The things, the purchases, the fashions

In those days, men and women were overwhelmed by things: there were things and more things and more things.

An author at the time called it "the civilization of thousands of things": he could have said hundreds of thousands and would have been more accurate.

In the United States —where they were most obsessed with these accounts— a study said that in the home of an average family there were some 300,000 things, "from paper clips to ironing boards."

And that those people spent an average of ten minutes a day looking for things they lost: that meant, in a lifetime, about 200 days dedicated to the search.

Almost nothing, compared to the 2,000 that was spent buying when face-to-face purchases were still the majority.

Many men and women had things and more things, but many had almost nothing: 12 percent of humanity, Europe and the United States, consumed 60 percent of the world's goods —five times more than their share— , while the poorest 30 percent, African, Asian, South American, consumed 3 percent—ten times less than their share.

For them, things continued to have an important value: the one they had always had.

For centuries, the few things were unique objects that were very difficult to replace.

And still in 2022, for the poorest, a knife could last a lifetime, accompany a person forever.

For the rich, on the other hand, each thing didn't mean much: it was disposable, replaceable, it wasn't worth caring for or repairing because —made in series who knows where by who knows who— they abounded, and it was easier and cheaper. buy a new one than take care of the old one.

And nothing gave them as much pleasure as buying new ones.

The fashions, the supposed renewal, the so-called technical advances, the bare quality, the planned obsolescence and other similar trifles favored the overproduction of things.

Customers queue at a HomeGoods store in New York in November 2022. China News Service (via Getty Images)

There were, in the globalized production of those years, two characteristics that stood out among many: the superfluous, the ephemeral.

It is impossible to make a precise calculation, but it would seem that the vast majority of the goods manufactured in those years were unnecessary.

Although, of course, the idea of ​​necessity is so debatable: who defines who needs what, who doesn't need it (see chapter 13).

But if we tried to draw a line between the essentials for life and those that are not, even if they were very broad, we would probably agree that nobody needed ten sets of sheets or change their gadgets with each new release or their wardrobe. with each season or throw away a third of the food I bought.

That is why it began to become clear that the success of a product -material or virtual- did not consist in responding to a need -which had already been so fulfilled- but in creating a new one: the one who convinced many that they could not live without it triumphed. without which they had always lived (see chap.17).

It was about persuading millions that something important was missing: the super-rich of the Third Decade profited from that feeling of incompleteness and that thirst for novelty, millions and millions convinced that, to remain “people of their time” they had to adopt sooner rather than later these innovations (see chapter 19).

They had created a culture based on permanent dissatisfaction: the pervasive conviction that there would always be something better than what one had—and that one should have but.

The shock that you were always missing something.

Added to the unnecessary was the ephemeral: what was then called “planned obsolescence”.

Obsolescence is the condition of any object or entity that is going to stop working, of being: animals, without going any further, are obsolescent to the extent that they do not live forever;

people less.

But, for centuries, goods were produced with the pretense of lasting as long as possible: that was their quality and reputation, until certain industrialists understood, at the beginning of the 20th century, that this was not good for business and decided to start manufacturing. make things that won't last as long.

They say that in 1924 the largest manufacturers of light bulbs in the world met in Geneva and in secret and conspired not to produce any that could shine more than a thousand hours: it was not easy, and it required many experiments, a lot of control,

(In Livermore, California in the United States, in 2020 one that had been burning for more than 120 years was still preserved —and when it turned its first century a thousand people sang happy birthday to it. And it is curious that the first known example of a product voluntarily Bad were precisely the light bulbs, which cartoonists and other jokers used to use as a symbol of ideas and innovation: "My little light bulb came on," they said then.)

Around 1950, another skull lit the short light bulb and it occurred to him to call this scam “planned obsolescence” —

.

The notion was slow to reach the general public: small scandals, such as the discovery that the batteries of a new gadget famous in those years were programmed to run out after 18 months - and, thus, forcing consumers to change the device - , confirmed that the big manufacturers wanted to produce goods that should be replaced after a shorter and shorter period of time.

View of the Centennial Light Bulb, the world's longest-lasting incandescent light bulb installed in 1901, in Livermore, California, in 2019.Smith Collection/Gado (Getty Images)

The producers forced this replacement in various ways: that the materials could not resist more than a certain number of uses, that some chip limited that number, that the energy charges ran out after Xs, that their programs became definitively out of date.

They produced objects that were not made to be used for more than a few years and, above all, they installed the social obligation to have the latest models: that object so coveted a short time before was so “superseded” by a new one that using it became a shame.

This is how they managed to get rich countries to consume much more than they needed and to fill the world with spoils: by 2020 “planned obsolescence” was already part of almost all products.

It was curious that an entire civilization would happily accept that its most desired items were designed to fail.

The ability to sell what is so finite unnecessary was supported by large advertising fabrics that convinced millions that without these devices they were nothing, and on a credit system that allowed them to sell things that many, in principle, could not afford.

But there was a decisive prop: the satisfaction of buying.

Buying meant demonstrating —and above all demonstrating oneself— that one was doing well, that one was meeting expectations.

“If happiness depended on the level of consumption, we should be absolutely happy, because we consume 26 times more than 150 years ago”, said a defender of “degrowth” (see chapter 13).

Faced with the few who proposed this option and criticized the proliferation of objects as a vice that was destroying the planet, depleting its resources, the conservatives—literally: those who wanted to preserve the established form—answered that this was the capitalist system: that he needed more and more things to be "needed" because he lived by making them.

That the survival of hundreds of millions of people whose job it was to make them, transport them, sell them depended on this unbridled production: that to stop buying them was, in some way, a terrible lack of empathy, of solidarity with all those millions who lived from it. .

The argument seemed solid as long as they did not imagine other ways to ensure the subsistence of all these people.

Some, of course, were already beginning to think about them.

On the one hand, there was talk of the forms of distribution of the increasing wealth produced by so much production (see chapter 15).

And, also, that sharing objects between groups would be a way to reduce their weight and their presence and, at the same time, build networks, ties.

Some added an aesthetic argument that was not yet common but was emerging: that it was vulgar to need so much garbage to live better, that wisdom consisted in not having it.

They paid little attention to them.

(Garbage was one of the great products of that world: few things were made in larger quantities. In 2020, it was estimated that people produced about 2.2 billion tons of “solid waste” a year. There were, of course, differences there as well. : each North American contributed more than two kilos of solid waste per day —while each Chinese did not reach 700 grams and many Africans did not reach 100. The paradox also worked here: those who spoke the most against the deterioration that this waste caused in the environment were by far the biggest ruiners.

With tricks: to get less dirty, these countries exported their dirt to poor countries in Asia, Africa and America, which functioned as garbage dumps.

They sent them mostly “plastic”, very difficult to recycle, and they were paid —little— to receive it and devastate their ecosystems.

In 2022, certain poor people had already rebelled and stopped accepting it;

others not yet.

The “plastic” often ended up in the seas, where it threatened a good part of life;

a report from those days said that the companies that polluted the most were three food giants of the time: CocaCola, PepsiCola and Nestlé.

The "packaging" -packaging- had become decisive for the sale of their products, which often cost less than their wrappers, and those wrappers, so important to their profits, were filling land and sea with shit.)

Dump trucks collect intact objects to sell among garbage in Nairobi, Kenya, in January 2023.Anadolu Agency (Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The system of incessant consumption was the great ideological triumph of the United States in its era of cultural dominance: getting the rest of the world to accept this idea of ​​increasing waste that they launched after winning the war in 1945 and that, for twenty or thirty years, produced the illusion of a happy world.

He was presented as the other face of the other model —the “communist”— that did not offer the freedom to buy and buy, and his power of conviction was strong: he turned that freedom into one of the most desirable.

With the logical differences that each context imposed, the model was imposed on almost the entire globe.

Among those things that abounded, none showed the mechanisms —the lack of necessity, the obsolescence— more clearly than what was then called “clothing”.

They were those pieces of colored fabrics or fabrics organized to cover most of the body except, in general, the face or head.

Each one chose and used each piece and its combinations as a way of saying who he was, what his economic position was, what his cultural and social options were, what he was doing, what intentions he had: so many things that people, in general, read without knowing that they read—but with some precision.

(Clothes was one of the aspects where the gender difference resisted better. We talked about the construction of identities, of individualities: how the lack of a social body, a common body, caused so much attention to be diverted towards one's own body (see ch.4). Those were times in which the first person that each person thought of first was the first person, their I, themselves. Times of extreme individuality that, of course, manifested itself in such different ways depending on the social, cultural place , economic of each one.But there was something that they all shared: the first story that each person exhibited about himself was his "clothes".

We do not know when people began to wear pieces of fur or plants on their bodies.

Prehistorians say, without much shame, that it must have been sometime between 500,000 and 100,000 years ago.

We do know that, through times and places, these coatings became more complicated and simpler and more complicated and simpler until we arrived at our current solution.

But in 2022, textile clothing was practically essential: although it may seem strange, almost no one, among the 8,000 million, stopped wearing it except to bathe and, sometimes, to sleep or fornicate while in body.

But a trend was beginning that would eventually lead to the current situation: after having used it for millennia as one of the main elements to distinguish the sexes, the custom was beginning to break down.

It was like that because more and more women, in more and more countries, wore pants, those two tubes for the legs —see images— that, for centuries, had been exclusively masculine.

Polleras or skirts—a single, wider tube, see—were almost exclusively feminine in the West;

in India and Southeast Asia many men still wore them in their traditional form—a cloth tied at the waist that fell to the ankle—and in Muslim countries many wore a full—see—robe.

In the rest of the world, however, regional clothing had given way to Western simplification—pants, skirts, shirts and T-shirts, sneakers—and a traveler could no longer tell from people's clothing whether he was in Idaho or Krakow or Guangdong or Nairobi.

It had never happened before.

This aesthetic unification was one of the great achievements of the Western Age: it was curious to see how a few "creators" managed to get their products adopted by multitudes in all corners, who managed to standardize the world in this way.

It was, we might think, a first step—but it is always a mistake to analyze a historical moment in light of those that come after it.)

Employees work in a jean factory in Uzbekistan in November 2022.picture alliance (dpa/picture alliance via Getty I)

It has been said: certain details of clothing and appearance were still decisive for differentiating genders.

For example, the majority held the idea that men should use —and did use— their cut hair and women, on the other hand, their longer hair, up to their shoulders or mid-back or longer.

Similarly, many women still wore shoes with inserts on the entire sole or only on the heel—called, respectively, platforms or heels—and hardly any men.

And many women put makeup on their faces—they covered it with various colored powders and paints—and hardly any men.

Instead, certain ornaments were already becoming more common: for example,

And “fashion”, despite everything, continued to have more weight among women than among men.

Fashion was the original form of programmed obsolescence with its own mechanism.

In the beginning, this obsolescence was pure whim and had served as an element of distinction: the privileged wore a certain garment to show that they were privileged and, when more "vulgar" people began to copy them, that garment no longer showed anything and they rushed to change it.

But in the 20th century, the mechanism became ritualized: clothing manufacturers managed to impose the idea that their garments should change every year —or every season—, because that was their natural rhythm, as if they were artichoke orchards.

And in those days

(Thus, in those days, thanks to those programmed changes called fashion, few elements were more useful for dating an image—still or in motion—than the clothes of its protagonists: the observer, seeing them, could tell what period they were from. I tried. It was easier.)

An employee operates a machine at a textile factory in December 2022, in Ganzhou, China. VCG (VCG via Getty Images)

The clothing industry was one of the most abusive: the manufacturers —and the big brands in the Rich World— used the need of millions of people in the Poor World to make them work for paltry wages in crowded, unsafe, and undignified factories.

Thanks to this exploitation, the clothing industry was able to offer those enormous quantities of merchandise at low prices: millions of people —young people, above all— bought “fashionable” clothes knowing that they would not want to wear them a year later and that, furthermore, Because of their poor quality, they probably couldn't.

The proportions seemed very inverted: often the "relatively" durable cost less than the "absolutely" ephemeral.

For the price of a common meal, for example, a person could buy two or three T-shirts.

It was what his critics began to call "fast fashion",

burgers for body adornment.

As a consequence, global clothing production had doubled between 2000 and 2015.

Thanks to this mixture of hyperproduction and exploitation, the clothing industry —clothing, footwear, accessories— was, then, one of the most powerful in the world: it had moved, in 2021, some two million million euros and it did not stop growing .

The rich countries consumed an average of 900 euros a year in new clothes;

meanwhile, a billion people were not able to raise that money for all their annual expenses.

A billion citizens of rich countries spent to be fashionable what a billion poor people did not get to live, eat, cover themselves, heal.

And some millions of these thousand worked in the manufacture of those clothes.

The clothing industry employed more than 400 million people, one in ten workers on the planet, who produced between 100,000 and 150,000 million objects per year.

Among them, for example, 2,000 million t-shirts.

Each shirt needed, for its production, about 3,000 liters of water: the amount that a person drank in three years.

At this rate, some warned, the world's reserves would not last long.

The fashion industry was also the second most polluting in the world, after energy production.

There had never been so much "clothes" in the world.

And given the development of that field, there would never be again.

The characteristic of fashion, then, was to change without ceasing within an order.

But, judging by photos, videos, films, two styles widely used in those days resisted without great variations: the office-based corporate or "corpo", the street delinquent or "delinca".

Both were tributes of Anglo traditions: the corpo consisted of a "suit", a set of pants and a two- or three-button jacket -and sometimes a vest, see- blue or gray or brown over a white or light blue shirt adorned with a strip of cloth that hung from the neck, black or brown shoes.

In women, the style manifested itself in "suits" of jacket and skirt, but it accepted more variants —including pants— as long as they kept an air of modesty and tedium.

The “delinca” was the result of the imitation that certain North American black musicians had made of their more or less gangster neighbors: sublimation of urban marginality into violence.

It generally consisted of sports shoes with worked soles, very wide or very tight black or blue or light gray pants —sometimes interrupted at the knee—, a shirt or T-shirt of any color and, above all, a cap consisting of a round crown and a straight visor designed to protect the eyes from the sun but which they used, according to the images, to protect their necks —from we don't know what threats.

And the tattoos: from what you can see, the cultists of the "delinca" could not function without a tattoo, but they were not the only ones.

Tattoos were marks that people made on their bodies, with the shapes of faces, letters, arabesques, animals.

They could be black or colored and were supposed to be indelible: marks of a moment worth remembering for a lifetime, expressions of loyalty or eternal love or hate or confusion.

The tattoos were an attempt to fix the fugitive in their lives, gross miscalculations—as if every future continued the present.

They had been widely used at different times in history by —more— primitive peoples and then a little disdained;

Until the end of the 1980s they were exclusive to sailors and prisoners;

they became common with the diffusion of those fashions that exalted the marginal.

They were a relatively easy way to show a conventional rejection of certain conventions: in that field, as in so many others, adaptation consisted of showing yourself slightly maladjusted.

They were also a way of establishing himself in his time: when so much attention was paid to the care and use of bodies, it was logical to use them as a support for certain drawn speeches.

An artist tattoos a man on the back during the International Tattoo Convention in Berlin in September 2022. picture alliance (via Getty Images)

Clothing fashion was, it has been said, just one example: its mechanisms were replicated in so many other areas.

Cars, digital machines, home machines, even meals followed the same pattern.

It was one of the great achievements of that civilization: being able to convince hundreds, billions of people to follow the designs of a few designers and their industrial patterns, to think that they should "do like the rest" to "be fully them." themselves”.

The gregarious spirit that has always distinguished men—the basis of homelands, of so many religions—seldom managed to manifest itself in such a complete, common, and profitable way.

The plague of 2020 —the

, see chapter 6—, with its confinements, interrupted the fashion processes.

It was revealing to see the decrease in the production and sale of clothing in that period.

It became completely clear that the consumption of clothing was a social function, an effect of labor and festive circulation and that, without all that hustle and bustle, people did not need so many and such a variety of garments: they were enough with three or four things that they could wear and again.

Some would take advantage of the lesson and, probably, they were the ones who led the way.

The manufacture of clothing had been concentrated in poor countries, with very cheap labor.

The richer countries, meanwhile, were mostly engaged in inventing and manufacturing more complex things.

They were divided into four large poles: China, the United States, Europe, Japan-Korea.

But it became more and more difficult to know who made what.

For centuries, the so-called "international division of labor" consisted in the fact that peripheral countries produced raw materials —wool, cotton, iron, oil— and, from them, the central countries manufactured in their territory the manufactured products that they sold throughout the world. world.

In the second half of the 20th century, the famous globalization —and the fall of many customs, political, and social barriers— produced a change in the system: the rich countries installed their factories of simpler, easier products, in poor countries, to take advantage of cheap labor.

That first “offshoring” left millions of workers in rich countries without a job (see chapter 10).

At the same time, other factories—or the same ones—began to assemble parts made in rich countries.

In America they were called "maquilas" and thus they were able to complete more complex products.

The mechanism became more complicated until it gave rise to the most defining characteristic of those years: that each object used to include parts made in many places.

Automobiles, for example —the terrestrial ones— had about 4,000 pieces, which could be produced in several countries and assembled in several others.

Four elements were essential to enable this new system: the evolution of production techniques, the possibility of instantaneous circulation of information, the increase in large maritime transport fleets, and the drop in prices (see chapter 14).

Thus, for example, one of the standard-objects of those days, a small pocket mobile computer called “iPhone”, manufactured by the most expensive corporation in the world —Apple—, included design and technology from the United States and parts produced in Japan. , Germany, South Korea and China, but ended up being assembled in “iPhone City”, Zhengzhou.

Which made, among other things, very difficult to define which country produced it and, therefore, the real amount of exports from each one.

Thus, when it was said that China was the world's leading exporter of technology goods -750,000 million euros in 2020- so much above the United States -only 140,000 million-, the account, being true, was still false: it measured shipments of finished products without considering all those previous steps.

The new international division of labor made it very difficult to know who did what, how much each one earned.

That confusion was, for global companies, an added bonus.

(The production of that pocket computer was studied by a sociologist of the time, Mariana Mazzucato, to dismantle another widespread myth: that of the superiority of private initiative. In a classic essay, he showed that almost all of his technologies had been developed in public institutions The HTTP communication protocol had been created at the Center Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire —CERN— in Geneva, the internet in the Department of Defense of the United States, which also commissioned and paid for the inventions of the locator called Global Positioning System—GPS—the hard drives, the microprocessors, the memory chips, and the LCD screens. The touch screen they were using had been conceived with funding from the National Science Foundation and the CIA, and so on. It was one example: it was of course, said Mazzucato,that most of these private corporations were fed by public spending—and then built the very profitable myth of the supremacy of private initiative and, with the help of his political friends, did everything possible not to pay their taxes.)

A worker at the Luyang Electronics Co factory handles a loudspeaker in Fuyang, China, in January 2023.Future Publishing (Future Publishing via Getty Imag)

So much buying —and the central place that this activity occupied in many lives— gave rise to a new social definition: more and more people thought of themselves as “consumers”, subjects whose rights were based on the fact that they had paid for a merchandise and they deserved to be satisfied with what they received, or else they could band together to defend their money.

Associations and media "for consumers" abounded in those days when so few felt "citizens."

It was another effect of that world overflowing with things.

And many of those things were machines.

People, then, lived in a world of machines.

A few decades earlier this was not the case: an ordinary person could avoid them almost completely.

But throughout the 20th century their environments were filled with mechanized devices: already in 2022 their lives depended on all these devices, they had lost the ability to live without them.

17. Living by machinePeople lived among machines: cars, telephones, computers and many more machines formatted their lives —and changed them.

the world then

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