While this seems like an extreme form of politically correct identity politics, it’s not. It’s advanced metaphysical gymnastics. Attempting to place being out of grasp while describing it in excruciating detail has been a pasttime of nominalists for generations. Plato, Kant, and others had bad habits of describing the very things they claimed were indescribable, beyond the access of mere mortals. Such privileged access begs the question: either these object whisperers know more than we do, and are able to reach through the veil where mere mortals cannot, or they are speculating without any grounding in reality.
If you’re bicurious about OOO, posthumanism, new materialism, and the bevy of other ungrounded and often non-relational theories de jour that get served up to university students as the new gospel, you might enjoy reading this paper.
Is programming premature product lifespans a form of corporate crime?
This the question that Lieselot Bisschop, Jelle Jaspers, and I address in our new publication in the journal of Crime, Law and Social Change.
Planned obsolescence is a core business strategy in today’s economy. The items we buy today are supposed to not last, so that we – the consumers – have to buy them over and over again.
In a blogpost summary, we argue that planned obsolescence is not only something that should be recognized by policy makers, but also considered a corporate environmental crime and treated this way.
I was perusing Kickstarter when I happened upon a solution to a problem that I didn’t know was that big of a deal: spices going bad. As it turns out, it’s not that big of a deal, it’s what could easily be classified as a “first world problem.”
Spices, because we live in a commodified society with more supply than demand, often sell us large quantities of pre-picked, pre-ground spices. Moreover, these spices are picked from around the world, very far from where we live, and so by the time we use much of them, they lose some of their pungency.
For the same reason that many people grind their own coffee beans, and in many parts of the world including Europe, their own grains, many people still grind their own spices. (Full disclosure, wherever possible, I grind my own spices too – they taste way better fresh that way; no pre-ground spice, no matter how well packed, will taste as good). There is no secret to this. A couple of good kitchen tools, and you’re good to go with most spices. It keeps the nutrients fresh and less degraded (though of course, from picking a spice, it’s shelf-life starts ticking away), and much more pungent and enticing.
Yet, this Kickstarter doesn’t say, “hey, I’d like to make some money by selling you high quality spices, but you’ll still have to grind them yourselves and take an extra minute of delight every time you cook!” No, instead, it fails to see that good cooking, by its nature is a meditation, not something to create a lot of trash with for convenience’s sake. It is a fail because it does not understand that gourmands who like fresh spices are happy to take the extra 30 seconds and grind their own pepper, ginger, or nutmeg. Instead, it grinds the spices already, prematurely, and puts all of its heft on the claim that it has found a better “preserving” mechanism, better than glass containers, but somehow stopping short of formaldehyde.
By appealing to “design” this company is yet another hipster gourmand appropriation of disposable trashy production in order to pull the wool over consumers’ eyes. They have the gall not to merely discuss how their throw away, potion enough for a bachelor(ette) only spice capsules, but to call their product “revolutionary” for its ability to “keep spice fresher at the molecular level.” At the molecular level! I love it–they don’t explain what they mean (except through appealing to the boogieman of “oxidation”) by saying “molecular,” other than that it has become the new buzzword after “neuro” and “nano.” But hey, if you’re already in the business of commodifying trends, why not throw in meaningless buzzwords to prey on consumer gullibility?
Beyond their appeals to their product perhaps rightly being “more flavorful,” than old forgotten spices, they also make the much more suspect claim of it being more “affordable” as well. But worst – and here it’s just a blatant lie – they also claim that their throwaway aluminum pod peel trash wrapper is also more “sustainable.” And that’s why I’m calling bullshit on Occo, and all products like them that attempt to solve a non-problem for people who have more money than they know what to do with, by creating more trash for future generations.
For fun, let’s take a look at some of their misleading and fallacious sustainability claims:
(1) That aluminum is “the most recyclable material in the world”
(1) A: The price for aluminum is higher today than it has been in many years. That’s why there have been, for the first time a rash of thefts of aluminum bleacher seats at parks. So I ask the very Instagrammable Connie and Lisa: do you know what bauxite is? (The raw material from where aluminum comes from). Have you ever been to a bauxite mine? How about a bauxite processing plant? Ever breathed in those fumes? No, because otherwise, you would avoid aluminum like the plague that it is.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but disposable aluminum (where do you even discuss recycling, and the fact that in many jurisdictions your customers may not even have adequate access to recycling facilities?) is a loser. It’s an environmental nightmare, not the paragon of recyclability you paint it as.
Anything that can be used more than once, or say, used many, many times, for years, is more sustainable than something that is only used once. Period. You don’t have to be an industrial ecologist to do the math and realize that even in the best case scenario, if you melt something down, you’re using a tremendous amount of energy to do so, (coming from where?), and then refashioning that raw material into another thing–losing material and energy along the way.
(2) “Saving food waste” claim.
(2) A: Another fallacy is that Occo is helping reduce food waste and saving the planet by selling expensive spices in high quantities in disposable aluminum. The company even does a masterful deflection of using a loaded label against the waste in bulk food items (they call it the “Movie Soda Mark-Up”), that strikes a chord with their Millennial audience of single, big income, no children. They say that food waste is created because people buy more than what they need, and when people are more minimalistic (I love the movement of minimalism, but detest the way it has become commodified to sell more crap that people don’t need to them in the name of minimalism!). But I truly have to question how true this is around spices: what percentage of the 40% of food waste boils down to spices? 1%? 0.5%? If so, that would boil down to 0.4-0.2% of food waste blamable on too many spices. And this is a generous estimate. Nice try, but this is a clear case of the misuse and abuse of pulling on legitimate environmentalist heartstrings.
To sum up: the problem with this scheme and so many like it is that there’s no money in simply telling people to go quality over quantity; and to buy less instead of buying more. The “super premium” segment of the nouveau riche, always eager to virtue signal their “style” and “taste” is one of the leading contributors to ecological disaster and climate chaos.
To falsely claim some sort of ecological currency in doing so, should be met with a healthy dose of reality and opprobrium. There are enough charlatans around; the last thing we need is more cannibalism of truth by poseur minimalists willing to say any ecological lie to make a quick buck.
P.S. After writing this, I just found some more spurious reasoning from these poster-children for the Dunning-Kruger effect (a little bit of knowledge is dangerous–you might actually think you know something when that’s not the case). I’m not going to comment on it, I’ll just put it here:
Philip K. Dick once wrote: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” (“How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”, 1978).
It is so tempting, as academics, activists, or advertisers, to want to believe in a purely constructivist world.
Trump and Breitbart and Neonazis are not original in their glorification of alternative facts. New Agers have been at it for decades, with their fluff around abundance consciousness, making people responsible for being poor. It is only because you haven’t cleared away the cobwebs of scarcity consciousness, they croon, that you’re poor. Say nothing of institutionalized racism, inequality of opportunity, nepotism, trust-funds, or lookism. No, the New Age ideology long ago took Social Darwinism and internalized it, so that its interiorization meant that your socioeconomic level remained pegged to your inner spiritual development, nothing more.
Working in the world of public health policy and epidemiology, the writing is on the wall: placebo, as powerful as the effect is, only goes so far. There is a “there” there in the world of matter and things. For example with cigarettes, putting a filter on the cigarette–something initially lauded as a harm reduction measure–did not, despite millions in advertising dollars and the hopes of smokers wishing to resolve their cognitive dissonance, actually reduce negative health outcomes. If anything, filters allowed smokers to take deeper puffs, drawing smoke deeper into their lungs, while believing that they were somehow having their cake and eating (smoking?) it too. All the optimism in the world still gave them cancer. All of the social construction of smoking as safe did little to stave off the morbidity and mortality suffered. And this has also been the case with so-called “light” and “mild” cigarettes–fancy descriptors, with absolutely no scientific mooring.
So how do we square the circle of ideation, which admittedly is an attractive frame to believe in, with the hard reality that there is a world out there recalcitrant to the imposition of conceptualization? This question is wrapped up with the productive debates at the intersection of analytic and continental philosophy since the 1960’s, revolving around the “remainder” or différance (Derrida, “Cogito et histoire de la folie,” 1963). In the hermeneutic tradition, one can see this difference between the interpretation and how the text or event plays out against the asymptote of time. As time passes, the careful observer will detect glitches in the assumed way of seeing, and allow herself to shift perspective in accordance with how things really show up (or are revealed) in realtime versus accumulating more resistance to phenomena, building up increasingly elaborate hoaxes and twists to resolve an incompatible Weltbild with an increasing rebellious reality.
Ultimately, reality will win. But the more we try to save face, and sweep reality under the rug of ideology, the larger the dustbunny of death and destruction that comes from the disconnect between our acting as if reality were as we wished it, and how reality actually is, becomes. Currently, in late capitalism, we have been behaving as if we lived on an infinite earth, where every type of capital is interchangable with every other kind. But complex systems theory and punctuated equilibrium show us quite plainly that irreversability exists. No amount of technological hooha can change the arrow of time, and put things back as they once were, or create life and complexity ex nihilo. We can create houses from forests, but not forests from houses. Yet, in a commodity culture of transubstantiation, such as digital currency, where everything is reduced to a common “price” on the same scale of value, this great ontological flattening is precisely what occurs. We rage against reality with the relativism of fake sameness, praying to the false idol of fungibility. Perhaps, this is one of the problems with the object-oriented-ontology (OOO) or new materialism people–in the end, they are engaged in little more than the narcissistic solipsism of magical thinking.
Yogi Hale Hendlin 
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