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People who want to theorize post-consumerism fail because they fail to identify a strong positive-valence, positive-feedback alternative to "convenience" as a driving attribute of material life. Behavioral attribute, not value/virtue. "Clean" or "environment friendly" ain't it.
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A tax on convenience (either financial or behavioral) isn't the same thing as an alternative to convenience. I think the answer is "automate materiality to regain control over temporality." The thing people hate about convenience-culture is that it accelerates life.
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You don't actually get to enjoy benefits of convenience in anything because you just get to the next consumption decision-point faster. If you can discard a disposable container instead of washing a reusable one, you just get to "what shall I eat/drink/watch/buy next?" quicker
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This pressure cannot be resisted because it is what makes economy run. The faster you make consumption decisions, the faster economic engines turn. We all have an interest in making this "as fast as possible." This is why direct "slow food" or whatever doesn't scale.
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Environment/sustainability questions aside (the need not be tied to our consumption behaviors) the trick to having your cake and eating it too is to decouple consumption decision-making from living life itself. Hence consumption-automation.
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If you can trust you fridge to reorder milk when you're close to running out, *you* can relax and take it as slow or as frenzied as you actually want to that moment. Automation also makes engineering sustainability easier (reduce waste, close material flow loops etc).
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Consumption automation also implies budget management automation. Bringing the idea of "pay yourself first" (a slogan common in the US that means "automate deposits in retirement savings") to all your spending, but without getting into unsustainable spending.
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Fortunately the bar to beat there, at least in the US (and possibly most of the west) is low... people suck at living within their means and avoiding credit card/other debt traps. Automated consumption is likely to do better than humans do.
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Like driverless cars but for personal finance. This tech needs to be invented, since all automation is for/by the forces designed to get people into debt traps rather than into a healthy financial state.
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Post-capitalism challenge is to invent a way to do 3 things at once: a) keep pace of economic life as fast as it needs to be via consumption automation b) use the automation to make it sustainable environmentally c) decouple pace of human life from pace of economic engines
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100% agree with this thread. But what to automate? We start on household bills that most people hate - gas / electricity, broadband, home insurance. We make better decisions than majority do themselves saving them a lot of money. But where next in discretionary spending is hard.
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