Man, this post makes me feel conflicted, because on the one hand, of the things listed, next-day delivery is the only one that DOES actually exist in the world today. The others are exaggerations, and while I understand the point being made, they do detract from it.
I understandâand agree withâthat sentiment of, âI want slower deliveries by drivers who are paid better,â as one recent tumblr post put it. I absolutely agree with the idea that we need to produce and consume less as a culture, and that an actual substantive conversation about politics should involve willingness to relinquish the many modern luxuries that are built on exploitation.
I donât think these are good examples of those luxuries, though.
Large budget movies are possible because consumers (and investors) are willing to pay for them. A large budget is actually a necessary component in making sure workers are being adequately compensated; the fact that they currently are often exploited by studios is a result of deliberate misallocation of resources, not anything intrinsic to the size of the production. Same thing goes with high-quality video games. As for releasing a new film/game every month/year, thatâs only unsustainable because thereâs only a handful of monopolistic studios doing it. In a well-regulated industry that encourages growth and competition, we could see tens, if not hundreds of studios producing big-budget films and games. And, with a well-compensated and socially-supported citizenry, consumers would have enough disposable income to support it.
Similarly, the problem with soda isnât that we have 80 brands; itâs that we have two. And those two brands each own 800 different labels. In a healthy economy, these monopolies would be dissolved, and we could support well over 80 moderately-sized independent beverage companies producing their own sodas.
Same-day delivery, again, could be easily supported with proper allocation of resources. Currently, we have huge centralized distributors like Amazon exploiting gig-workers with slave-wages to ferry cheap mass-produced crap to people, and thatâs what makes it bad, not the speed at which they do it. If instead, we had something like a super-robust USPS, with well-compensated deliverypeople working reasonable hours within a decentralized network of independent-but-cooperative suppliers, there would be absolutely no reason why you couldnât get something delivered to you from the distro ten miles down the road within a day.
When we critique capitalism, and they respond, âYeah, well capitalism made the cell phone youâre using!â our response shouldnât be, âOh shit u right,â it should be, âNo, capitalism made the cell phone Iâm using break after a year so Iâll buy a new one, and they use slave labor to do it while they pocket the rest.â
There are luxuries, and there are artificially-valued, mass-produced, built-to-break trash that are marketed as luxuries. But we donât solve the problems of fast-fashion by saying, âWelp I guess I shouldnât wear clothes.â
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