5 ms·

saddest thing is that they are both rich based off luxury fashion, an industry based off manipulating human psychology and effectively an industry that contribu

saddest thing is that they are both rich based off luxury fashion, an industry based off manipulating human psychology and effectively an industry that contributes nothing to humanity. Tech and manufacturing you can at least somewhat defend

bastawhiz 4y ago
Ad tech is "an industry based off manipulating human psychology" but nobody would say all of the tech industry is represented by that. It's certainly untrue that fashion is also entirely about manipulation. I, for one, enjoy having options for what I wear that let me look how I want rather than dressing in standardized, homogeneous garments.
- JPKab 4y ago
  The fashion industry is essentially devoted to planned obsolescence based on arbitrary whims produced by top down influence. Perfectly good functional clothes are suddenly deemed to be unwearable and in need of replacement. When you combine this with the fact that the industry is entirely based on exploiting cheap labor it is a deeply immoral industry. My niece works in the fashion industry doing extremely intricate embroidering and has worked for certain very dominant designers and has had her work featured in Vogue magazine. She's already burned out and leaving because it's such a predatory industry.
  - barrysteve 4y ago
    Arbitrarily obsolete items controlled from the top down, shares conceptual similarity to a list of tech products. Games, digital currency purchases, kickstater projects, web apps.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      Nitpicking: they are not tangible items. So the effects are much less impactful on the environment. Take games, they are probably non-essential for humanity (even though I would not claim they are built with planned obsolescence in mind, I still play DOOM from time to time or Tetris or Wonder Boy and a myriad of other old games), but we could stop producing them and they would stop having an effect on the World we live in immediately (in terms of, for example, energy consumption) We can't say the same thing for the fashion industry. The damages have already been done and some are irreversible. - Every year the fashion industry uses 93 billion cubic meters of water — enough to meet the consumption needs of five million people. - Around 20 % of wastewater worldwide comes from fabric dyeing and treatment. - Of the total fiber input used for clothing, 87% is incinerated or disposed of in a landfill. - The fashion industry is responsible for 10% of annual global carbon emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. At this pace, the fashion industry’s greenhouse gas emissions will surge more than 50% by 2030. - If demographic and lifestyle patterns continue as they are now, global consumption of apparel will rise from 62 million metric tons in 2019 to 102 million tons in 10 years. - Every year a half a million tons of plastic microfibers are dumped into the ocean, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles. The danger? Microfibers cannot be extracted from the water and they can spread throughout the food chain.
      - barrysteve 4y ago
        Microplastics are a horrific nightmare, you got me there. But I will point out that Games rely on electricity, that is coal/nukes/ect in some countries. Not to mention whatever materials go into building the internet for multiplayer games. The cost of water is usually the cost of pumping it and the filters for desal, or aeration or whatever cleaning method is used. If people have adequate access to water, using it on fashion is not so morally terrible. Land-filling fibers, producing excess waste water and microplastics is "not so great" (to understate it), I agree.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > I, for one, enjoy having options for what I wear that let me look how I want rather than dressing in standardized, homogeneous garments. Not considering that environment would like to have a word about that, it's undeniable that what I personally enjoy "contributes nothing to humanity". Anyway it's a false dichotomy: you can have choices without the fashion industry. My grand-grand-grandfather was a tailor, my grand-grandfather was a tailor, my grandfather was a tailor, they all made mostly the same kind of dresses (mostly men suits, they were specialized in that), because the society needed durable, robust and standardized garments and despised frivolousness. The way you dressed projected who you were in society. The choice was very large though, you could customize the "standard" in a lot of different ways: you could wear a pocket watch, a monocle, a hat (one could write a series of books on the different kinds of hats), cufflinks, a pochette or a tie in a very bold color, a combination of them, or not. the reason why the "classic style" survived is because it rewards people that have an eye for a unique style, without punishing those that do not have it or do not have enough money to afford it. In a suit you will look good, anyway. "Express yourself" (by dressing cheap rags) was invented by the ad industry that fueled the fashion industry (that simply attached a premium price to the same rags) to sell more of the same to more people in waves - the 60s are back! no! the 70s are back! are you kidding? 2001 is back! - and so on. It would be exhilarating if it wasn't tragic. > Ad tech is "an industry based off manipulating human psychology" but nobody would say all of the tech industry Of course not, because the industry is Advertising. Everybody would say that all the ad industry is represented by that
  - Gud 4y ago
    This eco-authoritarianism needs to be stopped. When the day comes when people aren’t allowed to dress beautifully I know at least I will revolt. Today men and women have the ability to dress(and to look and feel good) more or less anyway they want(more freedom to dress how you like seems to correlate strongly with societies that are liveable… go figure). I’d rather let the world burn than live in it without beauty and beautiful people. We’re not robots to run the machines for rich people. God bless those “cheap rags” I say.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
- GeoAtreides 4y ago
  The parent comment didn't say anything about fashion being entirely about manipulation; they said luxury fashion is based off manipulating human psychology". "Luxury" and "based off" are key words and cannot be omitted. You also propose a false dilemma: either luxury fashion or standardized, homogeneous garments. Surely there are other myriad options, not just between extravagant luxury or dull conformity.
  - version_five 4y ago
    This doesn't make any sense, it reads like taking issue with random words. The op's point was pretty clear even if he omitted "luxury" somewhere.
    - GeoAtreides 4y ago
      I disagree. "based off" means a completely different thing than "entirely": the former is not exhaustive, the latter is. "Luxury fashion" is a firmly delimited subset of fashion. The reason OP omitted "luxury" was to set up their false dilemma, which wouldn't have worked between "luxury fashion" and standardized garments (wouldn't have worked in the sense it would've been even more obvious it was a fallacy).
iamwpj 4y ago
Sorry that their unfathomable amounts of wealth and massive international brands do not interest you.
etrautmann 4y ago
whoa there. As a scientist, I would still strongly argue for the value of art and culture. Luxury fashion can be deeply problematic, but throwing all of clothing design under the bus and elevating tech as somehow contributing more to humanity seems misguided. It's not zero sum, and a rejection of arts leads to weird places.
thunky 4y ago
Well it sounds like they at least built something. Contrast this with someone like Warren Buffett who just pushes money around. And he pushes towards questionable industries like big oil and big soft drink.
TacticalCoder 4y ago
> that contributes nothing to humanity I overall agree with you but some luxury items do bring beauty to this world. I've watched artisans in the process of creating Hermes silk scarves and it's nothing short of fascinating and I find the end result often beautiful. I offered one to my wife, ten years ago. She still wears it. The same can be said about high-end mechanical watches. Some are beautiful and their mechanism are a thing of beauty in themselves. Some people are in awe of the "Geneva Drive" [0] and not many won't be moved by Bartosz Ciechanowski's explanation and interactive animation of mechanical watches mechanisms [1]. I offered one high-end mechanical watch to my wife, she wears it daily.. And what's the alternative anyway? I much prefer to live in a world where Hermes scarves and mechanical watch do exist than in a planned economy where the komrades do decide what items can and cannot be manufactured / sold. I mean: Kim Jong-Un isn't exactly known for having many billionaires thanks to the luxury items sold by North Korea. Would you want to live there? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_drive [1] https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/
version_five 4y ago
The good thing about capitalism is that people get to decide for themselves what is valuable to them, not you or any other overlord. I can't imagine what kind of dystopia we'd live in if we were forced to do everything "for the good of humanity".
snapplebobapple 4y ago
Strongly disagree. Luxury fashion helps turn the trust fund kids successful people inevitably create (might not be there kids, but if it's not their kids, it will be their grand kids or great grand kids) into average people by eating through their trust fund (drugs help a lot too). Luxury goods perform a vital service of turning elites by birth who are turds by nature into proles eventually and this is drastically better than the way we used to accomplish this (revolution or war with the accompanying massive innocent person bloodshed and property destruction).

bastawhiz 4y ago

Ad tech is "an industry based off manipulating human psychology" but nobody would say all of the tech industry is represented by that. It's certainly untrue that fashion is also entirely about manipulation. I, for one, enjoy having options for what I wear that let me look how I want rather than dressing in standardized, homogeneous garments.

JPKab 4y ago
The fashion industry is essentially devoted to planned obsolescence based on arbitrary whims produced by top down influence. Perfectly good functional clothes are suddenly deemed to be unwearable and in need of replacement. When you combine this with the fact that the industry is entirely based on exploiting cheap labor it is a deeply immoral industry. My niece works in the fashion industry doing extremely intricate embroidering and has worked for certain very dominant designers and has had her work featured in Vogue magazine. She's already burned out and leaving because it's such a predatory industry.
- barrysteve 4y ago
  Arbitrarily obsolete items controlled from the top down, shares conceptual similarity to a list of tech products. Games, digital currency purchases, kickstater projects, web apps.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    Nitpicking: they are not tangible items. So the effects are much less impactful on the environment. Take games, they are probably non-essential for humanity (even though I would not claim they are built with planned obsolescence in mind, I still play DOOM from time to time or Tetris or Wonder Boy and a myriad of other old games), but we could stop producing them and they would stop having an effect on the World we live in immediately (in terms of, for example, energy consumption) We can't say the same thing for the fashion industry. The damages have already been done and some are irreversible. - Every year the fashion industry uses 93 billion cubic meters of water — enough to meet the consumption needs of five million people. - Around 20 % of wastewater worldwide comes from fabric dyeing and treatment. - Of the total fiber input used for clothing, 87% is incinerated or disposed of in a landfill. - The fashion industry is responsible for 10% of annual global carbon emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. At this pace, the fashion industry’s greenhouse gas emissions will surge more than 50% by 2030. - If demographic and lifestyle patterns continue as they are now, global consumption of apparel will rise from 62 million metric tons in 2019 to 102 million tons in 10 years. - Every year a half a million tons of plastic microfibers are dumped into the ocean, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles. The danger? Microfibers cannot be extracted from the water and they can spread throughout the food chain.
    - barrysteve 4y ago
      Microplastics are a horrific nightmare, you got me there. But I will point out that Games rely on electricity, that is coal/nukes/ect in some countries. Not to mention whatever materials go into building the internet for multiplayer games. The cost of water is usually the cost of pumping it and the filters for desal, or aeration or whatever cleaning method is used. If people have adequate access to water, using it on fashion is not so morally terrible. Land-filling fibers, producing excess waste water and microplastics is "not so great" (to understate it), I agree.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> I, for one, enjoy having options for what I wear that let me look how I want rather than dressing in standardized, homogeneous garments. Not considering that environment would like to have a word about that, it's undeniable that what I personally enjoy "contributes nothing to humanity". Anyway it's a false dichotomy: you can have choices without the fashion industry. My grand-grand-grandfather was a tailor, my grand-grandfather was a tailor, my grandfather was a tailor, they all made mostly the same kind of dresses (mostly men suits, they were specialized in that), because the society needed durable, robust and standardized garments and despised frivolousness. The way you dressed projected who you were in society. The choice was very large though, you could customize the "standard" in a lot of different ways: you could wear a pocket watch, a monocle, a hat (one could write a series of books on the different kinds of hats), cufflinks, a pochette or a tie in a very bold color, a combination of them, or not. the reason why the "classic style" survived is because it rewards people that have an eye for a unique style, without punishing those that do not have it or do not have enough money to afford it. In a suit you will look good, anyway. "Express yourself" (by dressing cheap rags) was invented by the ad industry that fueled the fashion industry (that simply attached a premium price to the same rags) to sell more of the same to more people in waves - the 60s are back! no! the 70s are back! are you kidding? 2001 is back! - and so on. It would be exhilarating if it wasn't tragic. > Ad tech is "an industry based off manipulating human psychology" but nobody would say all of the tech industry Of course not, because the industry is Advertising. Everybody would say that all the ad industry is represented by that
- Gud 4y ago
  This eco-authoritarianism needs to be stopped. When the day comes when people aren’t allowed to dress beautifully I know at least I will revolt. Today men and women have the ability to dress(and to look and feel good) more or less anyway they want(more freedom to dress how you like seems to correlate strongly with societies that are liveable… go figure). I’d rather let the world burn than live in it without beauty and beautiful people. We’re not robots to run the machines for rich people. God bless those “cheap rags” I say.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
GeoAtreides 4y ago
The parent comment didn't say anything about fashion being entirely about manipulation; they said luxury fashion is based off manipulating human psychology". "Luxury" and "based off" are key words and cannot be omitted. You also propose a false dilemma: either luxury fashion or standardized, homogeneous garments. Surely there are other myriad options, not just between extravagant luxury or dull conformity.
- version_five 4y ago
  This doesn't make any sense, it reads like taking issue with random words. The op's point was pretty clear even if he omitted "luxury" somewhere.
  - GeoAtreides 4y ago
    I disagree. "based off" means a completely different thing than "entirely": the former is not exhaustive, the latter is. "Luxury fashion" is a firmly delimited subset of fashion. The reason OP omitted "luxury" was to set up their false dilemma, which wouldn't have worked between "luxury fashion" and standardized garments (wouldn't have worked in the sense it would've been even more obvious it was a fallacy).

iamwpj 4y ago

Sorry that their unfathomable amounts of wealth and massive international brands do not interest you.

etrautmann 4y ago

whoa there. As a scientist, I would still strongly argue for the value of art and culture. Luxury fashion can be deeply problematic, but throwing all of clothing design under the bus and elevating tech as somehow contributing more to humanity seems misguided. It's not zero sum, and a rejection of arts leads to weird places.

thunky 4y ago

Well it sounds like they at least built something. Contrast this with someone like Warren Buffett who just pushes money around. And he pushes towards questionable industries like big oil and big soft drink.

TacticalCoder 4y ago

> that contributes nothing to humanity I overall agree with you but some luxury items do bring beauty to this world. I've watched artisans in the process of creating Hermes silk scarves and it's nothing short of fascinating and I find the end result often beautiful. I offered one to my wife, ten years ago. She still wears it. The same can be said about high-end mechanical watches. Some are beautiful and their mechanism are a thing of beauty in themselves. Some people are in awe of the "Geneva Drive" [0] and not many won't be moved by Bartosz Ciechanowski's explanation and interactive animation of mechanical watches mechanisms [1]. I offered one high-end mechanical watch to my wife, she wears it daily.. And what's the alternative anyway? I much prefer to live in a world where Hermes scarves and mechanical watch do exist than in a planned economy where the komrades do decide what items can and cannot be manufactured / sold. I mean: Kim Jong-Un isn't exactly known for having many billionaires thanks to the luxury items sold by North Korea. Would you want to live there? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_drive [1] https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/

version_five 4y ago

The good thing about capitalism is that people get to decide for themselves what is valuable to them, not you or any other overlord. I can't imagine what kind of dystopia we'd live in if we were forced to do everything "for the good of humanity".

snapplebobapple 4y ago

Strongly disagree. Luxury fashion helps turn the trust fund kids successful people inevitably create (might not be there kids, but if it's not their kids, it will be their grand kids or great grand kids) into average people by eating through their trust fund (drugs help a lot too). Luxury goods perform a vital service of turning elites by birth who are turds by nature into proles eventually and this is drastically better than the way we used to accomplish this (revolution or war with the accompanying massive innocent person bloodshed and property destruction).