Consuming Rhythms, Cultic Offerings

Posted: November 29th, 2009 | Filed under: Modern / Not Modern |

I’m a deep skeptic, maybe even a cynic, about environmentally-sustainable shopping. I recognize that the opportunity to purchase “green” versions of our usual items stands to benefit us in many ways. I could, for example, purchase coffee filters wherein less bleach was involved in the manufacturing process. This would likely put less bleach back into the ecologies of production and consumption. Yet I don’t do this.

Why not? Well, I only have to purchase coffee filters once a year or so, and when I see a chance at saving a buck or three at that opportunity I take it.

These opportunities present potential changes in the direction of flow for goods and money. New buying habits create new courses for the flow of materials. From sites of extraction to sites of manufacture, consumption and disposal, new routes of transit emerge. Perhaps I never used to shop at Whole Foods before, perhaps I never used products with materials grown in Brazil, perhaps I never sent my used materials to a particular port in LA for shipping to reclamation centers.

But if the flows change trajectory, the rhythms and rates of movement have stayed the same. The heart of consumption beats just as before, quickening in anticipation of a new purchase.

In this scenario, there has been no systemic change, no re-orientation of the central body, the consuming body. Until I change my own rhythms of consumption, there will be no substantive change in my relation to surrounding ecologies. Buying differently is not enough, and possibly even makes things worse. One has to buy less - or at least one needs to buy at different speeds.

Placing the burden solely on individual choice, on “intentional living,” is both daunting and unhelpful. I’m hungry to do this together, working at least in unison with other consumers, if not in cooperation with manufacturers. Here are some sites of modest complaint I have here from which to start:

Software and Hardware developers (Apple, I’m talking to you) - please diversify your development lines to include not just different spatial demographics, but different temporal demographics. For example, you already market and develop differently to students, domestic users, and corporate markets. What if you overlaid these horizontal strata with some vertical slices of purchase routines? There may be three or more timelines of purchase and development, for example - people who update once a year, people who update every other year, people who update every five years, etc.

With such a grid in mind, the developers of new products and improvements might always consider the impact on each timeline independently. At present, the operation of older equipment is getting harder and harder to do, since so little consideration is given to the compatibility of old tech and new. (If this is by design, Apple Corp, then Damn You, and please stop talking about sustainable anything, you cynical hypocrite of a company.)

For example, Youtube has no option for watching videos in different compression formats - rather it defaults to the latest and most processor-intensive. So even four-year old processors can’t keep up, though they are more than fast enough to display decent video. (And of course my complaint is familiar here in terms of repair protocols. Everyone knows it’s easier to replace than repair with most tech.)

But I suspect that this transformation of the development process might also apply well in non-tech fields. What it would be like for media production to adopt this model as well? Which audiences need a new film every week, which ones need one once a year, or every three years?

But consumers - and I mean you and me here - have plenty they can do as well on this front. We need to examine the rates at which we spend and consume, the rhythms we adopt for updating, replacing, adding new atoms to our collection, new services to our menu. Where can we address this?

First, at the level of adoption. We can choose - more as a group than as individuals - when to adopt a new version of tech, or whether to adopt at all. This might apply to consumption of media as well, and does already; consider the size-able group who now wait for the DVD to come out rather than watch a TV series live. These people still benefit from the corporate consumption of these items, the shared experience of moving through new serial narratives together, slightly in and out of sync with one another. I suspect that the industry is going to quash this as we move to all-digital delivery, but we could preserve it through practice. Imagine if thousands of people were JUST NOW hearing Nirvana’s Nevermind for the first time. OH WAIT - they are. Let’s stop calling them late then.

Secondly, we need to talk about the encroaching mass of scheduled, regular payments and fees. Regular subscription fees and service plans are the best thing for an economy with little wiggle room for impulse buys. But these habits are naturalizing some substantial shifts in our personal budgets at an alarming rate. Get those pie charts out people, watch how your monthly spending is getting increasingly regular, but also increasingly large.

Lastly - gifts. And here’s where I feel like an absolute jerk. But the seasons of gift-giving, the regular time-scales at which we consume “for others,” has grown out of any control, and is largely meaningless. Birthdays, holidays, anniversaries of this and that - these are the new Moveable Feasts, the new Holy Calendar for paying homage to the gods at regular intervals. In our adherence to these scheduled buying sprees, we are no different from any oppressive religious regime, giving money we don’t have to keep the priests rich and the poorest poor.

We are rhythmic beings, and we need these cycles. We also need to give gifts, both for those who need them and for the ways in which it changes us to give things.

So let’s give by other calendars than those enforced by the market. For myself, I’d rather give by the calendar of my own religion, so I at least know whose altar I’m bowing at. But I also live with others who don’t share my religion, so I’d like to have some new calendars with them as well. What else can we invent here? I’m not talking about mere modern innovation or parody - I’m not looking for the Flying Spaghetti Monster to answer Creationism. I’m looking for substantive, embodied rhythms by which we turn to one another in celebration and giving, rhythms that aren’t more “pure” but simply more intentional.

For my sons, I’d rather celebrate their baptism’s anniversary than their birthday. (Yeah, I know. Won’t get away with that. Commence tomato-throwing.) For my colleagues whom I count as friends and co-workers, I’d be happy to exchange gifts in sync with the school year - come June, when school’s out and the grades are turned in, I’m happier than I’ve been at Christmas in decades. For my neighbors, the seasonal changes probably make the most sense as our rhythms of celebration, especially tied to the cycles of life on the suburban block - (Hey, the first snow! Hey, the last leaf raking! Hey, the first Spring day with out a coat!). And what about anniversaries of peace and victory over death? Perhaps we could do better in our corporate celebrations of slavery abolition, women’s suffrage, or other victories for humankind.

We live together in diverse allegiances to diverse gods. The market’s dominant cycles and rhythms of consumption create a false unity, a mass cult for which few to none of us signed up. We probably won’t all be pantheists, but we can at least work to create a civic space wherein multiple offerings to different gods at different rhythms are supported. Christianity may bear the blame and brunt as the most imperialist religion of the last centuries - its wake in space is broad and bloody. But in terms of time, and the ways we use it, Christianity’s got nothing on capitalism. We move and spend to homogeonous and imperialist rhythms, even across class. Let’s help one another deviate at every level, from production through consumption.

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