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The basics of consumer culture
Let's start with the iPhone. You probably know that Apple hardware components are manufactured by the Taiwanese company Foxconn. It employs at least a million people - Chinese and Taiwanese. In 2010, 10 Foxconn employees committed suicide, with men and women typically being thrown from high floors or rooftops. Of course, there was an investigation, during which it turned out that the company was systematically violating labor standards. Employees, receiving scanty wages, experience fantastic overloads - physical, psychological and, last of all, intellectual. That is, 10 corpses are the result of a rather cannibalistic and aggressive policy of the employer. In the same year, the investigation was launched by Apple itself.An interesting coincidence: in 2010, the first iPad was released, which became for Apple a way to revive its former greatness. It took a long time since the first Macintosh entered the market, and by the end of the 2000s, Apple began to gradually lose its leadership position. IPad allowed Apple to take the lead again. This was achieved, among other things, at the cost of the lives of these ten unfortunate workers and inhuman workloads.
Of course, after that, measures were taken, and the number of suicides began to decline. Do you think Foxconn has humanized the internal routines? Not at all. They put bars on the windows and special nets around the perimeters of the buildings. They also released a wonderful document that equates suicide with an accident. According to this clause, now the employer does not have to pay any compensation to the relatives of the deceased, and no investigation is envisaged. Thus, the suicide statistics were actually reduced to zero. As you can imagine, the situation with loads has not fundamentally changed.
Consumer culture emerges where consumers themselves begin to discover and explore this behind the scenes. Where people do not bite the brand and a beautiful shell, but know the wrong side of the Apple product, Windows, Ubuntu - everyone.
Environmental awareness
The ecology brand is now as popular as the high tech brand. They often collaborate. When you are getting ready to buy some kind of equipment, you find out, among other things, how it meets the requirements of environmental safety. Maybe in our country it is not very common, but in the West it really is. Leading IT companies are promoting sustainability as a new form of humanity. For this reason, we choose environmentally friendly food, products grown on farms, we love everything green - at least the civilized part of society.In this video, Slavoj ižek, dressed as a janitor, talks about how an ecological machine works in a modern metropolis. It works very effectively: it creates the illusion that some essential problems are really being solved and we are watching the space around us. Right now, a separate waste collection program is being launched in the regions of Russia. The problem is that we have it a profanation. You know that the sorted waste is later dumped together. Nobody keeps track of where he goes, where and what happens to him, that is, the processing system is very poorly debugged.
Everything is much better in Sweden, there really is a separate waste collection and recycling program. But their strategies are not entirely sustainable either. Why? Because, in the final analysis, the volumes of waste that are produced by the current consumer society, in principle, cannot be recycled efficiently. Ižek shows that the illusion of cleanliness created by this environmental movement hides rather unsightly realities. Europe solves environmental problems, as a rule, at the expense of third world countries. Hence these wonderful islands of plastic in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The waste of humanity does not actually go anywhere, it accumulates. It is not enough to displace from our wonderful civilized space all this dirt that we ourselves have produced. You need to produce less.
Commodity fetishism
It is clear that we are producing a wild amount of garbage, because we are used to consuming a lot. But already after the Second World War, among the new leftists there was an awareness that the capitalist strategy of exploiting some citizens by others had been very cleverly transformed over time. One of the theorists of this interpretation was Herbert Marcuse, a representative of the Frankfurt School and the author of one of the key works on the topic of anti-consumerism "One-Dimensional Man". Marcuse states that modern forms of exploitation are based on stimulating a certain image of a modern person associated with hyperconsumption. That is, now people are purposefully cultivated who should become ideal consumers, and everything that surrounds them from the cradle is sharpened for this. From an early age, he learns to want, to want a lot and even more. Clear, that these desires are associated with social success. Few people say directly: "Buy!" or "Buy for the sake of buying!" No. “Buy to become more successful!”, “Buy to achieve something”. From an early age, a person lives in a situation where commodity fetishism is the norm.According to Marcuse, such an attitude to the world, to your own labor, which you, in fact, exchange for these things, is deeply flawed. He writes: “Goods consume and manipulate people; they produce a false consciousness that is immune to their own lies. "We are used to thinking that we are producing computer equipment, but in reality we are a favorable breeding ground for them, with the help of which they reproduce. We live in the space of their ideology. For example, "Toyota" ("Manage your dream"),"Pepsi" ("Take everything from life") and" Loreal "("After all, you deserve it!").
Great denial program
The first way to deal with this situation is the grand rejection strategy. This is a radical departure from traditional social attitudes, which imply constant inclusion in the production-consumption chain. This is a rather violent method. But where to go? Unclear. Marcuse describes it this way: “The simple absence of all advertising and independent media and entertainment would plunge a person into a painful vacuum, deprive him of the opportunity to wonder and think, to recognize himself (or, rather, negative in himself) and his society. Deprived of his false fathers, leaders, friends and representatives, he would have to re-learn this alphabet. But the words and sentences that he can construct may turn out to be completely different. "That is, it is too radical and difficult.There was an attempt in America to implement the great refusal program. The hippie movement, all these crazy informals actually embodied this utopian idea. Quote from Marcuse: "The hippie commune, in my opinion, is one of the ways of practical implementation of the strategy of the great refusal." Hippies really leave civilization, take the essentials with them and try to start living from scratch in the bosom of nature. Here Marcuse was not original, he repeated Rousseau's call: "Become a noble savage again!" Indeed, many have become happy, but not all. Having matured, people returned back to civilized life. It was not possible to build a new society, this strategy failed.
Minimalism strategy
It turns out that something more moderate and adaptive is needed. There are many such strategies. I will describe the one I work with - this is a minimalist strategy. Ethical minimalism in many ways comes from aesthetic minimalism. This is really a striving for simple forms, for a minimum of things, but this striving is also ethically conditioned. Modern minimalists are very fond of traditions, they often call themselves stoics, unworthy, they can even be associated with Tolstoyans - with a strategy of simplification. The principle here is elementary: the less, the better. Throw out everything that is superfluous from your life. To do this, you need to collect all the household items and sign where everything is. During the month, you use only those things that you need: find them in the box, take them out, and do not touch the rest. In a month you will understand that three-quarters of the items will remain in the boxes. You don't need them, you can donate them to charity funds, donate them and then make sure that things around do not accumulate, but, after serving, they leave.Leo Babauta, author of Zen Habits, teaches how to develop a life strategy and follow it without wasting yourself. One of the foundations of his teaching is Zen Buddhism, a practical philosophy, a religion that needs to be learned in practice. First of all, it fosters a special attention to what is happening, a culture of awareness. Zen Buddhist meditation is a very simple thing: a person sits in a static position and begins to track events that occur, from heartbeat and breathing to tactile sensations. That is, the task of meditation is to stop the continuous hum in the head, which constantly speaks and shows, to switch to what is happening to us. The big plus of this strategy is that it is not an ideology, but basic principles that can be modified.
That is, if you want to focus on awareness, please. You can focus on technical minimalism, as do Joshua Milborn and Ryan Nicodemus, authors of The Minimalists. This version of minimalism can be called anti-consumerist. What are the owners of various social networks and resources buying? First of all, our time: it is monetized. This is how the attention economy works. Until you dispose of your attention, you slide along a cascade of links on the web, you cannot stop, and when you stop, it's too late, it's time to sleep, you're late again. That is, the first thing to do is to learn to control your attention and your consumer habits.
For this, the minimalists have a wonderful recipe. Try, they say, at least for a week to completely cut off your home from the Internet, do not use Wi-Fi, 3G, or 4G, and see what happens. It is clear that at first a terrible breakdown and frustration will begin. But if suddenly everything works out, then miracles will begin, because you will see how much time is consumed by online activity. You will see how much you can do in a day without the Internet. Minimalists suggest using the Internet from time to time, connecting to free hotspots and doing only what you have planned in advance. That is, the Internet should be used for its intended purpose for solving specific problems, and you should not spread on Facebook, looking at the feed.
And here, of course, the question arises: what to do with the huge amount of free time? You can invest it in creativity, or you can invest it in relationships. In an offline relationship, that is, direct communication. People who have grown up now under the yoke of the Internet, unfortunately, are losing this ability. It is difficult for them to talk for a long time without falling back into their smartphone. But technology is a tool; it should not enslave and force people to work for it. It is designed to free up time, not the other way around.
