a need combined with other luxury requirements to differentiate the car-driving experience to their tastes, and the market provides it. They don't always ask if there are alternative urban models that policy-makers could have tried. See also lobbyists, that distort this process near the top as a bid to artificially create demand, or to stay solvent as economic actors without revenue from the free market. This also creates the illusion that the market is merely responding to consumer needs, when in fact it is constrained in ways that encourage specific consumer responses.

captainmuon 5y ago

Counterpoint: What do you think "fashion" is? I used to think there were some very cool, fashion-adept people, who have the ability to predict what will considered modern next year. The reality is, the clothing industry decides what to produce at least 6-12 months in advance. It's not like they produce everything and public opinion decides in the end what is "cool". Granted, the industry tries to predict what will be in demand. But by and large, fashion is not predicting what will be cool, but specifing what will be produced. When they say "blue will be in fashion next year", then it means you'll be able to buy a lot of blue clothes (and some people will be able to deduce that you have not recently bought clothes, which is a bonus to encourage more buying). I only realized this a I got older, when certain items were missing in every shop, that were there the previous and following years. Be it a certain cut of jeans or a certain colored shirt. (And it's not just clothes, I noticed it in interior design, PC cases, salad sauces, and just about any product category.)

sjg007 5y ago
Yes and no. People can pick out vintage and older stuff and mix it up. Also you should look up Zara and fast fashion.
blablabla123 5y ago
More subtly a smaller but far more interested proportion of the population tries more experimental things and the big shops just copy that. That's both cheaper for the buyer and the producer. It's the same for tech, various gadgets or technologies that are hyped right now have been gathering traction since years but have been picked up by the big brands only very recently. Best example is the trend of using non-x86 Computers, a few desktop/laptop projects have been there including Chrome books. Now Apple picked it up and it's a completely normal thing to buy an ARM laptop. Looks kind of planned but it's not. It's just that some things fall out of fashion for whatever reasons...
- coldtea 5y ago
  >Looks kind of planned but it's not. It's just that some things fall out of fashion for whatever reasons... "Not planned? Whatever reason?" There are huge billion dollar campaigns for what things "are in fashion" this season. For starters, the thousands of ads by fashion brands with the same "current fashion" messaging. Without that, the majority of the population could not care less what some "small proportion" of idiots consider "experimental/cool/etc". Sub-culture fashion would stay with the subculture (like most of it does, unless it's picked up by the mass fashion industry and promoted to hell). It's the endless branding, messaging, adverting, PR, articles, etc, that get Joe/Jane Average buying into this season's fasion.

coldtea 5y ago

>Calculated, like in planned-economy, directive-from-the-top? Doesn't matter. You don't need to give "directive-from-the-top" is your interests as an industry with the interests of other industries are more or less the same, and you can all push individually in the same direction. >A lot of the "fluff," as the author describes it, is excess capital finding its way to things people find pleasurable, whether it be dope, travel, beauty, or rock and roll. Some things yes. Most things, people find it pleasurable because they are in a state where they take pleasure from buying shit. In fact, they only find them pleasurable before they buy them, afterwards there's a small rush for a few days, and they could not care less for them again, they're back into the lookout for buying the next "pleasurable" thing. This is not accidental, it's the result of many changes, including what the post describes, but also a century of efforts from advertising and industry leads which have been well documented and with the overt intention of bringing up consumption and reducing self-reliance.

jbcdhn 5y ago
Citation needed for every claim in this post. > Most things, people find it pleasurable because they are in a state where they take pleasure from buying shit. Counterpoint: my largest purchase ever was my house. I enjoy owning it much more than I enjoyed buying it.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

Yes, it seems far more likely that it is emergent rather than planned. That's not to say you shouldn't try and understand and criticise it and opt out where necessary but there is no big conspiracy going on.

agumonkey 5y ago

In consumerist societies "pleasurable" is very much stretched, when your life is dull, you'll find spending money on whatever cool guy is trying to sell you. People with big pockets know all about your flaws, social behavior in the large, fads and followers, and they sure play with it like an orchestra conductor. unlike russian communism you're not forced to do anything but you're seduced out of your mind, I guess it's fair

goodpoint 5y ago
> you're not forced to do anything You are forced to choose between working to pay rent and health insurance or go hungry, homeless and ill or in prison. In various developed societies there is free healthcare, social safety nets, or some forms of UBI or other help. > but you're seduced out of your mind, I guess it's fair Fair? Consumerism is threatening all ife on the planet. Humanity can do so much better.
- namdnay 5y ago
  > You are forced to choose between working to pay rent and health insurance or go hungry, homeless and ill. Oh lord, being “forced” to provide work in order to receive the work of others I think the US has serious progress to make on safety nets, but this type of statement doesn’t really help move the discussion forwards
  - anemoiac 5y ago
    > Oh lord, being “forced” to provide work in order to receive the work of others I didn't write the comment you responded to, but I don't think its author was advocating for the mythical "free lunch." I read their comment as a statement decrying the seemingly artificial constraints built into modern (American, I presume) society that force workers to make an essentially binary choice between a stable, secure life and one of, potentially, poverty and marginalization. To be more explicit - most people can't simply provide (even valuable, in-demand) work on their own terms, so they're forced (by various intentional and unintentional social/economic/legal/etc. barriers) to work according to terms that may not make sense to a rational third-party. This is (probably) why the commenter you responded to mentions the binary distinction between financial stability and physical insecurity - there's hardly any middle ground between the two categories when it comes to most fields of employment. Although "tech" is probably the most flexible industry in this regard, it's still difficult to find positions that allow part-time employment with health insurance benefits (even at lower-than-average pay rates), for example. In most industries, the prospect of being able to work to provide only enough "value" to comfortably sustain oneself, as opposed to "being forced" to fully commit to the lifestyle (i.e. 40+ hours/week, car for commuting, lodging within commuting distance, childcare, general cost of paying for convenience in food/housework/etc. due to having less free time, etc.) is laughable. I believe this is what the commenter you reference was referring to - having the freedom to live cheaply without becoming financially insecure or socially marginalized, not some desire to have others pay for their lives.

bnralt 5y ago

In the post he seems to only being talking about corporations (as far as I can tell). His point about corporations pushing products that people don't actually need, and in fact often make people less happy, seems fairly on point. The entire advertising industries that exist to be a conduit for advertisements (most of the media) are based on trying to get people to spend their money on things they wouldn't naturally spend them on. His argument that the 40 hour work week is a deliberate way to force people to be consumers is extremely unlikely. You're point about excess and un-directed capital, though, probably hits at the larger issue. It also can be used to explain things like administrative bloat and inflating tuition at higher education institutions, as well as a host of parasitic industries that go beyond mere consumption. It seems like we hit the singularity years ago, but the majority of the new capacity mostly went into waste, unhealthy addictions and borderline scams that have taken up an increasingly large part of the economy. One wonders if more direct involvement from society (perhaps a robust industrial policy) could have lead us in a more prosperous direction.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

It's hard to believe western societies willingly and collectively wanted the fleshlight.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

You may be being unrealistic about the role of spontaneous personal choice in this. To a surprising extent, people find things pleasurable because they're told to find them pleasurable. No one sane would inhale burning carcinogenic leaves to damage their own health, but people do - because they're encouraged to. People buy new phones because they're somehow "cool". No one is really sure why, but it's something that happens. There used to be an element of spontaneous creativity in trends. Traditionally industry noted the trends and sold them back to customers. But it's easier and cheaper to skip the organic and spontaneous part and sell trends top-down by linking them to perceptions of social status. This is done by key players inside the relevant industries instead of by a Politburo of fat elderly men. But it's still heavily bureaucratic and centralised. Just in a cool way. It also creates economies of scale, which is both convenient and useful.

NotSammyHagar 5y ago
Certainly advertising makes people want to start smoking or maybe continue. But people smoke because it gives them a high from the nicotine. Why do you think people were smoking in 1700? Because the nicotine made them feel relaxed, good and they became addicted.
CPLX 5y ago
> No one sane would inhale burning carcinogenic leaves to damage their own health, but people do - because they're encouraged to. This is a ridiculous take. You think indigenous communities in pre-Colombian America were using tobacco because of media influence? It’s a pleasurable and highly addictive drug.
- metabagel 5y ago
  The difference being that indigenous communities weren’t aware that they were inhaling a carcinogen.
mancerayder 5y ago
> No one sane would inhale burning carcinogenic leaves to damage their own health, but people do - because they're encouraged to. That's a bit naive. The carcinogenic leaves have mental effects, a buzz, pleasurable even before and despite addiction and carcinogenic qualities. New phones have new features, speed and sizes / resolution. None of these things are free of influence, peer pressure, advertising, and 'needing to feel in' the group. Sure. But to remove personal choice too strongly is a False way to look at the world. But this - this, call it systemic, way to look at the world - is popular and trending - ironically.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Yeah, I think we got here by evolution not revolution.It's a local minimum until the next upheaval. Lots of people are comfortable. As can be seen by comments on HN of "how can anyone possibly live on $100k?" . I think we may be at a local max of change as a certain level of comfortableness has allowed a false sense of revolution/being deprived as well as POC taking on more political power in the country. This has reached a critical mass in the form of the current republican party headed by Trump, I think unfortunately the violence from them will get much worse before it gets better.

slibhb 5y ago

That quote is right out of Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-Dimensional_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-Dimensional_Man). Marcuse argues that we only think we're choosing to pursue certain things (pop music, sex, cars, food, etc). Actually, society has been transformed by certain parties to push these "false desires" on us. I think there's something creepy about telling people their desires are false. This is an example of what Isaiah Berlin called the abuse of positive liberty: telling people what they should rationally want, which amounts to a kind of paternalism. I suspect you're right, this stuff isn't top-down. To the extent that taste-makers and corporate boards determine what we want (which I suppose they partially do), they are participating in the same economies as us and are acting for the same reasons as we are. There's no domination going on here as far as I can tell, though there are certainly undesirable outcomes (from my perspective).

CyanBird 5y ago
> I suspect you're right, this stuff isn't top-down. But it is, thats where Bernays enters on the picture with Manufacture of Desire and Manufacture of Consent through Propaganda and Mass Media imprints > “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” - Edward Bernays, Propaganda 1927 > “No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.” - Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda 1927 > “Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.” - Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda 1927

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago

Debt is >60% of the economy, and it's price fixed. It's interesting that people seem to think fixing the price of bananas has more consequence than fixing the price of debt.

pharmakom 5y ago
How is it price fixed? Interest rates go up and down, different lenders offer different terms, etc.

lwhi 5y ago

> Purveyors of such pleasures have proved to be remarkably adept at creating & providing these opportunities. It feels like this was also the central point the author was making, although they made it more forcefully. .. these purveyors aren't necessarily 'providing these opportunities'; they are actually the inventors of many of the pleasures in the first instance. It's not a calculated directive from the top. It's a crystallised consensus from those in a position of influence. Incentive based capitalism, at it's worst (or best, depending on your point of view).

gentleman11 5y ago

There are job postings for mobile app/game developer positions requiring x years of designing slot machine casino games as a prerequisite. Calculated addiction and whale hunting is a major part of the economy right now

momirlan 5y ago

I agree, and find it funny how many responses blame the government, corporations, etc. We are born with free will. Most of the time we act mindlessly, and try to blame someone else for it. Being happy with little possessions is a virtue that takes a lot of work. The benefits are beyond monetary.

motioncuty 5y ago

Yes. The planned directive is a fiduciary duty to maximize profit for shareholders in combination with a lack of protection for those who face the externalities of these incorporated entities. We are maximizing for capital growth rather than happiness, and undervalue life.

KoenDG 5y ago

Chicken and egg. Does the money flow to that which is pleasurable, or does the pleasurable get created to attract the money? Ask people which of these two is not possible.