
Do We Have Victorians to Thank for Consumerism? - apollinaire
https://lithub.com/do-we-have-victorians-to-thank-for-consumerism/
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samplatt
Nice read. The easily-youtubeable documentary (4x 1hr eps) _Century of the
Self_ also goes into the psychology of how America (and by extension 'Western'
culture) became obsessed with materialism.

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onion2k
Adam Curtis is a brilliant film maker. "Hypernormalisation"
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM))
and "Bitter Lake"
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84P4dzow1Bw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84P4dzow1Bw))
are well worth watching too.

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dragonelite
Ooh yeah i found Hypernormalisation quiet een eye opener, my first thought was
wtf for conspiracy movie did i just clicked on. But it kinda got me searching
and made me end up becoming a casual consumer of geopolitical articles and
think tank talks on youtube.

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gwd
Not sure if this is true of Hypernormalisation, but it is worth pointing out
that "It seemed weird but then I looked into it and saw more content along the
same lines which convinced me" is the experience of _everyone_ who gets sucked
into a conspiracy theory. :-)

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Nasrudith
This piece manages to miss the memetic classism distinctions about consumption
and strikes me as irrationally grating and perhaps unwittingly embodying it.
Likely unfair but I can't help but see echoes of the sour grapes of reduced-
to-irrelevance gentry with their posturing about how possessions aren't really
that important anyway now that they aren't at top, and seeing the history the
hypocrisy galls.

When it was confined to the elite such excess was to be called a virtue
outside of times of open rebellion (which almost always lost and would return
to the status quo). Having plenty of extra rooms and great halls in case of
guests is befitting of your station but to have extra chairs stored away for
guests and it is a vice! But when lower classes catch up in a luxury it
becomes passe unless there is something to upsell! If 'nominally lower'
mercantile classes end up moving beyond them then it is outright immorality.

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wisty
This paragraph really stood out as this:

> “The late seventeenth-century invention of shops and shopping by an urban
> middle class who lived by trade was mirrored by the growth of a new type of
> domestic space,” Worsley writes. “What might be termed the ‘middle-class’
> living room was full of superfluous objects, chosen for ornament rather than
> use yet cheap and not truly beautiful: a barricade of possessions intended
> to stabilize a precarious position in the world.”

It kind of reminds me of a famous watch Youtuber who berates anyone who wastes
their money on a watch that costs more than a Casio, but less than a Rolex.

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nicbou
That reminds me of this SSC article:
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-
left/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/)

Long story short, people want to distance themselves from the class below
them, and mimic the class above them.

The strategy that emerges is to appropriate the culture of people two classes
below them, because people one class below them can't.

If you're rich and do poor people things, you set yourself apart from middle
class people, who doesn't want to be mistaken for poor people. No one will
mistake you for a poor person anyway.

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AmericanChopper
The reason we have consumerism, is because we have a middle class. Once people
have the necessities of life sorted out, they figure out that there's actually
lots of other stuff they want too. From that point, the only ingredient you're
missing to reach consumerism is the desire to stand in judgement of others for
wanting more frivolous stuff than you do.

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michaelbuddy
Consumerism comes after basic needs are met, and time becomes available.

Consumerism is reading articles such as these, and reading comments
afterwards. It's natural, as humans are curious and want to experience things.

Though I can't quote anything I have a suspicion that this is written
somewhere in the bible or by aristotle. it's human nature but also animal
nature to be consumers.

Consumption has many reasons. some buy unnecessary things to build on other
things. People who buy a boat or vacation envision sharing it with their
friends.

People who buy the latest too envision building amazing things of high quality
for people, or they see themselves doing something in less time.

People who buy things also invent other things. The world gets more complex.
it's not that mysterious and has little to do with the victorian age, other
than maybe it was actually documented. It's a shame to lay blame on a
particular people of an era, as the sole originator of something that's
subjectively called "bad" just because those people happened to be the ones
who actually wrote down what they did for the future to learn from.

Consumption. Think about it. The victorian age? Tryu harder. Why do you think
throughout history, kings had huge feasts and dozens concubines. Because they
had the time and the opportunity.

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brongondwana
Isn't it enough that we're in stage 4 lockdown, you have to blame us for this
as we...

oh, you aren't talking about Melbourne. Carry on.

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082349872349872
Looking through the prism of the attribute/accomplishment/acquisition
trichotomy, the industrial revolution made acquisitions absolutely much
cheaper, accomplishments relatively more expensive, and left attributes (with
the notable exception of certain phenotypic expressions) utterly unchanged.

With the internet, we should have some examples of production of
accomplishable disciplines scaling in the same way that production of
acquirable objects scaled. I can't think of examples off the top of my head,
however. Arguably, modern languages?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23515204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23515204)

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Nasrudith
It isn't remotely my scene but influcers arguably along with photoshopped
appearances to subsitute for "beauty" and that goes back to MySpace angles at
the very least as it got more "real person non-academic orn work" vs "on the
internet nobody knows you are a dog". Some "accomplishments" like travel or
climbing Mtm Everest by ignored paid sherpa escort squad were made cheaper and
more accessible with airline travel.

Accomplishments autoscaling with tech and precedent has been there for a
while, transalatic or transpacific navigation going from heroic to routine.

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heresie-dabord
We have human industry to thank for learning how to make things at
unsustainable scale, and social conditioning to thank for making driveling
purchase-zombies out of citizens.

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lightlyused
Interesting read. Just recently stumbled across "Victorian Farms" on Amazon
Prime video and it touched on some aspects of how industrialization changed
farming during that period.

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aksss
In other news, “can we blame the past for the present?”

