I was just reading an article on this new startup web economy based on “flash deals” and couldn’t help but become saddened by it. The idea is quite simple. A product is sourced from a retailer that isn’t selling well and they dump it off to these startups at very reduced prices. In turn they create a “flash deal” online that targets a very specific group of consumers. Companies are reporting 500% increases in revenue and making their first million dollars in revenue the first year!
Being somewhat of a design freak and sustainability guru it saddens me to read such horror. Yes, I’m impressed by the machine’s ability to continue to manifest sales ingenuity, but I find myself asking, if ingenuity is predicated on purely sales margins and revenues, where do the measurements of prosperity weigh in to account for inequity, resource depletion, psychological imbalance, loss of spirituality, declining health, community vitality, equality, workplace wellness, and overall human well-being come into play? We are poisoning our future through industrial means and need to reassess the drivers that got us here and take a closer look at where this vision is leading us. It will take a new economy and a challenge to those who continue to buy in (small pun intended) to the vacuous purchasing behaviors of the whole.
Sales strategies cater very succinctly to the learned behaviors of consuming and instant self-indulging actions of the id (ego). It’s genius really. Replace the true yearning of the human to be connected through social intimacy and actual interaction with a self-assimilating identity to objects. Even better, make is a cultural movement!
Marketing was born from the mire by companies needing to boost profits. So these “marketers” began to conspire a means to make people believe that their life would be more fulfilled and interesting if they purchased some widget. They even go so far as to suggest that these things will sit you at right at the head of the table of upperclassity and you would FINALLY obtain social acceptance. If you were lucky and picked that one special shiny trinket, you might even be admired, thus fulfilling the void of ineptitude and singularity.
People don’t admire people anymore for their brains, or cunning abilities to think abstractly, or by their compassion and understanding. No. It’s all about the iPhones and iPads and Escalades on 27’s. Those $300 jeans, $1200 totes, and the $700 sunglasses. We’ve let ourselves down. We’ve let our species digress to a single unintelligible point. And that point sits atop one big pile of discarded consumer goods lost to the productomorphic gods of innovation.
I would hard pressed to believe that those who continue to buy in to this way of thought actually have a worldview that is holistic in approach and well-rounded enough in reflection to understand such a mechanism: The understanding of how a product came to be; how many supply chain hoops it passed through, tons of oil it used, man hours it required, shipping distances, the amount of off-gassing each material emitted as it underwent each manufacturing process add up to a serious burgeoning deficit in prosperity. Ultimately leading to the collapse of the economic engine as we know it.
Buying and selling futures predicated on the belief that through every purchase you secure your seat at the church of everlasting social status just seems a bit…well, suspect.
A definition of vision is what must be reexamined. However, success as defined by the economic structure based on GDP must be as well. Failure to measure happiness and well-being through the lens of GDP, as Ron Colman put it; (1) It fails to make qualitative distinctions, (2) it fails to value natural, human, and social capital, (3) it fails to value free time, (4) it fails to value unpaid work, (4) it fails to value free time, and (5) it fails to account for equity.
As it turns out the drivers of prosperity of a peoples have historically had little to do with the buying and selling of products and much to do with a population’s ability to sustain and continuously improve the well-being of their people. One tool used in to measure the well-being of a people is known as GNH, or the Gross National Happiness indicator.
Bhutan’s former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck was the first to suggest such a tool in 1972. Now, their government bases all decisions on a qualitative GNH doctrine. It suggests that beneficial development of human society takes place when material and spiritual development occur side by side to complement and reinforce each other. The four pillars of GNH are the promotion of sustainable development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and establishment of good governance.
Espousing the power of human connection with its surroundings and others has always been a cultural driver; it’s just been buried under the billboards for too long.
What does getting “Beyond GDP” (the title of a 2007 EU conference) look like? More succinctly, what is measured and how are these metrics weighted for the purpose of progress?
It most likely and hopefully would be based on a socioeconomic developmental platform. Here are some thoughts gathered from a Gross National Happiness presentation:
(1) Environmental Diversity (Individual/Systemic) – to embrace service of ecology, ecological degradation, ecological knowledge, afforestation (natural systems that manifest habitats for life and offer resources purified through its existence, or “ecological economics”)
(2) Psychological Well-Being- acknowledge the spiritual, emotional, and psychological well-being of a population. (ie: discrimination, safety, divorce rates, complaints of domestic conflicts, family lawsuits, public lawsuits, crime rates, parks per capita (social science)
(3) Limits of Use – set limits to removal, acknowledge resources as a finite service and act accordingly (Pythagorean science – “the world is round!”)
(4) Equality – acknowledge commercial transaction as a means not an end. ie: consumer debt, living standard, average income to consumer price index ratio, income distribution, housing, food security (inequity economics)
(5) Time Use – embracing the act of doing nothing (il dolce far niente), sleeping hours, working hours, playful time
(6) Workplace Wellness – acknowledge the workplace as a driver of happiness. (ie: jobless claims, job turnover, workplace complaints, sick days taken, lawsuits (workplace economics)
(7) Culture (Practice/Values) – sports, festival, dialect usage, artisan skill, social capital. (ie: local economy generation (social capital)
(8) Political quality – promote local democracy, institutional trust, individual freedom, foreign participation)
(9) Community Vitality – engage in measurable reciprocity, social support, safety, kinship density
(10) Education – funding, ability to obtain, English language, folk and historical literacy
(11) Health – rates of miscarriages, availability to medical attention, pollution, rates of disease
And the impacts = Ecology, Creativity, Longevity, Social Bonding (Citizenship)
The sheer notion of acknowledging that the abovementioned plays a certain role in the vitality of progression is a monumental hurdle, but the most difficult of all to this is instigating the reprogramming of perception. Redefining the consumer to the citizen. Shifting an entire globalized market to embrace something other than monetary value will be more than difficult, but it will become easier as resources continue to be depleted beyond repair, access to clean potable water shrinks, ecosystems are shredded to make paper and refine metal, the value of money (inflation) sky rockets, and transporting goods around the world become cost-prohibitive, the speculators with their old school thought drive markets further into depression.
It will be grunt ingenuity and the sales pitch of a lifetime that will get this done!
Daniel Quinn wrote much on “old minds” vs. “new minds” in his book, Beyond Civilization. He likened it to Einstein’s thought that, “the problems of today cannot be solved by the level thinking that created them.
irwindesigned 