A glitch in the New Stuff Industrial Complex
On the tariffs and consumerism
Sigmund Freud’s nephew kinda invented consumerism. Edward Bernays made propaganda for the Americans during WW1, and once the dust had settled he became the world’s first ever PR guy, pioneering the art of consumer storytelling. He piggybacked off the early 20th century’s feminist movement to help tobacco companies sell cigarettes to women: he branded them “Torches of Freedom” (if you want to get really deep into this, take a look at Adam Curtis’s Century of the Self documentary — you can find the whole series on Youtube).
You can trace a pretty direct line from Bernays up to the present day, where our hopes and dreams are projected onto mass-produced objects. That whole it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism thing? That’s not because we humans yearn for bond markets and commodity trading. It’s because we love shopping. Consumerism is how America projects soft power around the globe: everyone wants Coke, Big Macs and Nikes. Making stuff more expensive is the third rail no politician will touch.
In the 80s, politicians in the rich world rewired their economies. Companies that made stuff would go do it somewhere else, where wages were cheaper and there weren’t so many rules. If places like Detroit and Sheffield lost all their good jobs, then it wouldn’t matter so much because all the car makers and fast food chains and iPhones would make so much money from their factories in Asia that it would trickle down to everyone else and we’d all live the good life. Clearly, that’s not what happened. The death of manufacturing wiped out the stable career ladder that gave ordinary people the chance to build long-term wealth, the billionaires got so rich that they bought politicians and the rest of us got Shein and Uber eats.
And the products got shittier too. As supply chains got longer and murkier — to the point where a lot of companies genuinely don’t know where their raw materials come from — they formed a giant new-stuff machine pumping out mountains of ultra-cheap nonsense. Stuff is cheaper now, because there’s sweatshops and children working in mines and rivers flowing with chemicals. And most of the massive brands at the top of it all are just design and marketing machines: they pay factories to make all their stuff for them abroad while they take over the Olympics and sell limited edition sneakers. That’s how we end up with the oxymoronic made in China MAGA hat, and how one boat clogging up the Suez canal blocked $9bn worth of stuff every day it was stuck there.
The global new-stuff machine is set up around volume: any technological innovation that makes things more efficient gets used to make even more stuff (aka Jevon’s paradox). But the world only needs so many washing machines and iPhones and printers, and so once companies get to a certain point they have to make previous customers buy new versions of the same thing. That’s how we ended up with such a fast trend cycle in fashion, but also unrepairable washing machines that break as soon as the warranty expires. Then there’s parts pairing, where tech companies make repairing stuff cost a fortune by locking components so that you can only use an authorized dealer (aka the guys who sold you the thing in the first place) to fix your stuff when it breaks. Apple is notorious for this.
This is the world Trump’s tariffs have set fire to. He can’t make the world’s supply chains come back to the US, no matter how much he shouts about it. The ecosystem of workers, factories, equipment and suppliers that made stuff in the the rich world has migrated overseas, and you can’t expect that they’ll magically flourish again once you put a paywall around the American economy (just look at what happened when Louis Vuitton tried to open a handbag factory in Texas). There’s also the fact that young people don’t want to work in manufacturing anymore. People want flexibility from work now, and factory work is anything but: when you’re working on the shop floor, shifts are timed and holiday dates are fixed so that the production line can keep moving.
When disaster happens there’s always a certain kind of temptation for the talking heads and columnists to whip up a spicy take, speculating that maybe this is going to be a good thing in the long run. Maybe Trump tearing up the global economic playbook is going to make the good jobs come back and everyone will be more sustainable? IDK, nothing makes sense in the upside down world of Trump’s America. Speculating about the potential upside to all of this reminds me of when trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort predicted a “quarantine of consumption” when covid first broke out (the exact opposite happened).
There is somewhat of a silver lining here, in that the tariff rollercoaster brings to the surface just how weird and shitty contemporary consumerism is: all these companies who don’t make their own stuff, who don’t even want to make good stuff, trying to growth-hack their way to the top with marketing gimmicks. And if one guy — or a stranded ship — can throw the whole system in turmoil, then rewiring the system starts to make business sense too. Plus, right-to-repair laws are coming into effect across the US and EU.
In Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World, Jason Hickel outlines a more common sense approach to economics. He tackles a big misconception thrown at climate campaigners: that they want everyone to give up owning things and live in tree houses, or something. Rather, the idea is that very large parts of modern economies are devoted to really dumb things and that we’d be a lot happier if we spent our energy on education, caring for each other, doing therapy and creating art than working in logistics and spending all our money on stuff that falls apart as soon as the warranty’s over. Some concrete steps in the Hickel book: outlaw planned obsolescence, shift society from owning many products to just paying to use them (say, power drills and cars) and drastically slash the cost of education, housing and healthcare. Again, this is where the easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism thing comes up: it sounds like utopian nonsense, until you remember that present-day consumerism would have sounded like a fantasy to anyone living in the 60s and 70s, back when rich countries still made things. Again, I don’t want to get all every cloud… about the situation the world is in, but turmoil creates space for new opportunities. Volatility is just the way things are now. And the rest of us, more with less seems like a good mantra to carry with us into the chaos.
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This really hits. Especially the point about degrowth not being some cottagecore fantasy. It’s literally just common sense. Imagine if the collective creativity put into trend cycles, branding, and marketing fluff actually went toward care, education, or collective repair. But yeah, that’s harder to sell.
You are spot on and yes - there is a huge opportunity here for us to reassess what we want and need. To cut consumerism and reduce pollution and waste. But will we do it?? Probably not, but I still have hope!