western minimalism
apropos: pipes made of stuff
this is just a short post not connected to the recent stream about things. if you read this far, it should be easy to understand a common mistake i hear more and more from westerners. more and more people are considering themselves minimalists, saying they only need their computer and/or cell phone. but if you go back to the posts about work, the work required to build a cell phone makes it a bit ridiculous to claim it as a possible minimalism.
even though all we’re holding is a cell phone, to have it we needed a whole chain of production and marketing. we need the mines, the miners, the engineers, the designers, the salesmen, the transport system, the globalized economy, the hardware and software designs, the job to get the money to buy the stuff, which in turn requires an economy to work.
so saying we can just have a cell phone, or any other modern artifact, is the same thing as claiming we just need an entire capitalism globalized market. that is hardly minimalism.
until we can build our own chips and hardware at home, using dust or dirt, there is no way one can be a minimalist. and even if we could build everything ourselves, we would still need the knowledge to build the things, which would come from a society, and probably after a lot of work done by that very same society.
another one i love is how minimalists these days easily dumpster for everything, but still have a laptop and an online connection. the online connection alone is a massive energy sink and requires an immense telecommunications infrastructure. i know when you use your cell phone, you don’t “see” the cables, so it’s like “magic”. but nearby i bet there is at least one cell tower with a broadband connection, and plugged in to the city main electrical grid. there is nothing “independent” about a cell phone except that you can’t see the wire. the same works for everything we do. even if we dumpster everything and use nothing from the main economy, we are still using byproducts of that economy. if capitalism magically “disappeared”, so would dumpstered goods and broadband.
unless the items we use last or made by ourselves (including the mining), it is pretty much useless to dumpster, because the engine is still moving. how long do your items last? we have technology to make electronics (and other items) to last forever (lifetimes). capitalism just doesn’t work that way (see planned obsolescence). the article is highly disputed on wikipedia, but i learned that same technique in project management. it’s just not widely broadcast because it might make people realize what’s really going on.
you make light bulbs. thick filament and glass means it’s more expensive, but that it will last 400 years. you sell a batch to all citizens. you’re out of business. that’s the essence of planned obsolescence, which has been around for a long time (even since henry ford days). there is little extra cost to make a lifetime thing, but there is a big cost to stay in business afterwards.
once we moved from a culture of making things to a culture of making money, lifetime goods are no longer an option.
when was the last time a cell phone lasted you more than 2 years? a tv? a computer? my laptop failed exactly 1 year and 11 months after i bought it. i could call the warranty just for that 1 month, but it’s a bell curve around 2 years, so most fail one month after anyway.
management likes to say this is a conspiracy theory. despite the evidence it isn’t, let’s be a bit naive and just say we’re doing it only for the money. the cheapest components don’t last as long. so the effect of saving money is equivalent to planned obsolescence. electronics break down when the worst part breaks down. some computers can break down because of a fucking cheap capacitor. so even if planned obsolescence wasn’t a management technique (false statement), profit driven management also guarantees planned obsolescence.
so how can we be real minimalists? an easy one would be becoming a hermit. another one is building your own infrastructures and hardware and producing your own goods. this is impossible for most things at this point, since electronics requires a lot of power and rare minerals. it’s easy to see how being a minimalist requires either having nothing or having a massive infrastructure to support you. either way, you’re left with joining society or building your own.
a more practical way of avoiding such traps is reducing consumption, fixing and recycling. but you can’t fix or recycle everything. until you can, you can’t be a minimalist in a western society. you could be if all of a sudden everything you had became self powered and “payed off” the energy necessary to build it. from then on, maybe. but your hardware would be so obsolete you couldn’t plug in to the rest of the world, making it useless. planned obsolescence always wins.
our world is moving fast enough to be unstoppable. i would say jump off, take the speed you got from the ride and start something new, like we’ve been doing with the places we built. but don’t fall for the trap of believing you magically became “sustainable” or a “minimalist”. that requires the entropy math i just did. where are your things coming from?