January 16th, 2009

Post-Consumerist Waste and the Weapons of Mass Reproduction

Rick Banister
I won't bore you with too much of a history lesson, but through a certain sequence of events we (you and I) have taken over the role of industry (since industry totally sucked in 2008).

For the purpose of this post, "media" and "technology" are going to mean the same thing. (Everyone and their mom should totally read Understanding Media, it's excellent.) They both represent any extension of humans, like a wheel lets us move around quicker and easier, extending our range. Paper, the same thing, you can give a note to a messenger and he or she can deliver your thoughts to someone very far away. All media until the telegraph had an explosive effect on humanity—better roads made for faster travel, the printing press let thoughts travel those roads, money allowed for power transfer and commerce to spread across regions. This explosion facilitated nationalism and shortly thereafter imperialism.

Electric media had the opposite effect, the complete implosion of culture. The telegraph connected people across the atlantic, making global synchronization possible. The radio, telephone, movies, television, cell phone all furthered the trend.

The addition of the Internet to this equation has curbed the implosion, or at least interfered with the trajectory of all those imploding particles. Many of us no longer rely on strictly one-directional broadcast media for news and other information. The internet has facilitated a retribalization of culture, not based on geography, but interest. I can read the hipster pinko news and chat it up with my post-conceptual photographer friends, while someone else can join a vintage rifles of famous assassinations message board.

One more step back before the final step forward. All this media is primarily used for political power, the variable is how it derives influence. Mechanical technology: making war and moving that war around faster. Early electric technology: making sure the war is going well because it's really far away now. Broadcast electric technology: unify the masses by entertaining them with all the same entertainment, it will create fraternity. Consumerism: the war is over, let's use all this industry to sell things to people and keep the economy going.

A long long time ago we all made everything we personally needed for survival (or at least someone in the family made everything). Then we got caught up in all that war and imperialism. Then we didn't know how to make things, but we could go to the store and get everything we need. But we felt a longing for making things. In the last two decades there has been a trend of "creative consumption" or "authentic consumption." Thinkers like Sharon Zukin posited that we buy the sneakers that express how we feel about ourselves, shopping is a creative act.

More recently this has changed. Buying culture wasn't enough. We still feel empty. We need to create. We have entered Post-Consumerism. I refuse to buy stuff for the logo, the logos are all crappy. The shoe companies don't design their own shoes, they have contests to have us design them. The number of tshirts has outnumbered the people buying tshirts.

So, we have in-a-way reentered an age of localized production and mass creation, but not for the same reason. I don't create out of necessity, I don't create for the process, I create in order to be consumed. We enter the world of Post-Modernism, scary. We all need a consumer base. We all are that consumer base. I have a flat file full of my friends' art. Geoff has two. We have taken over the role of industry. I can buy handmade and feel good about it. The authenticity in consumption is restored. But only as long as we keep up both ends of the bargain. We are producer and consumer, so we can't stop doing either. The economy would collapse.

Thus enter the Weapons of Mass Reproduction. We need factories: magcloud.com, blurb.com, lulu.com, cafepress.com, threadless.com. We need storefronts: blurb.com, lulu.com, threadless.com, etsy.com, shopify.com, our own wordpresses. We need consumers: us!
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