The account in this book has raised serious questions about the idea that we are in the midst of moving from a hard, product-based economy to an experience economy. Yes, the last two decades have seen a phenomenal rise in the number of people flocking to music and film festivals, going on wellness holidays or being pampered in a day-spa. In 2000, the sale of CD albums in the United States was worth $13 billion; by 2008 it had dropped to $2 billion, as listeners were increasingly downloading their music or, more recently, streaming it. The vinyl record has had a comeback in the last decade, but this still leaves it with no more than 3 per cent of the US market in recorded music. Two thirds of music sales are now digital.12 Is this not a clear illustration of the general switch from a culture based on the ownership of physical products to one focused on servicing experiences?
Not really, because it wrongly assumes that consuming in the past was rock solid. Many of the features of an expanding consumer economy we have encountered in this history were all about tickling the senses: the pleasure gardens of eighteenth-century London, the department stores in Paris, Moscow and Tokyo a century later, the excitement at Tianqiao market in 1920s Beijing with its diverse retailers and entertainers, shooting the chutes at Coney Island, the millions flocking to cinemas several times a week, and the craze for dance halls, to name just a few milestones. People in the past were not lacking in experiences or fun. Communication, pleasure and entertainment have been a growing feature of the emotional economy for several centuries.13 The internet has added a new layer, not created a revolutionary break.
As visual reminders of our bulging lifestyle, things have had a bad press in recent years.14 By shedding possessions, in this view, we will save not only the planet but also ourselves. Freeing ourselves from the shackles of material property, we will enjoy authentic experiences once again. Facing up to the environmental consequences of our things, however, should not automatically erase an awareness of the emotional work they do, as recognized by novelists and philosophers as well as anthropologists, psychologists and those working in marketing. It is a fundamental mistake to draw a sharp line between things and emotions. The empire of things expanded in part because possessions became increasingly important carriers of identity, memory and emotions. To the collector, things are friends and family, not dead matter. Clothes, cars and many other objects are prized for the feelings they generate within their owners as well as their practical use.
It is uncertain whether ICT, the internet and sharing networks will automatically lead to greater sustainability. It will depend on how consumers put these technologies to use and what they do with the savings of money and time made possible by them. The internet, computing and telecommunications are currently contributing 2 to 2.5 per cent of greenhouse-gas emissions in the world, and their share has been rising fast with the global diffusion of mobile phones, the greater power needed for higher processing speed and the growing ownership of multiple devices which are constantly ‘on’.15 In 2008, the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, sponsored by ICT companies, predicted that ‘smart’ technologies would by 2020 be able to save over five times their own ecological footprint by facilitating more efficient transport and buildings and by dematerializing the way we live, as things will give way to electronic and virtual alternatives.16 What such prognoses tend to ignore is what people do with the resources freed up by ‘smart’ technologies. ICT, for example, has encouraged home-working and home delivery, cutting down commuting time and multiple trips to shops. These direct reductions would be significant if people stayed at home and enjoyed the time and money saved without changing anything else in their lives. The environmental gains quickly disappear, however, if they are spent on additional electronic items, a new set of clothes or an extra holiday. Innovative ‘smart’ technologies have been a mixed blessing so far, as the spread of new software and innovative apps to phones, computers and, increasingly, washing machines and other appliances is accelerating the product-cycle, making machines that had worked perfectly fine in a less smart environment suddenly obsolescent.
The twentieth century saw huge efficiency gains in the use of materials and energy. Refrigerators today are much more economical than they were a generation ago. Radiators are more efficient, bottles are lighter, and so forth. But it has not meant that a household’s consumption has consequently declined. Instead, fridges have got bigger, central heating has raised indoor temperature throughout the home, and one-way bottles have replaced reusable ones. On top of this, additional purchasing power and leisure time are being devoted to an expanding set of new goods and services, previously undreamt of. Material use has indeed been decoupled from growth since the 1980s in rich OECD countries, but it has not declined in absolute terms, nor diminished in environmental impact.
It is not clear why the latest technology (ICT and the internet) would break with this historical pattern. Business flights and conference trips are more frequent than ever, notwithstanding the availability of Skype and videoconferencing. The crux of the matter is that new technologies don’t automatically replace existing patterns of use. They often complement or add to them. In addition to virtual consumption, telecommunication and the internet have, arguably, reinforced physical consumption by expanding the awareness of the objects and places that exist in the world and making it easier to buy and visit them.
For the internet of things to displace the empire of things, it would need to replace the existing culture of use with a radically new one. This is the hope many attach to a sharing and leasing economy. The internet, in this view, will not only bring greater efficiency but wean people off ownership and socialize them into a sharing lifestyle characterized by collaboration, long product-cycles, maintenance and reuse and a low carbon footprint. So far, the sharing economy has been limited to very specific sectors, especially car travel and accommodation, while leasing mainly takes place between businesses.17 We need to have a sense of proportion. In 2014, 92,000 vehicles belonged to carsharing programmes – in the entire world. By comparison, 2.5 million new cars were registered in the United Kingdom alone that year, the fourth largest figure on record. In the United States, 1 million drivers belong to car-sharing schemes, and this is estimated to have reduced the sales of new private cars by half a million. That is a considerable achievement, as far as the number of cars is concerned. But it does not necessarily follow that the same members have become universal sharers, fed up with personal ownership, or that they have taken their foot off the material accelerator. People may increasingly share a car or an electric drill, but, in West and East alike, they almost all aspire to have their own apartment with private comfort and conveniences – and ‘their own’ more and more means exactly that – living solo, not with family or friends.18 How many communes have grown up around car-sharing schemes? The savings from sharing networks overwhelmingly flow back into a society centred on private ownership and pleasure. As one car-sharer told the Wall Street Journal in 2014, she used the money saved to go skiing in Utah, holidaying in Bermuda and touring Europe.19
Reuse, recycling, cradle-to-cradle product design and greater fuel and technological efficiency – we will still need to encourage all these measures. But on their own they do nothing to curb our material appetite for more. They just make resources go round more efficiently. We should also think about the consumption side and how changes to lifestyle could lower the demand for products and resources in the first place. History cannot provide a detailed list of policy measures. What it can do is give us a perspective on change across time and, in doing so, a fresh way of thinking about current problems. So far, we have stressed the long and deep roots of an increasingly resource-intensive consumer lifestyle that defies quick fixes. But, by showing us how this upward momentum came about, the same history also provides us with lessons about the types of interventions that might help change lifestyles in a more sustainable direction.
Today, the discussion of change is mainly framed in terms of choice, markets and the sovereign consumer.
Behavioural economists have added the concept of ‘choice architecture’ to show that consumers do not make decisions in a vacuum but are influenced by available information as well as their own inertia, procrastination or unfounded optimism.20 Their analysis has encouraged a libertarian paternalism, a mix of measures that gently nudges people towards more sustainable behaviour by improving the ‘architecture’ with the help of more salient information, default rules and opinion from valued groups, while preserving freedom of choice overall. This is a step in the right direction but, from a historical perspective, does not go far enough. The rise of consumption entailed greater choice but it also involved new habits and conventions, and these were social and political outcomes, not the result of individual preferences. Domestic comfort, exotic holidays, eating and drinking routines, shopping hours, what it means to be clean, fit and fashionable: these and many other aspects of our lifestyles are the historical product of social norms, expectations and arrangements.
To be sure, consumers need to play their part in change, as indeed do companies, but a sole focus on choice and markets distracts from the active role played by states, cities and social movements in laying down material infrastructures and promoting ideals of a higher material standard of living for all. This is not to argue that the era of slums, poverty and disease was a better time or that we should go back to it. But we should recognize that, however desirable from a social point of view, higher standards of housing and hygiene, the expansion of roads, water and energy infrastructures and welfare services have all been implicated in the rise and diffusion of materially more intensive lifestyles. Because these interventions have been progressive does not mean they have been benign in terms of material-resource use or for the environment. It is disingenuous for states today to say that their hands are tied and that they cannot interfere too much because they need to respect the sovereign consumer. It amounts to an abdication of collective historical responsibility.
For consumers and producers, it is critical that the carbon and water embedded in goods and services are properly priced. Without that, it is difficult for people to gain a sense of the consequences of their lifestyles for the planet and for those mining, producing and dismantling the materials for these products. On their own, however, correct pricing and labels are unlikely to be enough to change what are often deepseated habits. For this to happen, we need a more honest public debate about how standards and habits have come to be what they are, a keener appreciation of changes in the past and alternatives for the future, and a recognition that, even today, in rich societies the most materially intensive practices are not distributed evenly. One lesson from history is that we are wrong to take our current standards as given or to assume that our lifestyles will and ought to continue into the future, just more efficiently serviced. Air-conditioning, hot showers, fast fashion and budget city-breaks are not an inherent part of human civilization. The high-flying, multitasking consumer lifestyle, in particular, which requires so much coordination and with it mobility and resources, has been a quite recent phenomenon, driven by the highly educated professional middle classes, who have taken standards of productivity from the world of work and injected them into the world of leisure, radically intensifying it in its course. It is easy to forget that, even sixty or so years ago, the same kind of people lived more sedentary, relaxed lives and that other groups continue to enjoy fewer, less hectic and less mobile pastimes. ‘Slow living’ advocates have tried to counter this trend, but for the most part they have been marginal and ineffective. Society as a whole continues to tick to a faster rhythm. There has to be a more general appreciation of the pleasures from a deeper and longer-lasting connection to fewer things.
Our lifestyles, and their social and environmental consequences, should be the subject of serious public debate and policy, not left as a matter simply of individual taste and purchasing power. There are plenty of opportunities for intervention, from shared housing and different standards of heating and cooling to more sustainable forms of mobility, all the way to public-information campaigns about the damage done by ever more frequent showers and changes of clothes.
Such a debate has to be bold and envisage different lifestyles and the concomitant changes to housing, transport and culture. It will need more people to remember that, as consumers, they are citizens and not just customers. And it will need historical imagination.
Acknowledgements
This book has consumed a lot of my time and thought over the last seven years. It would have been impossible without help from many people. The original idea for it came to me at the end of the Cultures of Consumption programme, a research network of over sixty experts from fashion and geography to law and business which I had the good fortune to direct. Thanks to everyone involved, including Stefanie Pearce, my superb administrator, the advisory group and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council for funding this unique and rewarding multidisciplinary endeavour. The sociologist Elizabeth Shove and the anthropologist Rick Wilk have continued to be sources of inspiration since.
Several institutions provided me with time to research and to think. I am grateful to the European University Institute for a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship, to Caltech for awarding me a Moore Distinguished Fellowship, to the Sustainable Consumption Institute, Manchester, and for visiting professorships at the University of St Gallen and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. Thanks to colleagues in all these places for many stimulating conversations. Ironically, the more I followed the surge of consumption in the past, the more the present was adding new chapters to the story, as British governments decided that students, too, should be treated as consumers in an educational marketplace: that the consumer could be a citizen as well as a customer was forgotten. Financial reform and bureaucratic red tape were the results. More than ever, therefore, my deepest thanks go to my home institution, Birkbeck College, and to the Master and Dean for steering us safely through the resulting turbulence, as well as to all colleagues, students and staff for keeping Birkbeck a special place of critical inquiry, teaching and learning which makes books like this one possible.
Over the years, I have benefited from countless opportunities to try out ideas and early drafts in lectures and seminars across the globe. I am grateful to organizers and audiences for discussion and comments in New York, Pasadena, Rio de Janeiro, Helsinki, Oslo, Gothenburg, Amsterdam, London, Oxford, Cambridge, Berlin, Cologne, Munich, Paris, Florence, Delhi, Tokyo and Beijing. Additional thanks to local experts who helped me in foreign places – in Beijing: Bingzhong Gao, Yunxiang Yan, the officers of the China Consumers’ Association, and also to Karl Gerth and Julia Lovell for their advice; in Rio: Livia Barbosa; in Helsinki: Jukka Gronow; in Tokyo: Sheldon Garon and Hiroki Shin; and in Delhi: Gurcharan Das, Anjali Garg, Sanjay Srivastava, Suresh Mishra and the National Council of Applied Economic Research.
Three scholars generously read the entire manuscript and gave me the benefit of their unrivalled knowledge of culture, economy and society: John Brewer, Martin Daunton and Gerhard Haupt. My debt to them is immense. Thanks also to Sheila Fitzpatrick and Jonathan Wiesen for reading an early draft of the chapter ‘Age of Ideologies’, and to Chris Coggins and Heike Weber for leading me to dig deeper into waste. Ed Mayo, at the then National Consumer Council (UK), generously shared with me his knowledge of consumer advocacy, as did Robin Simpson of Consumers International. Throughout, Heather Chappells has been an ingenious research assistant.
At Harper, in New York, I have had the great pleasure and privilege to work with Jonathan Jao and his team. My thanks to them for believing in this book and bringing it to American readers. In London, Stuart Proffitt and Laura Stickney have been exceptional editors, and I am grateful to them and everyone at Allen Lane/Penguin for all their support. From start to finish, David Godwin, my agent, provided just the right mix of enthusiasm and advice, and I am greatly indebted to him and everyone at DGA.
My
final thanks go to my family and are immeasurable. I have been blessed with a partner who is not only caring and supportive but, on top, is the best in-house editor any writer could wish for: thorough, demanding and critical. There is not a page in this book that has not benefited from Lizza Ruddick’s eye for style, clarity and reasoning. This book, however, is dedicated to our children, Julia and Oscar, who have enriched this journey of the material world with their humour, curiosity and tolerance, and who can finally breathe a sigh of relief and say: consummatum est.
Frank Trentmann
London, August 2015
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Britons today, for example, replace their dresses and jackets every two to three years. See WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme), Valuing Our Clothes (Banbury, 2012); the figure is for Britons aged 16+. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 26 April 2011. For American garages: Jeanne E. Arnold, Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century: Thirty-two Families Open Their Doors (Los Angeles, 2012). For contrast, see the role of possessions in rural Hungary: Tamás Hofer, ‘Gegenstände im dörflichen und städtischen Milieu’, in: Gemeinde im Wandel, ed. Günter Wiegelmann (Münster, 1979), 113–35.
2. The English title of Georges Duby’s seminal 1977 book of essays. An alternative to this sequential scheme was to see history as a clash between rival identities, as in Werner Sombart’s famous portrayal of the First World War as a fight between calculating English merchants and primordial German heroes: W. Sombart, Händler und Helden (Munich, 1915); see also: David Priestland, Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power (London, 2012).
3. For emissions, see the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fifth Assessment Report, Working Group III – Mitigation of Climate Change (2014), esp. chs. 8 and 9. Emissions from transport have more than doubled since 1970, faster than any other energy end-use sector. The bulk of this increase (80%) has come from road vehicles. See also: International Energy Agency, Energy Efficiency Indicators: Essentials for Policy-makers (Paris, 2014); International Energy Agency, Worldwide Trends in Energy Use and Efficiency (Paris, 2008); for meat and nitrogen, see the Royal Society, People and the Planet (London, 2012). For the electronic-waste trade, see ch. 15 below.
Empire of Things Page 90
