recession chic
Feb. 25th, 2009 12:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaSo, yes, i've seen it mentioned: "recession chic." It's stylish now to talk about how you're doing without some modern luxury that people had gotten used to. Cheaper clothing, cheaper vacations, keeping the car a year or so longer. More and more talking heads on TV telling us how morally satisfying it is when you save instead of consuming quite so conspicuously.
And while yes, Americans have badly needed to buy less crap than they can honestly afford, it feels like the mass media has decided now to sell the recession, just as when we had money and credit they sold us more crap than we could afford. They needed us then to be happy quiet content little consumer bots, and now they need us to be happy quiet content not-making-runs-on-the-bank bots.
It is interesting, though, how easy it is for the spell of marketing to unravel. It's like people are waking up to the realization, "Oh, hey, i don't need to have a new 4-in-one PDA/phone/GPS/MP3 player, the items i already have work just fine. Or, you know, i'll even go without, because somehow that's how i existed 10 years ago and i was just fine back then." It's like the echoes in the echo chamber are starting to die down and you can hear your own thoughts for once.
Once upon a time it was practically unpatriotic to suggest that people save a bit more and buy a bit less. Now we're hearing about the virtues of saving more and buying less, from the same people, pretty much. It's not that they can't make up their minds; it's that they care less about meaning than about what we need to hear to stay in line.
So, along comes "recession chic;" marketers selling us what we already have, which is a sudden decrease of abundance. It's to float us along until they get the echo chamber started again. We're roughing it! It's fun! It's an adventure! And doesn't it feel good to put money into savings instead of buying a piece of worthless crap? But soon the adventure will be over and we can go back to buying tons of useless crap on our credit cards again.
But if this goes on long enough, maybe the edifice will start to crack a bit. What do i mean? I mean this strange world order in which somehow many of us have jobs that do not relate even remotely to the core functions of survival: growing food, distributing food, making clothing, gathering resources, making tools, making shelters, maintaining shelters, curing illness, child care, teaching. Wait, what is all this other stuff we're doing? Well, some of it makes sense: research, development, energy, waste management; a lot of it doesn't.
If it goes on long enough, maybe more people won't be so eager to fall for low "introductory rates" on credit cards next time around. Maybe they won't so easily succumb to the allure of new gadgets.
Now is the perfect time to get the word out about how poisonous the flowers in this phony paradise really are. To make people aware, for example, that the sudden spike in demand for tantalum, which is used to make numerous electronic devices like the Playstation 2, incited a war in the Congo. People were dying and children were being enslaved in mines half a world away so that we can have a game machine, and most of us never even knew about it.
And while yes, Americans have badly needed to buy less crap than they can honestly afford, it feels like the mass media has decided now to sell the recession, just as when we had money and credit they sold us more crap than we could afford. They needed us then to be happy quiet content little consumer bots, and now they need us to be happy quiet content not-making-runs-on-the-bank bots.
It is interesting, though, how easy it is for the spell of marketing to unravel. It's like people are waking up to the realization, "Oh, hey, i don't need to have a new 4-in-one PDA/phone/GPS/MP3 player, the items i already have work just fine. Or, you know, i'll even go without, because somehow that's how i existed 10 years ago and i was just fine back then." It's like the echoes in the echo chamber are starting to die down and you can hear your own thoughts for once.
Once upon a time it was practically unpatriotic to suggest that people save a bit more and buy a bit less. Now we're hearing about the virtues of saving more and buying less, from the same people, pretty much. It's not that they can't make up their minds; it's that they care less about meaning than about what we need to hear to stay in line.
So, along comes "recession chic;" marketers selling us what we already have, which is a sudden decrease of abundance. It's to float us along until they get the echo chamber started again. We're roughing it! It's fun! It's an adventure! And doesn't it feel good to put money into savings instead of buying a piece of worthless crap? But soon the adventure will be over and we can go back to buying tons of useless crap on our credit cards again.
But if this goes on long enough, maybe the edifice will start to crack a bit. What do i mean? I mean this strange world order in which somehow many of us have jobs that do not relate even remotely to the core functions of survival: growing food, distributing food, making clothing, gathering resources, making tools, making shelters, maintaining shelters, curing illness, child care, teaching. Wait, what is all this other stuff we're doing? Well, some of it makes sense: research, development, energy, waste management; a lot of it doesn't.
If it goes on long enough, maybe more people won't be so eager to fall for low "introductory rates" on credit cards next time around. Maybe they won't so easily succumb to the allure of new gadgets.
Now is the perfect time to get the word out about how poisonous the flowers in this phony paradise really are. To make people aware, for example, that the sudden spike in demand for tantalum, which is used to make numerous electronic devices like the Playstation 2, incited a war in the Congo. People were dying and children were being enslaved in mines half a world away so that we can have a game machine, and most of us never even knew about it.
